Word: klansmen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this year, the Justice Department has recorded 44 Klan-related incidents, compared with eight in all of 1978. They included cross burnings, beatings and firebombings. A Klansman was convicted of whipping a white woman from Sylacauga, Ala., who he thought was dating a black man. In Birmingham, Klansmen were convicted of shooting at the houses of two black civil rights leaders...
...membership is growing, up 25% in 18 months. Klan activities have been reported in 22 states, from Middletown, Ohio, to Castro Valley, Calif., as well as on the aircraft carrier A U.S.S. Independence and at the Fort Carson army base in Colorado. But four out of five Klansmen are in the old Confederate states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas. Most of the Klan members are blue-collar men with no more than three years of high school. About a third are women, usually the wives or girlfriends of male members. There are even a few Roman Catholic...
According to Klan watchers, the growth in membership is mostly a reaction to busing for school desegregation and to affirmative action, which Klansmen figure gives blacks an advantage over them in competing for jobs. David Chalmers, a historian at the University of Florida and author of Hooded Americanism, observes that most Klansmen have a resentful sense of being unfairly excluded from the middle class. Says he: "By joining the Klan and defending Americanism, they confer on themselves the status that society has denied them...
Although all Klansmen subscribe to the same racist beliefs, they are fractured among at least a dozen factions. The oldest and largest is the 3,500-member United Klans of America, led by Robert Shelton, 50, a former tire salesman from Tuscaloosa, Ala. But his group has been waning in influence in the past few years. The South's most visible klavern now is the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which has about 2,500 gun-toting, violence-talking members. Their imperial wizard is Bill Wilkinson, 36, a former electrical contractor from Denham Springs...
...Other observers are persuaded that Klan strength will decline only when the people who are now attracted to it get a bigger share of the South's economic boom. Until then, say Mary Joyce Carlson, a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta whose car was once shot at by Klansmen, "any group with simple ready-made answers will have some support...