Profile: Do the 'atonement trials' of Ku Klux Klan members for race crimes sound the death knell of the white supremacy movement in the US, asks Conor O'Clery, North America Editor
I once met a former "grand wizard" of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He wasn't wearing a white mask, a conical hat or flowing robes, but was sporting a natty suit and tie. David Duke, a good-looking, 41-year-old member of the state legislature was campaigning across Louisiana in the Republican primary in the 1991 race for governor.
He had been a top Klan member until 1980, when he resigned and founded the more innocent-sounding National Association for the Advancement of White People. He had toned down his rhetoric too but still sold Nazi literature out of his legislative office in the Louisiana House of Representatives.
"I am not a racist," he told me, surrounded by supporters wearing badges with the slogan, "Equal Rights for All" at a rally in the north-east University of Louisiana at Monroe. "I am working to protect my heritage and if discrimination is wrong against minorities, then it's just as bad against whites." His opponent was a famously corrupt politician called Edwin Edwards.
A popular bumper sticker during the primary in the southern state read: "Vote for the crook; it's important." The majority of Republicans did, and David Duke lost the contest and his political career ended in ignominy. Lawyer Mitch Moran of Mississippi today feels sorry for him. As long as a person doesn't terrorise or advocate violence, a person should be free to speak, Moran told the Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson.
"He was just speaking out on something he believed in. We have a Miss Black America. We don't have a Miss White America. We've got the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), but we don't have anything for the white people. What's the big deal?"
Moran was the lead defence counsel in the just-completed trial of Edgar Ray Killen, the 80-year-old former Klansman who was convicted on Tuesday of the manslaughter of three civil rights workers - Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York, and James Chaney of Mississippi - who were beaten and shot to death in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Killen, now bald and with an oxygen tube up his nose, represented the worst of the old KKK, the violent southern racists who didn't go into politics but donned white robes with slits for eyes to go after "uppity" blacks.
Witnesses testified that Killen was a local Klan leader who organised a mob of KKK members to intercept the three men. The case is one of a number that mark an attempt by the Deep South to close a chapter on a dark passage in its history. In Alabama three years ago a jury convicted Bobby Frank Cherry of the killing of four black girls by bombing a Birmingham church in 1963, and in Mississippi the body of Chicago teenager Emmett Till, kidnapped and murdered in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman, was exhumed this month in probably the final investigation of the so-called "atonement trials".
The conviction of Killen marks the nadir of the Ku Klux Klan, the secretive organisation whose name has become synonymous with white supremacy since it was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, just after the Civil War. Six young Confederate veterans led by Nathan Bedford Forrest, who drew on the ancient Greek word kuklos or "circle" for their title, adopted elaborate secret rituals patterned on a college fraternity known as the Kuklos Adelphon.
Its president was called the "grand cyclops" and its sub-divisions took on grand-sounding names such as Knights of the Red Hand, Constitutional Union Guards and the Knights of the White Camellia. According to author Stanley Horn in his 1939 book Invisible Empire: Story of the Ku Klux Klan 1866-1871, the Klan quickly evolved from "a hilarious social club" to a populist Protestant movement against northern carpet-bagging, and opposed to any move to give African-Americans a place in government.
In its earliest days the Klan vowed "to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenceless, from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the brutal," and to "aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizure, and from trial except by their peers in conformity to the laws of the land."
However KKK vigilantes wearing pointed hats and masks to disguise their identity and instil fear, conducted a campaign of terror across the Deep South, burning houses and crops and murdering freed slaves, and also killing some white members of the Republican Party, which in those days was the chief political proponent of black emancipation.
The organisation went into decline when southern white political leaders declined to tolerate its violence. Forrest ordered its disbandment in 1869 and Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act of April 1871, which permitted the US president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in cases of secret conspiracy.
The Ku Klux Klan re-emerged in 1915, inspired by a notorious film called Birth of a Nation, which was praised by president Woodrow Wilson as "terribly true" but which caused riots in major cities such as Boston and Philadelphia for its racist depiction of African- Americans and scenes eulogising the Ku Klux Klan - which were cut from later versions. The Klan was officially relaunched that year by William Simmons on Stone Mountain in Georgia with a cross-burning, a ceremony not widely performed before then but popularised by the film.
