The Mississippi Department of Public Safety has turned over rare Ku Klux Klan artifacts to the state’s archives after finding the materials while clearing out space ahead of a move to new headquarters, state officials said.
In a disclosure last week, the agency said the items included materials unearthed inside a suitcase and other Klan-related items found during the cleanup. Officials said they have transferred all the objects to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and that it will take months to inventory and process the full collection.
The discovery included what officials described as a handbook for the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, along with Klan charters, a Klan robe, recruitment materials, and propaganda. The materials also included meeting notes, ledgers, and a list of members who paid and did not pay dues, according to the accounts officials provided.
Mississippi Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell said the effort was part of an ongoing relationship between state troopers, the public safety department, and federal law enforcement partners to shed light on organizations “like the Ku Klux Klan” and the “darkness in which groups like” the Klan operated. In his comments, Tindell also framed preservation as a way to help prevent people from being influenced by hate groups.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History Commissioner Barry White said the artifacts are significant because they offer documentation of activities by a group known for secrecy. White said the archives are grateful for the public safety department’s decision to transfer the materials, and he said the records will give researchers broader access to documentation that deepens understanding of Ku Klux Klan activity in Mississippi during the 1960s.
Charles Taylor, executive director of the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP, said he was glad the material was coming to light, describing it as “a real pain” that those stories had not surfaced earlier. Taylor said the artifacts serve as a reminder that the Klan’s presence and violence in Mississippi were not long ago and argued that the state should ensure no law enforcement officers serving now carry Klan beliefs.
Taylor said it was “one thing to be able to say very clearly this was here,” adding that people were studying the group’s propaganda while they were supposed to be providing safety for all Mississippians. He also linked the archival disclosures to civil rights history, including violence attributed to the Klan during the 1960s.
The account placed the Klan’s modern-era growth in the broader context of U.S. history, describing the organization as forming just months after the end of the Civil War by former Confederate officers, later becoming known for terrorizing freed Black citizens. The report also referenced how Congress effectively outlawed the Klan in 1871, but said it later resurfaced, including during World War I, and expanded as Jim Crow laws took hold. It cited Klan violence in the 1960s, including the abduction and killing of three civil rights workers in 1964 that became known as the “Mississippi Burning killings,” and a 1967 bombing of the state’s only synagogue.
Stephanie Johnson-Toliver, president of the Black Heritage Society of Washington State, said protecting history matters even when the archives include materials associated with harm. She said making inventory and records accessible would allow the public to review “the history that definitely harmed and was traumatic and remains to be harmful and traumatic” in the United States.
As officials work through what they said will be a months-long processing effort, the state’s archives will determine how to catalog the documents and make them available to researchers, with officials and civil rights advocates characterizing the collection as important for understanding what happened—and for discouraging repetition of it.