Pulaski, Tennessee: Where the Klan Was Born

Pulaski, the seat of Giles County, was founded in eighteen oh nine and named for Count Casimir Pulaski, the Polish cavalry officer who died at the Siege of Savannah fighting for American independence. That honorable origin did not protect the town from a darker chapter. On Christmas Eve, eighteen sixty-five, six Confederate veterans gathered in Pulaski and formed a secret society they called the Ku Klux Klan.

What began as a social club with fraternity-style rituals and outlandish costumes quickly evolved into a vehicle for racial terror against the formerly enslaved people of the South. By eighteen sixty-seven the Klan had spread across the former Confederacy and its members were using violence to undermine Reconstruction. Today Pulaski does not celebrate this history.

A plaque placed downtown acknowledges the Klan's founding and condemns it, installed backward, facing the wall, as a deliberate statement that the community does not claim this legacy as its own.