The Klan Rides Again

Under a modern mask, oldtime racism and violence

The members are younger these A days, usually in their 20s and early 30s. Many of them sport hippie-style hair, Beards or drooping mustaches. Some of their leaders try to project an up-to-date image, sounding reasonable on TV talk shows and often wearing sober business suits. But at their rallies in the dark of night, today's self-styled knights of the Ku Klux Klan still wear white robes, burn crosses and spout the racist rhetoric of their grandfathers in the Klan's hey day of the 1920s, when klaverns across the country claimed millions of members.

The modern Klan is far smaller: no more than 10,000 members, according to estimates by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and other experts on the K.K.K. But after a decade of dormancy, the Klan in the past year has grown steadily more belligerent and violent. Two weeks ago, Klansmen and their sympathizers attacked an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, N.C., shooting to death four white men and a black woman, all of them members of the Communist Workers Party, formerly known as the Workers Viewpoint Organization.

So far this year, the Justice Department has recorded 44 Klan-related incidents, compared with eight in all of 1978. They included cross burnings, beatings and firebombings. A Klansman was convicted of whipping a white woman from Sylacauga, Ala., who he thought was dating a black man. In Birmingham, Klansmen were convicted of shooting at the houses of two black civil rights leaders.

At the same time, the Klan's membership is growing, up 25% in 18 months. Klan activities have been reported in 22 states, from Middletown, Ohio, to Castro Valley, Calif., as well as on the aircraft carrier A U.S.S. Independence and at the Fort Carson army base in Colorado. But four out of five Klansmen are in the old Confederate states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas. Most of the Klan members are blue-collar men with no more than three years of high school. About a third are women, usually the wives or girlfriends of male members. There are even a few Roman Catholic members, which is a sharp departure from the 1920s, when Klansmen hated Catholics almost as much as did black and Jews.

According to Klan watchers, the growth in membership is mostly a reaction to busing for school desegregation and to affirmative action, which Klansmen figure gives blacks an advantage over them in competing for jobs. David Chalmers, a historian at the University of Florida and author of Hooded Americanism, observes that most Klansmen have a resentful sense of being unfairly excluded from the middle class. Says he: "By joining the Klan and defending Americanism, they confer on themselves the status that society has denied them."

Today's K.K.K. units are also trying to recruit children. In more than a dozen cities throughout the country, Klan sympathizers have distributed leaflets to high school students asking: "Are you 'fed up to here' with black, chicano and [Oriental] criminals who break into lockers and steal your clothes and wallets?" The solution, according to the leaflet, is to join the Klan Youth Corps. At a K.K.K. summer camp in Jefferson County, Ala., robed counselors teach girls and boys ages ten to 18 the fundamentals of race supremacy and how to use guns. Near Decatur, Ala., a group of children, all outfitted in Klan T shirts, burned an old school bus last summer to protest school desegregation while several hundred adults cheered.

Although all Klansmen subscribe to the same racist beliefs, they are fractured among at least a dozen factions. The oldest and largest is the 3,500-member United Klans of America, led by Robert Shelton, 50, a former tire salesman from Tuscaloosa, Ala. But his group has been waning in influence in the past few years. The South's most visible klavern now is the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which has about 2,500 gun-toting, violence-talking members. Their imperial wizard is Bill Wilkinson, 36, a former electrical contractor from Denham Springs, La., who travels from city to city in a private plane, recruiting members and staging demonstrations.

Complains Wilkinson: "The Government is giving all the gravy to Negroes and other minorities who have not earned it." But blacks are not the only targets. Says he: "This is not just a racist, nigger-hating organization.

We're more complex than that." Indeed, Wilkinson's Invisible Empire also hates Indochinese refugees, Indians and Hispanics.

The slickest faction is the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which is headed by David Duke of Metairie, La. His 2,000 followers have tried to make racism more respectable by publicly condemning violence and recruiting a variety of middle-class professionals. Duke, 29, a smooth-talking graduate of Louisiana State University, ran for the Louisiana state senate, coming in second in a four-man race last week.

Next year he plans to enter a dozen presidential primaries with the aim of electing some delegates to the Democratic National Convention, where they will propose that K.K.K. stands on issues be included in the party platform. Says Duke:

"White people today are facing more massive racial discriminations than the blacks ever faced. We are the only group standing up for whites in this country."

Law enforcement officials and civil rights leaders are increasingly alarmed about the Klan, but they do not know what to do about it. Because of new federal restrictions designed to protect civil rights, the FBI no longer keeps as close watch on Klan activities as it once did. Says an FBI official: "We now cannot infiltrate them just because they are standing on a street corner and shouting, no matter how violent or antisocial their rhetoric." Other observers are persuaded that Klan strength will decline only when the people who are now attracted to it get a bigger share of the South's economic boom. Until then, say Mary Joyce Carlson, a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta whose car was once shot at by Klansmen, "any group with simple ready-made answers will have some support."

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