In major Southern cities such as Birmingham , Alabama , Klan members kept control of access to the better-paying industrial jobs and opposed unions . During the 1930s and 1940s , Klan leaders urged members to disrupt the Congress of Industrial Organizations ( CIO ) , which advocated industrial unions and accepted African-American members , unlike earlier unions . With access to dynamite and using the skills from their jobs in mining and steel , in the late 1940s some Klan members in Birmingham used bombings to destroy houses in order to intimidate upwardly mobile blacks who moved into middle-class neighborhoods . " By mid-1949 , there were so many charred house carcasses that the area College Hills was informally named Dynamite Hill . " Activism by these independent KKK groups in Birmingham increased as a reaction to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s . Independent Klan groups violently opposed the civil rights movement . KKK members were implicated in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on a Sunday in September 1963 , which killed four African-American girls and injured 22 other people . Members of the Communist Workers ' Party came to North Carolina to organize textile workers and pushed back against racial discrimination there , taunting the KKK , resulting in the 1979 Greensboro massacre
16th Street Baptist Church bombing
16th Street Baptist Church bombing
Ku Klux Klan