William Joseph Simmons (May 7, 1880 – May 18, 1945) was an American preacher and fraternal organizer who founded and led the second Ku Klux Klan from Thanksgiving evening 1915 until being replaced in 1922 by Hiram Wesley Evans. Early life Simmons was born in Harpersville, Alabama, to Calvin Henry Simmons, a physician, and his wife Lavonia Simmons née Davis, daughter of Thomas C. Davis. In his younger years, he attempted to study medicine at Johns Hopkins University, but unable to afford it, opted to serve in the Spanish–American War instead. After receiving an honorable discharge, he became a teacher for the Methodist Episcopal Church, South but was suspended by the church in 1912 for inefficiency. Simmons later joined two churches and twelve different fraternal organizations, which flourished in the early twentieth century. He was known as "Joe", "Doc" (in reference to his medical training) or "Colonel" (referring to his rank in the Woodmen of the World). Ku Klux Klan While recovering in 1915 after being hit by a car, Simmons decided to rebuild the Klan which he had seen depicted in the newly released film The Birth of a Nation directed by D. W. Griffith. He obtained a copy of the Reconstruction Klan's "Prescript" and used it to write his own prospectus for a reincarnation of the organization. As the nucleus of his revived Klan, Simmons organized a group of friends, in addition to two elderly men who had been members of the original Klan. On Thanksgiving eve, November 25, 1915, they climbed Stone Mountain to burn a cross and inaugurate the new group, with fifteen charter members. Simmons' later account of the founding included a dramatic story of "a temperature far below freezing", although weather records showed that the temperature had never fallen below 45 °F (7 °C) that night on Stone Mountain. He declared himself the Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The imagery of the burning cross, which had not been used by the original Klan, had been introduced by Griffith in Birth of a Nation. The film had derived the image from the works of Thomas Dixon, Jr., upon which the film was based. Dixon had been inspired by the historical practices of Scottish clans, who had burned crosses as a method of signaling from one hilltop to the next. The image also occurs in Lady of