You need a quick history lesson, pay attention 'cause they don't teach this shit in public school.
An estimated 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites died at the end of KKK ropes from 1882 to 1964, many of the blacks killed were killed not solely because of their race but for their political affiliation.
In an 1868 newspaper interview, Nathan Bedford Forrest (Grand Wizard) stated that the Klan's primary opposition was to the Loyal Leagues, Republican state governments, people like Tennessee governor Brownlow and other carpetbaggers and scalawags. He argued that many southerners believed that blacks were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues. - A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest. New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers. p. 336.
In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. It's purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party's infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life. - Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row. 1988. p. 425–426.
The refernces to this type of activity are numerous, but here is a typical example of Klan activity form the era:
Klan violence worked to suppress black voting. More than 2,000 persons were killed, wounded and otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868. Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071, after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for Grant's opponent. The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact. - W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, New York: Oxford University Press, 1935; reprint, The Free Press, 1998, pp.680–681.