White & Wrong

By MICHAEL RILEY JANESVILLE

The placid town of Janesville, Wis. (est. pop. 52,000), never asked for a Ku Klux Klan rally. But the Klan considered the town, perched on the Rock River, ripe for recruits. So there in the middle of Rockport Park stood a massive burlap-wrapped, kerosene-soaked cross surrounded by Klansmen, and even a few Klanswomen, their robes billowing in the soft breeze. The loud twang of country music mixed with the angry chants of protesters jousting with police a few hundred yards away: "Death to the Klan!"

The Kluxers kept a wary eye as the demonstrators repeatedly charged the police line, only to be repulsed by chilly blasts from a fire hose. Eventually the frustrated crowd began to pelt the cops with mud, rocks, bottles and obscenities. The police made eight arrests. For the man whose presence triggered the violence, no outcome could have been better. "Oh, yeah," said Grand Wizard Thom Robb of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. "I couldn't have bought this advertising for a million bucks."

Robb, 46, is the avuncular public face of a fringe white-supremacist movement whose virulence is growing. His Klan faction, which boasts at least 1,000 active members, is one of the largest white racist groups in the nation. According to professional Klan watchers, he has tapped into a growing market for bigotry. Reported hate crimes, from painting swastikas on synagogues to racially motivated murders, have steadily risen over the past four years; cross burnings alone doubled in 1991. Klanwatch, a monitoring group based in Montgomery, estimates that there are now 346 groups, up from 273 in 1990.

The resentments stirred by the Los Angeles riots, a still sour economy and a resurgent nativism may help swell the ranks of the K.K.K. In striking down a St. Paul ordinance last week that prohibited speech or behavior likely to arouse "anger or alarm" on the basis of "race, color, creed, religion or gender," the Supreme Court sought to protect free speech. But the incident that inspired the case in the first place -- a cross burning on the lawn of a black family -- led some to predict that the ruling would make it harder to prosecute hate crimes. Said Danny Welch, director of Klanwatch: "I'm convinced in my heart that we're going to see big, dark days before it gets any better."

At first glance, Robb seems miscast in the role of a Klan leader. Like his role model David Duke, the Imperial Wizard turned politician, Robb has traded in his pointed hood and robe for a well-worn gray suit and dingy wing tips. Like Duke, he has altered the Klan's hate-filled message to make it more palatable. Robb's white supremacy emphasizes love for the white race rather than hatred for blacks and other minorities. While Robb lacks Duke's telegenic looks, he shares his flair for attracting attention, and his plans for expanding the Klan's influence rival anything Duke ever dreamed of.

Robb lives deep in Arkansas' Ozark Mountains, off a dirt road that winds through the defunct hamlet of Zinc, past dilapidated mobile homes, rusting farm equipment and rocky pastureland. Chickens and goats pause in the road along Sugar Orchard Creek, and neighbors glare warily at unfamiliar visitors. The Grand Wizard's home, a weathered cedar dwelling and several ramshackle outbuildings, is built on 100 forested acres. Inside, Robb's pleasant wife, Muriel, prepares dinner while Oprah chatters away on a TV set in the cluttered living room. One son, Jason, 18, ponders his homework; another son, Nathan, 21, hauls in the groceries; and Robb's 11-month-old granddaughter, Charity, toddles around in her walker. The only jarring note in this domestic idyll is two Klan prayers hanging on a wall.

Just a short stroll from Robb's home lies an oak-rimmed pasture, where the Grand Wizard hopes to fulfill his grandiose vision of the future. Shortly after Duke lost his bid to become Governor of Louisiana last year, Robb drew national attention to his idea for building a high-tech propaganda mill, complete with training on how to appear on television, history lessons and political instruction, even a drum-and-bagpipe corps. It would become an assembly line cranking out articulate, blow-dried Duke clones. "They always have these pictures of people in the Klan, flies buzzing around the head, teeth missing, wiping manure off their feet," says Robb. "Louisiana has one David Duke. We plan to give America 1,000 of them."

Robb was first attracted to the Knights after meeting Duke in New Orleans in the mid-1970s. But his racist roots run deep. Born in Detroit, Robb was the son of a builder and a department-store sales clerk. His family moved to Tucson while he was a teenager. There he devoured his mother's right-wing political tracts and joined the John Birch Society. After studying at a Colorado seminary under Kenneth Goff, a minister with anti-Semitic views, Robb became a Baptist minister, opened a print shop and started publishing his own right-wing tracts and pushing white-supremacist causes. In 1979 he joined Duke's Klan (one of many different Klan organizations), and soon moved up the ranks. Shortly after Duke stepped down as Imperial Wizard in 1980 to found the National Association for the Advancement of White People, Robb and another lieutenant staged a coup to topple Duke's successor, Don Black, then in prison for trying to engineer the takeover of a Caribbean island. In 1989 Robb became Grand Wizard.

Since then, Robb has taken up where Duke left off, using modern marketing methods to enhance the Klan's image. The Klan sells itself on tabloid TV and on business cards emblazoned with three large red Ks. There is even something for Klan kids: balloons depicting a hooded night rider on horseback. "We're selling white pride, white power, whatever," Robb says. "It doesn't make any difference if you're selling the Klan or used cars or toothbrushes."

At his rallies, Robb is a duplicitous huckster. When protesters in Dubuque, Iowa, toss eggs at him, he responds with a verbal sally. "They are hypocrites!" he shouts. "They are liars. They talk about peace, but there is no peace over there. They are being built up by hatred." Then he tells his fans that they are on a "mission of love" at a "white Christian revival." With his message goes a commercial tie-in. Besides the usual Klan caps and T shirts and stickers, these rallies offer pricey Klan kitsch, like a ceramic statuette of a hooded Klansman whose eyes glow an eerie red when you plug it into an electrical outlet ($25 at a rally or $20 for the mail-order version).

