Ku Klux Klan Trials
Georgetown, Williamson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was a nationwide organization that openly preached white supremacy and hatred for Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and Immigrants. In Texas, Klan membership peaked in 1923 with upwards of 150,000 members. Klansmen influenced and held positions in local and state government and in law enforcement. Their power allowed members to engage in acts of vigilante violence without fear of prosecution. Although their primary targets were people of color, the Klan also threatened Anglos who disagreed with the KKK’s core values. On Easter Sunday 1923, ten Klansmen flogged and tarred Robert Burleson, a white traveling salesman, after Burleson ignored their warning to leave Georgetown. District Attorney Dan Moody, a Taylor native, led prosecution against the Klansmen in a series of trials between September 1923 and February 1924. Moody tried his strongest case first against Klansman Murray Jackson. After seven days of arguments, the jurors deliberated for twenty minutes before returning a guilty verdict and offering the maximum punishment for the crime. Moody’s initial conviction led to four additional convictions and four prison sentences for the other Georgetown Klansmen on trial at the Williamson County Courthouse. These trials were considered the first prosecutorial success in the United States against members of the 1920s Klan and quickly weakened the Klan’s political influence in Texas. Further, the publicity garnered by Moody following the trial led to his successful runs for State Attorney General in 1924 and Texas Governor in 1926 and 1928. He was the youngest person ever elected to both statewide offices. (2009)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1923, at the height of the Ku Klux Klan's power in Texas, ten Klansmen flogged and tarred a traveling salesman named Robert Burleson near Georgetown. District Attorney Dan Moody — a young Taylor native — prosecuted the attackers in a series of trials at the Williamson County Courthouse, winning a rapid guilty verdict in his first case and four more convictions after it. Widely regarded as the nation's first successful prosecutions of the 1920s Klan, the trials broke the organization's political grip in Texas and launched Moody toward the governorship.
Why it matters
These convictions proved that Klan violence could be answered in a courtroom, marking a turning point in the fight against the hooded order's hold on American public life.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To understand what happened at Georgetown, you have to understand how powerful the Ku Klux Klan had become in the early 1920s. This was not the Reconstruction-era Klan of the previous century but its revived, national incarnation — a mass movement that openly preached hatred of Black Americans, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants, and that dressed its bigotry in the language of patriotism and moral order. In Texas its membership peaked in 1923 at an enormous scale.
What made that Klan so dangerous was not just its numbers but its penetration of public life. Its members held offices in local and state government and served in law enforcement, and that reach created a terrible practical immunity: Klansmen could commit acts of vigilante violence knowing that the very institutions meant to punish them were often staffed by their own. The hood was frightening precisely because it seemed to operate above the law.
Against that backdrop, ordinary criminal justice — a district attorney, a jury, a courthouse — became the unlikely front line. The question hanging over communities like Georgetown was whether the machinery of the law could still be made to work when the lawbreakers believed themselves untouchable.
People & events
The crime that set everything in motion happened on Easter Sunday in 1923, when ten Klansmen seized a traveling salesman named Robert Burleson — a white man who had ignored their warning to leave Georgetown — and flogged and tarred him. It was exactly the kind of vigilante attack the Klan expected to commit with impunity, and it was aimed to send a message not only to outsiders but to anyone who defied the order's will.
Into that expectation of impunity stepped District Attorney Dan Moody, a young Taylor native who decided the attackers would answer for what they had done. Between September 1923 and February 1924 he pursued them through a series of trials at the Williamson County Courthouse. Shrewdly, Moody tried his strongest case first, against the Klansman Murray Jackson. After seven days of arguments, the jury needed only twenty minutes to return a guilty verdict — and handed down the maximum punishment.
That first conviction cracked the wall. It was followed by four more, and four additional prison sentences for the other Georgetown Klansmen on trial. A crime designed to prove the Klan was above the law instead became the case that proved it was not — and the young prosecutor who made it happen would ride the resulting fame to statewide office, winning election as attorney general and then, remarkably young, as governor.
Its place in the American story
These trials matter far beyond Williamson County because they were, as the marker records, considered the first prosecutorial success in the entire United States against members of the 1920s Klan. At the very moment the organization was at its peak, a local district attorney demonstrated something the Klan had bet no one could: that hooded violence could be answered, and punished, in an open courtroom.
The consequences rippled outward. The convictions did real damage to the Klan's aura of invincibility and helped weaken its political grip in Texas. An organization whose power rested on the belief that it stood above accountability could not easily survive the public spectacle of its members going to prison. The verdicts were a turning point in the broader national reckoning that would see the revived Klan's influence collapse over the following years.
There is also the arc of the prosecutor himself. The publicity from the trials propelled Dan Moody into the highest offices of his state, making him one of the youngest ever elected to them. His rise is a reminder that standing up to organized bigotry, at the moment it seemed most dangerous to do so, could also be recognized by the public as exactly the kind of courage they wanted in their leaders.
If you visit
The heart of this story is the Williamson County Courthouse in Georgetown, where the trials took place, and standing on that historic square is the best way to feel the weight of what happened here. Picture the pressure inside those walls in 1923 and 1924: a young prosecutor, a series of juries, and defendants who had assumed the law would never touch them. The twenty-minute verdict that broke the Klan's power in Texas was delivered in a room like the ones in that building.
Let the contrast sink in as you read the marker. It does not flinch from naming what the Klan was or how many Texans wore its hood at the movement's height, and that honesty is the point. This is a marker about the moment ordinary courtroom justice proved stronger than mob power, and it asks you to remember both the ugliness that made the trials necessary and the courage that made them succeed.
Georgetown's square, with its courthouse at the center, makes this an easy and meaningful stop on any tour of Central Texas history. Come for a piece of the American story that is uncomfortable and inspiring at once — a small county seat where, at the Klan's most powerful hour, the law was made to mean something.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Dan Moody
- · Robert Burleson
- · Murray Jackson
Related events
- · Ku Klux Klan trials
Themes & tags
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