Blood and Politics (9 page)

A new breed of self-styled Christian patriots also sprang up in the second half of the 1970s, as did rural gangs of paramilitary survivalists. But none drew the publicity generated by the Ku Klux Klan, which became the symbol of white supremacist resurgence.

October 16, 1977.
David Duke stepped out of a rented helicopter and onto the grounds of the San Ysidro port of entry south of San Diego, a federal office used by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to regulate traffic on the border with Mexico. Dressed in a light blue business suit, Duke was surrounded by an entourage of tough-looking men in street clothes, all members of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They faced a protest group, angry at the Klan’s public appearance. An egg splattered on Duke’s clothes, and a rock broke the windshield of a Klansman’s car. Police arrested the rock thrower while an INS agent in charge welcomed the Klansmen and gave them a guided tour of the port facility. For Duke and company, this visit was the first stop in an effort to stir up opposition to brown-skinned immigrants.
¹

“We believe very strongly white people are becoming second class citizens in this country,” Duke told the press. “When I think of America, I think of a white country.”
²

A few days later, in a Sacramento hotel room, he staged a press conference announcing a Klan “border watch.” He claimed five hundred to one thousand Klansmen would patrol the back roads and midnight border crossings of “illegal immigrants” coming from Mexico into the United States. At this venue, anti-Klanners tried to force their way into the hotel room, and the protest became part of the news coverage. While in Sacramento, Duke also managed to get a meeting with two aides to the lieutenant governor, and that event became one more headline in the Klan media blitz.
³

After all the news and hoopla, the actual border watch the following week was virtually anticlimactic. Nevertheless, it generated another round of publicity. Duke and fewer than two hundred Klansmen drove
around on the California border, talking to one another on their walkietalkies. The Knights group in Texas staged a similar border-watch during the same period.
⁴

Although the entire affair lasted only a couple of weeks, it was long enough for Duke’s Klan to claim a great victory. It published a special border watch issue of its tabloid newspaper,
The Crusader
, and wrote: “No single action in the last decade has done more to bring public attention and awareness on the border problem.”
⁵

Opposition to immigration later became one of the white nationalist movement’s most salient causes, and Duke in effect cut that piece of turf in the 1970s. His own analysis of the events on the border emphasized the media strategy he used then to build the Klan: “. . . when a hundred reporters are gathered around hanging on every word, when they help you accomplish your own objectives by their own misguided sensationalism, if indeed it was a media stunt, it was by their own presence an admission that it was a very brilliant one.”
⁶
By any measure, he had turned California into a sound stage for Klan politics.

Although the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were the most potent of several white supremacist forces newly resurgent in 1977, ironically, Duke’s success owed much to the fact that he was not the stereotypical Klansman of popular imagination. Born in Oklahoma in 1950, he grew up in a middle-class family in New Orleans, attended Louisiana State University, and earned a degree in history. Reporters often emphasized his intelligence. He was handsome, well mannered, and articulate. Unlike the leaders of competing Klan factions, who liked to pose as armed militants for news photographers, Duke never publicly handled a rifle. A psychological portrait might emphasize the fact that his father was largely absent, spending years working overseas, or that his mother was a barely functional alcoholic—or that like generations of other white racists, he was raised and cared for by a black woman, a surrogate parent hired as domestic labor for the family.
⁷

The adult Duke’s personal relationship with women remained troubled. Although he married Chloe Hardin and had two daughters, he remained an unrepentant womanizer.
⁸
His own members often complained that they had to worry whether or not Duke would bed their wives when he came to their town. He used the pen name Dorothy Vanderbilt to self-publish a “sex manual” titled
FindersKeepers
. And a long string of young women graced his arm over the years, more a sign of his own self-obsession than any indication that he had found genuine affection. As will become evident, however, whatever insights might be drawn
from his family relationships are overshadowed by the importance of Duke’s role in transforming the entire white supremacist movement.

