Nathan Bedford Forrest, American general and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (died 1877)

Nathan Bedford Forrest was an American slave trader, active in the lower Mississippi River valley, who served as a Confederate States Army general during the American Civil War. Forrest was elected to lead the post-Civil War Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan as its first and only Grand Wizard, though not a founding member, serving almost two years from the 1867 inception of his title, until calling for dissolution of the organization in January 1869.

The Ku Klux Klan, commonly shortened to KKK or Klan, is an American Protestant-led Christian extremist, white supremacist, far-right hate group. It was founded in 1865 during Reconstruction in the devastated South. Various historians have characterized the Klan as America's first terrorist group. The group contains several organizations structured as a secret society, which have frequently resorted to terrorism, violence and acts of intimidation to impose their criteria and oppress their victims, most notably African Americans, Jews, and Catholics. A leader of one of these organizations is called a grand wizard, and there have been three distinct iterations with various other targets relative to time and place.