Why did the KKK want black people dead? Why did they hate them so much?
Southern Whites would have had to fill the roles then held by Blacks - What is forgotten (or people don’t want to remember) is that poor Whites in the South were only marginally above Blacks economically. If the Ku Klux Klan had ever truly ignited major pogrom or even a Holocaust-type situation, Blacks who didn’t die would have fled in the thousands leaving sharecropping roles and low wage service jobs needing to be filled. At the time the only other cheap sources of labor were foreign immigrants (who, being ethnic Whites and also Jewish or Catholic presented their own problems for Southern racists) and poor Southern Whites as widespread Latino immigration didn’t began until after WWII. To be blunt, no one was looking to be the new “nigger” so Blacks had to be kept in check and not slaughtered wholesalely.share
Wealthy Southern Whites would have intervened - While they also despised Blacks themselves, they also knew that a Reconstruction-style backlash would result if the Klan’s actions got too far out of hand. This would result in their property potentially being seized, as well federal troops being sent to the South to put down unrest. Better that the occasional beating or lynching take place rather than a widespread pogrom.
Most Southern Whites weren’t (and even today still aren’t) sociopaths - As long Blacks “stayed in their place”, they didn’t want to see them injured or killed. While such a person’s mindset would be viewed as being vilely prejudiced today, for their time they were decent enough people to know right from wrong and murdering Blacks in mass numbers outside of rare occasions (See the Tulsa Race Riot) was beyond the pale even in the South.
There was always the very real threat that Blacks would fight back - What is also forgotten about during the Jim Crow era is that there were a sizable number of Blacks in many communities, and in some they outnumbered Whites. If the Ku Klux Klan had stepped too far out of line, there was the very real prospect of Blacks (who, BTW, were armed as it wasn’t against the law) fighting back and killing a number of Whites themselves. The leaders of communities kept the Klan in check in many areas simply so that reprisals by Blacks would not occur.
So there was never going to be the “race war” that fantasists and hate group leaders predicted simply because such an event would have served no one in power’s interest, it would have led to poor Whites dropping further down the scale in social status, and it would have provoked reprisals by Blacks.
The Ku Klux Klan was (and remains) a domestic terrorist group. Because its membership is exclusively White and draws from the communities in which it is based, the federal government so far hasn’t made much progress in dismantling or destroying the group. Currently it hides behind the Constitution’s right to free speech and freedom of assembly that protect it from prosecution. It also afforded protection by the state and federal governments being largely unwilling to prosecute White hate groups as effectively as it would those from minority groups.
The Klan hates Blacks as we are the most prominent minority in the US, because we are the reason that they were begun in 1873, and because they have suffered somewhat in the last few decades as we integrated more into American society and gained the wealth and privilege denied to us in the past. Their ideology preaches our inferiority, and successful and powerful Blacks creates cognitive dissonance because it conflicts with that ideology.