While other young people his age joined civil rights organizations and peace groups during the mid-1960s, Duke started his career as a professional racist in high school. When he left home for college, Duke became a student organizer for the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP) in 1969, creating first a White Student Alliance and then a White Youth Alliance while at Louisiana State University. He tried selling white supremacy from a soapbox at the school’s “Free Speech Alley.” In the process of speaking before hostile audiences he honed skills that served him well for years to come. In one incident from those early years, Duke donned a Nazi storm trooper uniform, complete with swastika armband, and strode around for the cameras with a picket sign protesting a campus speech by noted left-wing attorney William Kunstler.
⁹
The event hounded Duke later, when he tried to become a mainstream Republican.

FBI documents from that early period raise questions on whether or not Duke provided information about members of his own organization to the bureau. According to Tyler Bridges’s book
The Rise of David Duke
, Duke was arrested on January 18, 1972, for possession of bottles filled with a flammable liquid and topped with rags.
¹⁰
Most people call such items Molotov cocktails, but Duke claimed they were torches for a parade. Notably, FBI documents show that on that same day, January 18, an unidentified source had brought the bureau information
“in person.”
That memo indicates that the materials it was provided were
“applications.”
These papers were then forwarded to FBI offices in twenty cities, possibly indicating that a membership list with names was dispersed across the country. A week later, January 25, 1972, another memo from the special agent in charge to the FBI director states clearly that Duke had “furnished” information to special agents. The exact nature of the information was not mentioned in the memo, and the agents’ names remain unknown, as they were redacted out, a standard practice when the FBI is forced to release documents through the Freedom of Information Act.
¹¹
In any case, the Molotov cocktail charges against Duke were dropped several weeks later. When asked twenty years later about these incidents, Duke denied that he had given the FBI any information or provided his group’s membership list in exchange for having the charges against him dropped. He did acknowledge that he had been interviewed by the FBI during that time but claimed the agency must have gotten his membership list through some other counterintelligence program.
¹²

Whether or not Duke provided the FBI with information, he soon abandoned both his White Youth Alliance and its successor National Party. Nevertheless, when he created his own Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, described in the beginning of this chapter, it was informed by an underlying national socialist ideology. And Duke easily made the transition to white sheets.

At that moment, in 1973, the white supremacist movement as a whole still lay relatively inert, and Duke’s Knights were slow to start. By the time race-based conflicts over school busing broke out in 1975 in Louisville, Kentucky, things had changed. Klan groups sprang “up like wild mushrooms,” according to Patsy Sims, who wrote a book about the Klan in that period.
¹³
Among the many different Klan factions vying for new members, Duke’s Klan stood out for the audacity and intelligence of its leadership, and he proved that a postwar baby boomer could successfully reinvent a 110-year-old trademark name.

The history of the Klan began in 1866 with the formation of a social club for six young Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee. When this Klan turned to night-riding and paramilitary terrorism, it chose Nathan Bedford Forrest as its first Imperial Wizard, or national leader. A former Confederate general, Forrest had been a millionaire slave trader before the Civil War.
¹⁴
A statue and Tennessee state park in Benton County, Tennessee, still memorialize his name in the twenty-first century.
¹⁵

Immediately after the Civil War, white people in the South lost many of their special prerogatives. Newly emancipated slaves, once the disposable property of men such as Forrest, gained the right to vote, hold office, and own land—largely because these rights were guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the presence of the Union army. Public schools broke the propertied class’s monopoly on education, benefiting both black and white. Known as Reconstruction, this period was the most democratic to that point in American history.
¹⁶
Forrest’s Klan regarded Union soldiers as an occupying army and newly emancipated black men as thieves stealing the privileges he believed should have remained exclusively in white hands. The Klan and similar groups fought to break the Reconstruction governments and push black people back into servitude.

