For years, internet users have shared a black-and-white photo of a man, who appears to be Black, in a physical altercation with another man dressed in a white Ku Klux Klan robe and hood.
In captions, users identified the Black man — who wore a knit cap, patterned shirt, dark jeans, and athletic shoes — as "Willie 'Whoop A**' Johnson." One post (archived) from 2020 claimed Johnson was "the 1st Black Man to whoop a Klans man on camera and not give a f***."
(X user @GotDammWatkins)
Examples of the claim also appeared in posts on social media platforms including X (archived), Reddit (archived), and Facebook. Other posts (archived) featuring the same image (archived) gave the man's name as Tyrone "F*** the Klan" Johnson.
As we found when we first looked into the history of the photo in 2021, there was no evidence to support the claim that the man shown grabbing the Klansman was named Willie or Tyrone Johnson, nor that he had either of the nicknames "Whoop A**" or "F*** the Klan."
Although the image showed no signs of having been generated or altered using artificial intelligence (AI) software or other digital editing tools, we were unable to find any secure evidence about where or when the image was captured.
Reverse image searches of the photo on TinEye and Google found numerous examples around the internet, some (archived) dating back more than a decade (archived).
However, none of these examples included any credible information about where or when the photo was taken, or the identities of the men shown in the image.
In an attempt to track down information about the photo, we searched the key words "Ku Klux Klan," "KKK," and "Klansman" on the websites of image licensing services Getty Images and Alamy. We searched the same terms on the website of the Digital Public Library of America, which aggregates searchable metadata from libraries, museums, and cultural institutions across the country.
The image in question did not turn up among any of the results.
We also searched the above terms on Newspapers.com, limiting the date range to between 1975 and 1990 based on the appearance of the clothing and cars visible in the photo. We did not come across any examples of the image in any of the thousands of newspaper articles that search returned.
As we noted in 2021, it's likely internet users made up the names "Willie 'Whoop A**' Johnson" and "Tyrone 'F*** the Klan' Johnson" for humorous effect. Google searches for the two names returned only social media posts along the lines of the examples linked above.
However, in the absence of any credible information about the photo, the possibility that one of those names was real cannot be fully discounted.
We'll update this story if any credible information about the photo or the men in it emerges.