The Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Ala., says there are, today, about 7,000 card-carrying Klan members among Mississippi's 3 million residents.
In perspective, if they all attended one football game at Ole Miss this fall, they'd be outnumbered 10 to 1.
It's no reason for a party, but 7,000 is a lower number and a lower proportion of the population than in many other states.
Still, the number does beg the question: Who killed - or at least debilitated - the Klan?
The answer, overall, is the Klan killed the Klan. It didn't mean to die, but its philosopy simply failed to stand the test of time.
It's true that the SPLC, founded in 1971 to pile legal and financial misery on the KKK and other organized supremacist groups, made inroads over that period.
It's true that Congress was passing sweeping civil rights legislation almost 10 years before the SPLC was founded and that courts became active in civil rights even earlier - with Brown v. Board of Education way back in 1954.
But the Klan really killed the Klan?
Let's talk about it.
In the weeks since Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen was handed a 60-year term for his role in a triple murder 41 years ago, the word most frequently spoken and written by commentators has been "change."
Has Mississippi changed?
How has Mississippi changed?
What changed Mississippi?
What will the change mean for Mississippi?
Let's acknowledge this: "Change" can be a journalistic poof word. It may be used to sound like something ominous and immediate took place, but we all know that kind of change is rare.
People don't go to bed with one personal code of beliefs and wake up with different views. People adopt their own ideologies based on their own experiences over their lifetimes.
In that vein, it's just not accurate - as some insist - to say that white Mississippi in 1964 wasn't the least bit bothered when Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner were abducted and killed.
"They got what they had coming," was one sentiment, but not the prevailing sentiment.
It is, however, accurate to say there was a climate of fear, created by hate specialists and sanctioned by the state, that cowed people. Even those horrified by the Neshoba slayings stayed mum. In that day, any and all who said they were even slightly troubled by forced racial segregation and discrimination faced immediate retribution - some of it provided by the Klan, officially, but most of it inherent in the fact of the separate existences led by black people and white people, even a century removed from slavery. A minister, a teacher, a professor, a police officer who said something as benign as, "Well, we might have to look at how we do things," would be labeled a radical.
But something else was going on. While the Neshoba murders were widely reported, there were the everyday insults, everyday inconsistencies, everyday injustices. Politicans preached, "segregation forever," because they were sure that's what people wanted to hear. But in something of a testament to humanity, the Klan view began to pass from prominence.
The civil rights workers had a big role in "outing" the Klan lie, as did other heroes of the era whose names a well-known. A couple of generations of journalists helped. Stan Dearman covered the Philadelphia murders for The Meridian Star, Dub Shoemaker covered the Emmitt Till case. Bill Minor, Sid Salter, Hodding Carter, Jim Prince - all have been among those who declined to go along to get along.
It was Prince, now owner of the Neshoba Democrat and speaking in June to fellow newspaper people, who bared the truth in the face of all the national lip-flapping about a "new Mississippi": Groups don't change, individuals do. "Reconciliation" happens one person at a time from people electing to drop any mutual distrust and choosing to engage each other without assumption or pretension, he said.
But momentum is a factor, and, cumulatively, there's no doubt that more and more people today are choosing to face racial truths than hide behind lies - and that's all the Klan and Klan-types have ever had to offer.
Some see it as a weakness of Americans that we believe goodness will prevail, even if it takes a while. That belief, however, has to be part of any "change" rhetoric. The Klan didn't have the truth, and lost. Or at least it's on the skids.
