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PageSB Wednesday, October 17.1979 ATHENS NEWS COURIERKlux Klanuprevival?United Press International In the summer of 1979 for the first time since the peak of 1960s civil rights protests, stories about the Ku Klux Klan appeared on newspaper front pages. Images of burning crosses glowed again from living room television screens.Klan rallies were held in unlikely locations — Middletown, Ohio, Barnegat, N.J. — as well as old trouble spots. Little Rock, Montgomery and Selma.There were even incidents of Klan activity aboard three ships of the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet based in Norfolk. Va.But the bottom line, whether it’s hard or soft sell, is essentially the same: the while protestant American is being denied his due.Both Beam and Howard, as organizers for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, fall under the direction of David Duke, Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, whose home base is Metarie, La., a suburb of New Orleans.In Duke may be found the key to some of the klan resurgence. No one would ever cast Duke inthe role of a typical Klansman. In many ways he is a sharp antithesis to the red-neck, semiliterate rank-and-file image the Klan projects.David Duke is tall, handsome, college educated and intelligent. He holds a history degree from Louisiana State University, preaches nonviolence and has his followers sign a pledge against illegal acts.We don’t wave machine guns at rallies, he said. “We are much larger and morepowerful than any other Klan group. He is probably right.But no one keeps tabs on the Klan any more and most factions don't like to talk about their membership.In an interview in his office in the Patriot Bookstore. Duke sat in front of a huge Klan flag, a black cross on a white circle in a red field, and talked about what he was trying to do.Simply, he said, his organization is fighting for the civil rights of white citizens through legal action.educational programs, public appearances and debates.Duke filed a friend of the court brief in the celebrated Allen Bakke case that restricted Affirmative Action programs in graduate schools. In the interview he mentioned the Brian Weber case, which upheld voluntary Affirmative Action training programs in a Louisiana aluminum plant, citing it as proof white citizens were losing their civil rights.That case is going to launch the largest civil rightsmovement ever seen n this country,” Duke said. “That decision said white people have no civil rights.”Duke, who grew up in an upper middle class neighborhood near New Orleans’ Lake Pontchartrain, is the son of a U.S. Department of Energy engineer who encouraged his childen to excel academically.Now 28, he formerly taught English in a Laotian school under the auspices of the U.S.Agency for International Development. He favors a business suit and a tie at rallies over Klan garb and has debated several prominent black figures, including Jesse Jackson. Carl Rowan and Bobby Seale.“I’ve made the Klan respectable,” he said. “I know my issues.”Duke sounds another note, an important one in understanding the tone of the KKK in 1979. “There is a lot of jealousy by some of the old fashioned Klanleaders about our succe Duke said. “I’m not going to anything bad about them, our tactics and principlesdifferent.”Mildly put, as is Du fashion. Duke is indeed vie with open alarm and bi dislike by some of the o Klan factions in the country.We’re not a nigger-hj group,” Shelton told a raL Hamburg, Ark., in June, just detest the things £people do.”It was an uneasy summer. Those old scare words recession,” “unemployment” and “inflation” were heard more and more. The Ku Klux Klan, born of the South’s despondency anddissatisfaction over its loss ofthe Civil War, offered answers for some and gained at least a mild resurgence nationally.Was this a beginning of a revival for the KKK, which in the 20th century has been synonomous with racial and religious bigotry?I really don't know,” said Professor Martin Patchen of Purdue University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology whose field of expertise is race and ethnic relations and who has published articles on race relations in high schools. “But I would make one comment.I noticed it in the idea of the Klan tracing Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery. This seems to be pushing the idea that it is now the whites who are being deprived of their civil rights just as the blacks were earlier. The Klan continues to represent racism in the United States that has never died. -In Hartselle, Ala., author William Bradford Huie, who has written extensively on the Klan, offered another dimension.“These old boys who like guns and like to get out at night and get drunk... who like to shoot up something if they can, that isn’t going to end,” Huie said. He spoke of old antagonisms.“These men, particularly in the summertime, have got to have somewhere to go at night and got to have some excitement. This has been going on for more than a century between black people and, in particular, the poor whites.” However, the appeal of the Klan that refueled its latest revival, is neither confined to Huie’s prototype good old boys nor bounded by the states of the old Confederacy. It never has been in this century during its periodic surfacings.In a recent Ix)uis Harris rvey, more than 70 percent of ose polled feel the county is in recession, and more than 60 ■rcent think there will be a cession a year from now. ley also fear unemployment ill rise sharply and prices will ;ep going up. They expect ouble-digit inflation to intinue at perhaps an even ister pace. People on jtirement incomes are specially frightened.In some areas, far removed om the good buddy company r those who lace their beer with jurbon, the Klan is altering its itch to fit the changing times.In the affluent retirement communities around Beaver I,ake in northwest Arkansas clean-cut young men” are going door-to-door soliciting Klan membership. Blacks have the NAACP, Jews have B’Nai B’rith, they say, but what does the white protestant have'' The Klan, that’s what. It does not appear at present that many of these upper income retirees have joined. But they are listening. The clean cut young men, for the most part, are not being turned away from the door.In other areas, to fit the audiences, some of the old Klan venom surfaces.In June. Ixuis Beam, state organizer for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, spoke from the back of a pickup truck at Euless, Tex. I don’t mean any disrespect for colored folks when they're in their place,” he said. But five years ago you never saw a nigger with a whitewomanOn the other hand, Kandy Howard, the state organizer for the Knights of the KKK in Arkansas, says he is not a bigot. Howard, at 5-feet-2, might be taken for a Munchkin in his Klan uniform and his speech is as soft and polite as you would imagine that of a Munchkin might be,The Klan is completely legal and law abiding, Howard is fond of saying. 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Newspaper Details
Athens News Courier
Athens, Alabama, US
Wed, Oct 17, 1979
Page 23
Full Page
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Anonymous
USA 29 Jan 2019
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