Re-Enter the Dragon

By Adam Biegel/Little Rock

Thom Robb is a reconstructed racist. He calls himself the national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, eschewing the hoary title of Imperial Wizard. Indeed, the lower ranks have been defanged as well. There are no more Grand Dragons, no more Great Titans. Gone too are the robes and hoods. "We don't hate blacks," declares Robb, who assumed the leadership in 1989. "We just love whites."

Robb's diminution of the Klan's charter has not gone down well. "Thom Robb is a poor example of a Klansman. He comes off as a young Republican, not as a racialist," says David Neumann, 40, an auto-plant machinist who heads the Michigan chapter of the Knights. "He goes to great lengths not to say anything controversial that might alienate people from giving him money." In April, Ed Novak, born Ed Melkonian and an ex-lieutenant of Robb's, started a rival Klan out of Chicago. According to Klanwatch, based in Montgomery, Alabama, Novak's Federation of Klans has siphoned off at least a third of Robb's members nationwide. "This group is more likely to embrace the neo- Nazi, swastika-wearing segment of extremists," says Klanwatch director Danny Welch.

As for Neumann, he and the Klan leaders of Indiana and Illinois led a walkout from the Knights last month. This weekend they will stage an old- fashioned K.K.K. rally in Lafayette, Indiana, complete with robes and hoods. Neumann, with the blessing of his associates, has assumed the title Robb dislikes: Imperial Wizard. The rebel triumvirate maintains that most of the Knights are now with them.

Robb, who is based in Arkansas, insists the insurgents have taken no more than 15 of his members. He claims that Neumann and his accomplices, Troy Murphey of North Salem, Indiana, and Dennis McGiffen of Wood River, Illinois, do not have the standing to vote him out of office. He threw them out of the Knights immediately after they ousted him. "As far as I'm concerned this is just a blip on the radar screen," says Robb, 48. "It's like me putting out a letter dismissing Bill Clinton as President."

While tracking Klan activities becomes more difficult with the emergence of new factions, civil rights groups generally welcome the apparent unraveling of Robb's regime. "The Klan is more splintered than ever," says Thomas Halpern of the Anti-Defamation League in New York City. "But for the sake of public safety and the country as a whole, this is better than if the granddaddy of the far-right extremist movement presented a united front. If we're lucky they'll expend their energy fighting each other, and they won't have anything left to infect the American body politic."