The Ku Klux Klan begins in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, founded by Confederate veterans as a social club before turning into a paramilitary force that terrorized freed Black Americans across the Reconstruction South. The film traces its arc across a century and a half: the first Klan crushed by federal prosecution in the 1870s, its rebirth in 1915 fueled by the film Birth of a Nation and a cross-burning on Stone Mountain, and its swelling membership in the 1920s reaching into Northern states and mainstream politics. It follows the organization into the civil rights era, when Klan violence against activists and Black communities drew national attention and federal intervention, and into its diminished, fractured present. Archival photographs, newsreel footage, and historical commentary lay out the pattern of cross burnings, lynchings, and intimidation campaigns that recur across each incarnation. The throughline is how the same organization keeps dying and reforming under new leadership whenever racial backlash finds a new occasion.