With shirts emblazoned with the title “International Keystone Knights” and equipped with every variation of the Confederate flag possible, a band of Confederate supporters marched onto the Ole Miss campus the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 16. This organization is part of the Ku Klux Klan, the notorious group of white supremacists who terrorized minority communities, specifically the black communities during the Jim Crowe and Civil Rights eras.

In short, the KKK was at Ole Miss on Friday.

This group, clearly trying to counter-protest the earlier rally to take down the Mississippi state flag at Ole Miss, paraded through campus from the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College to the Circle, when campus police and security services then relocated them to the front of Fulton Chapel.

The Knights had members ranging from adults to teenagers to children; among them, a school-aged girl and a small boy, who clutched a Confederate flag in one hand and an adult’s hand in the other.

If either of these children went to Oxford or Lafayette public schools, they would have been missing school, as both local elementary schools were not on fall break, and did not note any canceled classes on their websites.

Waiting to meet the protesters were students of varying races and ages, carrying signs and calling out chants at the Knights: the remnants of the earlier group from the rally. Most did not seem to realize that this group was associated with the KKK when they first arrived, but after they said some of their most racist and prejudiced comments, the crowd seemed to catch on to the group’s true intentions, because this was no ordinary pro-Confederate flag/state flag supporting group. This was an organization intent on expressing their racism and desire for segregation, even when faced with a crowd of the very people they were offending.

One man, holding a sign bearing the message “SECEDE” and a hat reading “White Power,” stood at the forefront of the KKK group and talked to the media and responded to questions from the crowd. “We’ll fly our flags where we want, how we want,” he said. “You’re so afraid of a flag.”

Several other Knight members shouted out things to the crowd, such as “Black lives don’t matter,” in response to one of many posters in the crowd bearing the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” Other posters proclaimed, “Fins up, flag down,” and “Your silence won’t protect you.”

Ole Miss students and some faculty members have been calling on ASB for months to remove the Mississippi state flag from campus, and faculty members like Dean Sullivan-Gonzales of the Honors College and Coach Hugh Freeze have echoed these requests. Other students are rebutting these attempts, arguing that the Confederate symbols are a part of Southern culture and history and that a public university should not remove its own state’s flag. No Ole Miss students, however, participated in this counter-protest.

The crowd was eventually broken up because it was disturbing classes on campus. But the Knights and their leader Shaun Winkler said to expect more pro-flag supporters at the ASB meeting about the issue on Tuesday.