
          Notes of a Klanwatcher
          By Williams, RandallRandall Williams
          Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, pp. 11-13
          
          It's easy and relatively safe, in 1982, to hate the KKK, but
explaining why an anti-Klan movement is necessary, and getting those
in that movement to agree with the explanation, is less simple. After
a year Klanwatching (a friend still calls us occasionally, asks, "Have
you spotted any today?" then bursts into hysterical laughter), we
taped a favorite photo to a door in the office. The picture depicts a
serious young man, a member of a Canadian anti-Klan group, in mid-leap
from the roof of a car, placard stick raised on high, about to smash
the head of an equally serious young man who is a member of another
anti-racist group. The supporting parts in the photo are played by
several dozen members of these two groups, battling in a melee
apparently provoked by a difference of opinion on how best to oppose
the racism and violence of the Ku Klux Klan in British Columbia.
          Looking at that photograph, we at Klanwatch
are apt to burst into hysterical laughter.
          Part of the problem is that there are so many contradictions
involved; many questions about what author Stetson Kennedy calls the
Bedsheet Brigade can be truthfully answered both "yes" and "no." We
will look at other parts of the problem, but first, consider some of
the contradictions.
          No, there aren't enough Klansmen and they aren't well enough
organized, right now, to pose the country any serious threat. Yes, you
can still get hurt, killed or otherwise terrorized by the Klan if
you're the "wrong" color or doing the "wrong" thing. Or if you happen
to be married to California Klan leader Michael Mendonsa, who recently
ended his wife's budding career in organized racism by blowing her
apart with a shotgun.
          Still another contradiction involves the recently widely publicized
Klan recruitment of youth. No, the Klan Youth Corps is not
experiencing a membership explosion similar to that of the Hitler
Youth in the 1930s. Yes, the Klan today deliberately seeks out youth
and involves them in rallies, demonstrations and training. And a
startlingly high percentage of contemporary racist violence and
harassment is committed by youngsters. Klan literature does show up in
schools around the country. The stuff is available for the writing
from three or four Klan publications and is advertised in gun and
adventure magazines available at most grocery and drug stores.
          Where Klan chapters exist, it should not surprise anyone when the
sons and daughters of Klansmen say or do racist things or pass around
literature in school. However, the Klan youth camps which were seen on
television in 1980 and written about in Rolling Stone
and other publications were largely spontaneous creations for the
benefit of the press, and the kids in them were almost all the
children of adult Klan members.
          I think the Klan has definite allure for certain types of white
children. Kids dwell on mystery, violence and sensationalism, and the
Klan has all of that, especially as portrayed by much of the reporting
on the subject today. Some kids--perhaps most of them, really--are
raised with racism. Take a kid who already has all of that stuff
running around in his head, who is at the age of rebellion, and who
can't make the debate team (or; equally likely, is never encouraged to
try), gets beat out by black kids on the basketball team, and sits
sullenly in the back of the classroom--that kid is ripe for
recruitment.
          But even the strength of the adult Klan is a contradiction. It is
not true that the Klan's membership is currently growing by leaps and
bounds, through reporter after reporter dutifully licks his pencil
point and records it when the local head cone confides, "Well, son, we
don't discuss numbers, but we've got klaverns now in every country in
this state and three new ones started last week." It is true that Klan
membership today is the highest since the mid1960s and that the growth
was dramatic between 1975 and 1980. We at Klanwatch believe the Klan's
membership leveled off in 1981, though there is potential for more
growth. Clearly, this potential is aggravated by the mean mood of the
nation as a whole. It should be remembered that there are plenty of
people in Washington doing more harm with ink pens than the Klan is
with axe handles. Elsewhere, racist violence, whether committed by
actual Klan members or not, is at a sickeningly high level, as is
religious bigotry.
          There is genuine reason to be concerned about these turns of
events, all condradictions notwithstanding, especially when the
leaders of the nation seem blind to the existence of the problems and
the causes.
          Which brings us to today's sermon topic. We can cuss, meet, march,
legislate and litigate until the proverbial freezing over of hell, but
until we start thinking about Klansmen as people and consider how it
is that we still have a society which spawns them we're not going to
whip the problem. This is not to say that the current educational
campaigns against the Klan are no good, or that the 