Those eager to catch a glimpse into Robb's weird world can find themselves at a rally listening to a fledgling neo-Nazi discuss with a robed Klansman the religious primacy of the white race. A few steps away, a young Kluxer-in- training, his eyes peering out through slits in his hood, explains the history of a camouflaged Klanmobile, a trashed-out Ford Grenada loaded with ham-radio equipment and emblazoned with slogans like WHITE POWER and PRAISE GOD FOR AIDS.

When outsiders are nearby, Robb is careful to avoid the word nigger, though he admits to an occasional lapse. He avoids directly denigrating blacks and other races, and he shies from embracing white-power hero Adolf Hitler. He stresses that the Klan, or at least his branch of it, does not advocate violence. "We're not night riders running around beating people up," he says, "but we're setting our sights on governmental power." Robb thinks the future of the Klan lies in politics, and to prove it, he is running for the Arkansas legislature. In speeches, he blames the U.S. government for the nation's ills, and he has adopted a platform he claims will return America to its former greatness. He wants, among other things, to post soldiers at the Mexican border to stop immigrants, quarantine all aids patients, kill drug dealers and put an end to affirmative action.

Robb and his followers imagine a Jewish conspiracy in almost everything from banking to the Federal Government. He advocates eventual separation of the races, perhaps by banishing blacks, with reparations, to Africa. "They'll never have justice in a white society," he says of blacks. "After all, they were brought over here against their will, which certainly was a benefit to them, much more a great benefit to them than to the slave owners. It put a burden on us.

"This is going to sound awful crude to say this, and maybe it will come out wrong," says Robb, "but at least during the time of slavery, they earned their keep. What benefit are they to us today, after food stamps and public housing and heating their homes and cooling their homes and caring for their children and taking them to the hospital and all the things that are done? Where's the appreciation for that, and what is the benefit to us?"

These ideas are mild compared with those Robb expressed in the past. Before remaking his image, he castigated blacks and Jews, embraced Hitler and endorsed killing homosexuals, calling for "the death penalty to the faggot slime." His newspapers (the Torch and White Patriot) have featured racial slurs including a cartoon showing a hanging of a black man and a bigoted ditty, The Negro National Anthem. Despite his toned-down persona, he still hawks copies of Mein Kampf and swears the Holocaust is a hoax.

Like an infectious virus, the Klan has learned to mutate and survive, and that's just what Robb is doing. "It's the shadow side of the American character, and it's not going to go away," explains Wyn Wade, author of The Fiery Cross, an excellent study of the Klan. "The power is their history. We can never forget their potential to do it again."

Robb's ultimate goal is to hang a WHITES ONLY sign at America's borders. He fears his race will soon disappear beneath a tide of nonwhite immigrants and homegrown minorities. It is a stance that appeals to poor, alienated whites, especially males, who feel they have been forgotten. While militant racists talk freely of conflict, even of race war, one thing the white-supremacist movement agrees on is the preferred color of this nation. "From my perspective, America is a white nation," Robb says.

This concept springs from Robb's Christian Identity theology, an obscure faith shared by many white supremacists. Descended from a shadowy 19th century creed known as Anglo-Israelism, Identity interprets the Bible to mean that white Europeans, and thus their American descendants, are God's true chosen people. Though not endorsed by all believers in this anti-Semitic faith, the use of violence has been linked to the Order, a radical fringe underground group that sought unsuccessfully to overthrow the government in the mid-1980s.

While the natural inclination is to dismiss Robb as merely another member of the lunatic fringe, one cannot so easily dismiss the forces that drive his crusade or its impact. His updated rhetoric provides a paper-thin layer of respectability to a noxious creed that appeals to alienated white youths like Shawn Slater, whom Robb is grooming as a future Klan leader. An ex-skinhead, Slater now heads the Klan's chapter in Aurora, Colo. Like his mentor, Slater has mastered the art of attracting publicity by staging events that draw the wrath of protesters. In Denver last January, he orchestrated a Klan rally on Martin Luther King Day that turned violent when anti-Klan protesters threw bottles, overturned a police car and battled police. The incident allowed Slater to score a publicity coup on CBS'S 48 Hours.

Today a crew-cut Slater walks Denver's streets in a gray wool suit with a small Klan pin on his lapel. He carries a cocky attitude and a black Samsonite briefcase; inside is a copy of American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell's White Power. His favorite slogan -- "Equal Rights for Everybody; Special Privileges for Nobody" -- even shows a gift for glib phrasemaking.

As the 26-year-old sits at a Denver bar, he points to a young interracial couple strolling past. "This stuff makes me sick, white girl walking with a black," he says. "This guy's got a Malcolm X hat that stands for 'Kill whitey,' and he has this white girl walking with him." Though Slater denies he is a racist -- "I'm white and I'm proud" -- he has been linked directly to antiblack and anti-Semitic literature passed out in local high schools by supporters. His true beliefs are evident in the garish tattoo beneath his white shirt and tie. It features a montage of his heroes, including Hitler, Mussolini and Charles Manson.

While the tactics of white supremacy may change, Robb's goal is to "preserve" his "imperiled" race. "If that could be the only way of saving white people," says Robb, his hand sweeping across the Ozarks, "I'd burn the whole forest down." To that end, Robb will travel the country this summer in his green van with his boys and a loudspeaker system, a regular racist road show, holding rallies from Georgia to Colorado. He will probably draw more protesters, TV crews and publicity, which will bolster his membership, increase his profits and, of course, foment hatred and violence. Whether the Klan wears a hood and a robe or a business suit, its message is unchanged.