It tapped into a growing nativist movement among poor white Protestants who blamed Catholics, Jews and other immigrants for the US's economic woes, and by the early 1920s it boasted some four million members, in northern as well as southern states. In this period of its history the Klan raised money for social groups and churches, donated Bibles and flags to schools and helped the victims of tornados. Klan histories carry pictures of hooded KKK members giving food baskets to "Negroes in need" and claim that it was so respectable then that a youthful Harry Truman, later a champion of civil rights, paid his dues like everyone else.
But it was also responsible for lynchings, cross-burnings and menacing parades by hooded men. It fell into disrepute amid charges of greed and corruption, and especially after a scandal involving David Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana, who was convicted of a cannibalistic rape and murder in 1925. The Klan formally disbanded in 1944, but factions using the KKK name became active again in opposing the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
Their violence proved counter-productive. When Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney disappeared in Mississippi on June 21st 1964 the national media descended on Neshoba County and the discovery of the three bodies galvanised the struggle for civil rights. The murders became the subject of the movie Mississippi Burning which became the flip-side of Birth of a Nation.
Today several surviving factions of the Klan exist in mostly southern states. They include the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan formed in 1985 in North Carolina and suspected of burning two black South Carolina churches in 1995; the Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux founded in 1992 in Pennsylvania; the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (Arkansas Faction), which has a hardcore membership of some 500 in seven states; and the Knights of the White Camellia, which was linked to a number of racial incidents in Vidor, Texas in 1992 and 1993.
Occasionally they appear in public. Two weeks ago the White Camellia Knights held an exhibition in Tomball, an oil town 28 miles north-west of Houston, Texas. It welcomed "all those interested in the survival of the white race" and demanded: "No media". The Grand Dragon of the White Camellia Knights, Charles Lee, complained of the "terrible problems that white Christians find themselves in at this point in time" as they face a conspiracy "to destroy the white race and to pervert true Christian doctrine".
He asserted on his website that it was Satan's goal "to have us violate our Heavenly Father's law on mixing our seed with the other people of the world" to dilute the "superior" white race. In the Tomball Community Center Klan sympathisers were able to browse nostalgically among exhibits such as a Confederate Flag, Klan books, old robes and historic charters. Dozens of police in riot gear were deployed to keep away hundreds of protesters who chanted "Cops and Klan go hand-in-hand".
As for David Duke, after his defeat he sold his voter mailing list for $82,500 to Tony Perkins, now president of the Washington-based Family Research Council and a leading Christian evangelist. In 2002 Duke was sent to prison for 13 months for tax evasion and mail fraud. He had solicited donations from supporters on the grounds that he was about to lose his house and life savings, whereas he had sold his house at a hefty profit and gambled away his multiple investments in casinos.
Last year he published a book called Jewish Supremacism, and today he broadcasts on Stormfront, the white nationalist website run by former Klan members, where he rails against the "Jewish" war in Iraq. In reality, according to the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, "there is no such thing as the Ku Klux Klan" nowadays, and "fragmentation, decentralization and decline have continued unabated."
Members seek each other out by asking "AYAK?" (Are you a Klansman?), hoping for the response "AKIA" (A Klansman I am). Estimates put the number of Klan members across the US at less that 6,000, divided among scores of splinter organisations, still delivering, as the "Ku Klux Klan" website puts it, "a message of hope and deliverance for White Christian America."
What is it?
Notorious white supremacist movement with a history of terrible violence
Why is it in the news?
Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen, was this week jailed for 60 years for his part in the killing of three civil rights activists in 1964
Most recognisable feature
The robes, pointed hoods and the cross-burning ceremonies that have become icons of racial hatred
Least recognisable feature
Members insist they are not racist, but simply trying to preserve the culture of besieged white Christians
Klansmen most likely to be seen . . .
In a courthouse. Membership has fallen as past crimes have caught up on veteran Klansmen
Klansmen least likely to be seen . . .
Celebrating Martin Luther King Day
Shane Hegarty