Northwest writer Timothy Egan’s new book tells KKK history

By the early 1900s, the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group founded by former Confederate soldiers after the Civil War, had all but faded from existence in the U.S. Then, in 1915, a second Klan was founded in Georgia, and soon spread across the country.

By the mid-1920s, it had as many as eight million members across the U.S., including many chapters in the Pacific Northwest, and a strong base in the Midwest.

Seattle writer Timothy Egan’s most recent book, “A Fever in the Heartland,” tells the story of the rise of the Klan in the 1920s and the leader who was brought down by one woman’s deathbed testimony. We talk to Egan in front of students at McDaniel’s High School.