The killing of nine congregants at the Emanuel A.M.E. church in South Carolina was a hate crime committed by a young white man influenced by the Council of Conservative Citizens. The CCC began in Mississippi in the 1950s as the Citizens’ Councils of America. It is “a modern reincarnation of the White Citizens’ Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

There are 288 active hate groups within the 11 states of the former Confederacy. Anti-black groups are the largest category, with a total of 130, including white nationalists, racist skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan. There are also 39 black-separatist groups, many of them local chapters of the Nation of Islam (which is also anti-Semitic); and 40 anti-Semitic groups.

Organized hate is not limited to the South. There are 784 active “hate groups” operating in the United States today. California, for example, with a population of 38,802,500, has the largest number of hate groups in the nation, totaling 57. These include 17 anti-black groups, five black-separatist groups, six anti-Semitic groups, one anti-immigration group and 28 the SPLC designates as “other.”

(Click on the image below to enlarge the illustration).

Hannah Harper is an editorial intern for The Washington Spectator.

Source: Southern Poverty Law Center.

Illustration: Kevin Kreneck.

See also: “From the KKK to the CCC to Dylann Roof“