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Tuesday, Jun 16, 2026

Did Wisconsin have more than 40,000 KKK members in the 1920s? 

Tom Kertscher / Wisconsin Watch, Wisconsin Watch
no

We found no authoritative estimate that the number of Ku Klux Klan members in Wisconsin in the 1920s was 40,000.

That’s the current population of Wausau in central Wisconsin.

“No one knows for sure how many Americans joined during the 1920s but the best estimates are around 2 million members, some 15,000 of whom were in Wisconsin,” according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.

That’s the size of the Milwaukee suburb of Whitefish Bay.

The KKK is a white supremacist hate group originally formed in the South after the Civil War.

Two Wisconsin KKK researchers said the 15,000 estimate is reasonable: Stephen Kantrowitz of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of a report on KKK activity on the campus; and Michael Jacobs of UW-Platteville.

As of 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center counted 13 KKK groups in the U.S., mostly in the South and none in Wisconsin.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

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Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network.

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