Two children wearing Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods stand on either side of Dr. Samuel Green, Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard, at an initiation ceremony. Atlanta, Georgia. July 24, 1948 

On 1944, Dr. Samuel Green founded the Associated Klans of Georgia (AKG); their first cross burning ocurred on October 1945 atop Stone Mountains, Confederate memorial where the Second Klan was founded on 1915.

Dr. Green started his first major initiation ceremony on May 9, 1946 by “naturalizing” 1000 “aliens” or non-members, and soon extended his organisation to Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina and Florida.

During its existence, the AKG’s “wrecking teams” engaged in murders, floggings and the intimidation of those Blacks who managed to get registered on the voters’ rolls, by burning crosses or sending little coffins, for which he was rewarded by the Governor of Georgia by becoming his aide-de-camp.

Opposed to Communism, trade unions and Catholicism, they preached anti-semitism and white supremacy, fighting against the civil rights movement and wanting to quell the new assertiveness of retirning African American veterans, or “uppity niggahs” as Green called them.

They were infiltrated by several informants, federal agents, and investigative journalists, whose the most notorious was Stetson Kennedy, who wrote I Rode With The Ku Klux Klan (1954) and who inspired the “Clan of the Fiery Cross”, where Superman fought Klansmen.

On 1949, he was elected Imperial Wizard; two weeks later, on August 18, he died from a stroke. His organisation splintered soon after.

This photo features Green’s last mass initiation meeting.