What is the theme in They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group by Susan Campbell Bartoletti?

One important themes addressed in the novel is violence, and how the KKK's violence against the good things as well as bad didn't help the South. When the freedmen were chased off their sharecropped land, the KKK was stealing from the planters who were going to get some profit from the land. With the freedman gone, there wasn't a crop. The planter lost in the long run. When the black schools and churches were burned, it just added another strike against the Union and being one country again. Education would have helped the whole country. The KKK tried to destroy educational opportunities for the blacks when this would have made the freedmen able to do something besides pick cotton. There were so many black people in the South, they needed more skills.