In the first issue of his
Crusader
tabloid, Duke wrote about this earlier history: “A White guerrilla army was formed and it did the job quite well.”
¹⁷
Although this Klan was quashed by federal force, the canon of white supremacy was reestablished through a combination of racist terror and political power. New laws stripped black people of their civil and
political rights, and in 1896 the United States Supreme Court formally recognized the facts on the ground with its
Plessy v. Ferguson
decision, effectively rendering the Fourteenth Amendment moot. Jim Crow segregation became the law of the land.
¹⁸

A second era of Klan growth occurred after World War One, and its enemies list included Catholics, Jews, and others not deemed White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But Duke disavowed this Klan’s anti-Catholicism, arguing that it provoked an unnecessary rift in the ranks of white people. “The original Ku Klux Klan was never anti-Catholic,” he wrote, and concluded that white Christians, of whichever denomination or trend, should not “fight against each other.” He envied the financial empire that Klan leaders had built during the 1920s, but he was loath to re-create the giant Ponzi recruiting scheme necessary to generate the funds. “If our purpose was fraternal amusement, every possible Province, Dominion and Realm could be filled with corresponding Klan officers,” he reminded his members. “But our cause is serious . . . Therefore we will not delude ourselves with high sounding titles, or impressive scrolls of asininity.”
¹⁹

Apparently ritualistically burning kerosene-soaked rags wrapped around a forty-foot wooden cross was exempt from said scrolls.

Duke did hope to replicate several other aspects of the 1920s Klan, however, including its size.
²⁰
According to David Chalmers’s classic history,
Hooded Americanism
, the Klan had more than three million members in the mid-1920s. Many lived in northern towns and midwestern hamlets, and the Klan was a national force, not a sectional avenger. Dozens of elected officials were members during this period, including U.S. senators and governors.
²¹
A Hollywood film,
The Birth of a Nation
, extolled the Reconstruction-era Klan’s virtues and captured widespread and large, friendly audiences. President Woodrow Wilson and several Supreme Court justices watched it in the White House and concluded that the movie had written “history with lightning.”
²²
Duke wanted to repeat this political success.

Like its Reconstruction-era forebears, the goals enunciated by this Second Era Klan were reached, even if not by the Klan itself. It campaigned against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe alongside other groups supporting the hegemony of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and they were rewarded by Congress in 1924 with an immigration law that did just that.
²³
In August 1925, Klansmen marched thirty thousand strong down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., a demonstration of nativist and racist sentiment that endured long after that particular Klan collapsed. Segregation remained the law of the land. Anglo-Saxonism was carried on by organizations such as the Reverend Gerald Winrod’s
Defenders of the Christian Faith and William Pelley’s Silver Shirts during the 1930s. Charles Lindbergh’s America First Committee promoted a form of nativist isolationism right up to the entry of the United States into World War Two. And anti-Semitism was a staple feature of Father Charles Coughlin’s radio broadcasts.
²⁴
Historian Chalmers concluded that the Klan’s decline in the 1920s was due to its own “ineptness,” rather than any other “combination of factors.”
²⁵

A third era of Klan resurgence began after the
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education
Supreme Court decision in 1954.
²⁶
In bus stations and public plazas, marauding Klan mobs bloodied Freedom Riders while under the protection and guidance of local police. They bombed churches and homes with impunity. A string of horrific murders shocked the country. Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins—four young black girls whose names should never be forgotten—died in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. That same year a Klan sniper assassinated Mississippi state NAACP leader Medgar Evers on the doorstep of his home. In 1964, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, three activists registering voters, were tortured and then shot to death in Neshoba County, Mississippi. In 1966 another Mississippi NAACP leader, Vernon Dahmer, was murdered. The level of violence cannot be retold in numbers alone. And many of those crimes remained unsolved and unpunished at the time. In several high-profile instances, all-white juries acquitted Klan defendants with little more than a wink and a nod.
²⁷
Only in the 1990s did aggressive reporting and a new generation of prosecutors reopen several of the most egregious cases.
²⁸
With each act of racist violence, the dignity of the civil rights cause grew. Activists broke the edifice of legalized segregation in the public squares of southern cities and pushed the federal government for new legislation. Where so-called states’ rights had once held sway, Jim Crow fell. Unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan and the Second Era Klan, this Third Era Klan, despite the casualties it inflicted, lost its war against the black freedom movement.