prosecutions and
civil lawsuits against criminal Klansmen do not deter other racist
violence, or that outspoken stands against the Klan philosophy have no
effect. All of these are vital and are largely responsible for the
current disarray within the Klan ranks.
          But one of the obvious similarities of most Klansmen is an
overwhelming ignorance and a complete alienation from our society and
its institutions. It's a tough concept to sell the "Death of the Klan"
crowd, but I think most Klansmen, the rank and file, are victimized
almost as much as the targets of their hatred. It may not have been as
true in the Klan's prior incarnations, when thousands of otherwise
solid citizens were members, but most Klansmen today are pretty sad
characters. As a class, they are powerless people on the fringes of
social and economic life. They almost always have serious
psychological problems, with so-much anger and hate that they are
slowly burning up from the inside. They go through their lives being
manipulated by their employers, by the finance company, by the
landlord, by George_Wallace and Jim Eastland and the like, and finally
by smooth-talking salesmen like Bill Wilkinson (head of the Invisible
Empire), David Duke (National Association for the Advancement of White
People), and Don Black (Knights of the KKK).
          Having been ignored for so long, many of them are attracted by the
aroma of power which surrounds Klan leaders. It must be power, the
prospective Kluxer reasons, because people like Wilkinson get on the
Phil Donahue and Tom Snyder shows; they can go to city hall and
attract half the police and all the press in town; they aren't afraid
to call (chuckle) a spade a spade; they've got big cars, bodyguards
and can even wear a suit without looking as if it was bought that
morning. Once he joins, the new Kluxer can get on the evening news
himself, just for standing on the street corner in his robe.
          In addition to power, the social aspect of the Klan, the sense of
belonging to something, should not be overlooked. Most Klansmen have
never belonged to anything. Surprisingly few of them, considering the
Klan's lip service to Christianity, even attend church, according to
testimony in connection with a recent civil lawsuit against a splinter
Klan group in Chattanooga, Tenn. One of the defendants in that suit, a
participant in the shooting incident which injured five black_women,
testified that he had joined the Klan for reasons which included
having a group of guys to drink beer with, and because he wanted to
"help people." (Some 32 percent of white Chattanoogans, according to
survey data, were favorable to some aspect of the Klan, mostly to the
old vigilante notion that the Klan keeps in line not only black_people
but also would-be wife deserters, wanton women, etc.) Under
questioning, the Klansmen admitted that the only other organization he
had ever joined was the French club in his high_school.
          He is not atypical. Frequently, Klan meetings and rallies have an
atmosphere which for all its perverse weirdness can only be described
as like a country social. There may be music and speeches, children
playing in the grass, mama and daddy dressed in their robes, grandma
sitting in her folding lawn chair, and plenty of fish and beer.
          In such situations, an interested onlooker who can detach himself
for a moment from his feelings of contempt and hatred for what the
organization before him represents, will be swept by a sense of
sadness and pity.
          Or sometimes humor, because in its benign moments the Klan often
makes me wonder: If I'm supposed to be so scared, why do I feel like
laughing? Last summer, Mike Vahala (also a Klanwatch staffer) and I
attended a Klan recruitment rally in a public park on the outskirts of
Columbus, Ga. First the movie "Birth of a Nation" was shown, then
there was the usual incoherent discussion of how the government and
especially the courts had abandoned white_people, then the meeting
broke up so the Klansmen could go burn a cross, which was not
permitted in the public park.
          On impulse, Mike and I got in line in the caravan which formed, and
we drove 10 or 12 miles out in the country, turned off the main road
onto a side road, then off that onto a private road which went across
a pasture and into some woods. It was dark and mighty lonely, and the
60 people who had been at the park had dwindled to 15 or 20. Except
for Mike and myself and two guys we thought (and hoped) were
undercover cops, the rest appeared to be Klan members, some robed and
some not, or at least strong sympathizers. There had been no weapons
in the public park, but suddenly everyone was wearing them.
          It was a slightly anxious moment, but then it became obvious that
no one was paying attention to us. Instead, there was a serious
problem with the cross-burning equipment. In an achievement of
high-tech Klankraft, the local boys had built themselves a reusable
cross from sections of steel pipe. Wrapped with burlap and soaked with
diesel fuel, the 30-foot cross was simply too heavy to lift. For a
half-hour or so, an awful lot of grunting and sweating went on, and
some mighty nice white robes got soiled with dirt and diesel fuel. By
this time it was getting late, and Mike and I faced a long drive and
were ready to start home.
          We eased into the crowd and made a few suggestions, directed a
couple of guys to get up on a pickup truck for leverage, had others
tie a chain to the cross and pull, and finally the cross stood up,
though by now the pipe had bent and throughout the ceremony which
followed one Klansman had to brace the cross by holding to the
chain. The ceremony itself was similar to an ROTC drill, with a lot of
marching, about-facing, saluting and so forth. The leader couldn't
remember his lines and had to get out his Klan manual and read his
piece. We couldn't understand what he said anyway, because he read
with his face down and through his mask. It didn't seem to matter. The
cross lit up the sky and the non-robed spectators made photographs,
and the night air was enlivened by a few "White Power" chants. Then we
all went home.
          My point is not that ineptitude makes the Klan less dangerous, but
that its members are merely human beings who happen to be united in a
destructive cause. United also by ignorance, by their station in life,
by their utter inability to comprehend the world around them.
          In this case, ignorance is not bliss, but blindness. While visiting
the national office (a one-room masonry building) of the Knights of
the Ku Klux Klan in Tuscumbia to serve a subpoena, I had a long,
casual conversation with Charlie Thomas, who works in the
office. Among other things, he insisted to me that the black_man who
was given Allan Bakke's medical school seat (in the famous affirmative
action case) had an I.Q. of 39. "You can't be serious," I responded,
"Why, a person with an I.Q. of 39 can hardly talk." "Yeah," Thomas
replied. "Aint it a damn shame." When he saw that I was unconvinced,
Thomas searched for a few minutes for the "proof" of his claim, an
article he had read somewhere in one of the Klan newspapers. Thomas
also insisted that the racial turmoil in Decatur, Ala., in 1979, when
the Klan had attacked peaceful black demonstrators, had come about
because the blacks were marching in celebration of the anniversary of
the rape of a white_woman. When I told him he was 

wrong, that the
march had been to protest what the demonstrators perceived as the
unjust prosecution and conviction of a retarded black_man for that
crime, he was unmoved.
          Charlie Thomas did not strike me as a particularly evil man. He
doesn't seem too smart and he clearly is angry about a lot of things,
though he has difficulty explaining just what. My guess is that if a
good union had gotten to Charlie Thomas first, he would be just as
dedicated to the brotherhood of workers as he currently is to the
KKK.
          We should think about that when we next start chanting, "Death to
the Klan."
          
            Randall Williams is an Alabama writer who its currently
serving as director of the KLANWATCH project of the Southern Poverty
Law Center.
          
        
