Blood and Politics (10 page)

The invisibility of black people to whites began to change in popular culture, from literature to movies and television. And the attitudes of whites about race, as measured by national opinion surveys, became more enlightened. Having gained the right to vote, black people and other people of color became elected officials and public servants in the South as well as the North. For civil rights activists those years meant tremendous sacrifices and partial victories and ended with an unfinished and unfulfilled agenda. Despite white supremacist claims to the contrary, the dominant position and privileged status of white people remained
intact. They remained overrepresented in the halls of political power and more likely to live longer and accumulate greater levels of wealth, which they succeeded largely in passing on to their children. Segregated housing remained the norm, and fully funded, racially integrated public education the exception. Although the United States had not become a multiracial Eden, white supremacists still calculated race relations as a zero-sum equation, in which any advance for civil rights meant a total loss for white people.

The memory of this defeat remained fresh and mean as the Klan grew again in the 1970s. And it presented racists with a paradox. They unabashedly contended that white people were more intelligent and otherwise genetically superior to black and brown people. At the same time, they believed that these so-called inferior people had bested them on the field of civil struggle. To explain this situation, white supremacists invented Jewish control of black people as a way of explaining this supposed white dispossession. David Duke and the Klan borrowed heavily from this argument, particularly William Pierce’s writings on the subject.
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“The blacks in America are not really independent agents and are not fully responsible for their actions, but are primarily the tools of another minority which uses black-White [
sic
] race conflict for its own ends.” It was the Jews “who control the mass media,” not black people. And it was the media that conditioned “the White majority to yield without protest to minority demands.”
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The Pierce imprint, including its demand for total revolutionary change, was plainly visible on Duke, despite the sharp criticism that Pierce leveled at Klan-type groups. “Traditionally, the Ku Klux Klan has been conservative, parochial and Christian,” Pierce wrote. “It wanted to keep non-Whites ‘in their place,’ not separate them geographically.”
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Duke endorsed Pierce’s criticism of other Klan factions. “We of the Ku Klux Klan are not reactionaries longing to return to a previous era of White racial history,” the Knights proclaimed in a revolutionary-like credo. “We are not fighting to preserve the systems of weakness and degeneration that have led us to this precipice.” And much like Pierce, Duke and others in the new white supremacist movement endorsed the concept of creating a whites-only nation-state. No Jim Crow laws would be needed to keep black people down if the new state just kept them out altogether. Duke also endorsed the notion, shared by both Pierce and Carto, that Jews were the main enemy. All previous Klans had believed that “there is a Jewish problem in the Western world today,” as Duke argued. But his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were the first to regard it as “the most important issue of our time.”
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Other signs of Pierce’s influence abounded. The first issue of the Knights’ newsletter carried an ad for Pierce’s group. Newsletter editions that followed published cartoons by Dennis Nix, whose drawings also graced Pierce’s
Turner Diaries
. Pierce himself came to New Orleans in November 1975 and spoke to more than three hundred people at a Klan rally, according to FBI documents. And he repeatedly sent National Alliance emissaries after that.
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When Duke switched from a newsletter format to publishing a Klan tabloid,
The Crusader
, he routinely reprinted articles Pierce wrote for the National Alliance. In fact, the Knights’ credo, “Why We Fight,” reprinted virtually verbatim another article entitled “Why We Fight” from the National Alliance.
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Duke shortened the text a bit and inserted the word “Klan” to make it appear as if the article had originated with the Knights.

Similarly, the Knights republished Pierce’s tract purporting that “the Jews” controlled “the media.”
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For Duke the baby boomer, television loomed larger than newspapers as an instrument of Jewish subversion of the white race. In particular, his
Crusader
tabloid angrily reviewed a January 1977 docudrama miniseries entitled
Roots
. From Boston to Atlanta to Houston to Seattle, white people all watched the same program as black people about the brutal nature of slavery and the innate humanity of black people. The program had a powerful, if short-lived, effect on race relations. And white supremacists complained about it for years.

Nevertheless, Duke successfully manipulated a medium he believed was owned and operated by his racial enemies. From his first appearance on a late-night talk show, Duke impressed TV hosts with his modish appearance, calm demeanor, and articulate presentation. Of course, he had long before honed his forensic skills in the Free Speech Alley. He knew the art of speaking past his antagonists at public venues and talking directly to his own audience. Most of his television hosts, by contrast, had never interviewed anyone quite like Duke. They expected a backwoods bumpkin who gazed unintelligibly into the klieg lights, rather than a sharp verbal interlocutor. Duke often bested them in the sparring. The conflict made perfect television, and the Klansman returned as a frequent guest.

Duke never tired of looking at himself. He added tapes of his television and radio appearances to the list of merchandise he sold out of the back pages of the Klan’s periodic tabloid,
The Crusader
. Tom Snyder’s
Tomorrow Show
, Phil Donahue, Larry King, and
The Today Show
were listed alongside reprints of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, an anti-Semitic forgery created by the czarist secret police that became a bestseller in the hands of Hitler’s Nazis.

At the height of this TV charm campaign, in 1979, a discernible shift occurred in public opinion surveys on attitudes toward the Klan. According to a poll conducted by Gallup, 11 percent of whites held favorable or highly favorable attitudes toward the Klan, while unfavorable and highly unfavorable ratings were held by 88 percent of whites. The biggest shift was in the North—across all educational levels, but most particularly among high school graduates, where unfavorable ratings went down and more closely approximated white views in the South. While still small, these ratings had jumped up from 1965, when Klan violence in the South was well publicized. At that time only 6 percent of whites held favorable or highly favorable views of the group, while 93 percent of whites held an unfavorable or highly unfavorable view.
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Duke’s ability to find an audience among mainstream white people carried him outside the small circles of vanguard purists and into the ranks around Willis Carto and Liberty Lobby. Early in his career, Duke wrote in his Klan newsletter about the need to engage in electoral politics. In 1975 he announced his first run for public office, this time as a Klansman and a Democrat aiming at a seat in the Louisiana senate. Carto gave Duke’s political campaign and the rising fortunes of his Klan a jolt of free publicity in an October 1975 edition of his weekly tabloid, then still called
The National Spotlight
.
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Carto’s tabloid argued the case for Duke: “He sees the Klan, not as a terrorist organization, but as a political movement with ideological leadership.”
The National Spotlight
was thrilled. In that race, Duke won 33 percent of the vote, a double-digit portent of the future.

Further, Duke’s ideas about movement building and recruiting competent second-rank leaders more closely resembled Carto’s than Pierce’s. Pierce argued that the first task should be the creation of a dedicated leadership core; a mass organization would follow. By contrast, Duke proposed that the Klan first become a mass organization. A second step would be to identify possible lieutenants and develop them as a group of professional leaders. The Knights’
Handbook
predicted that “our movement, as it attracts millions of adherents, will build its leadership cadre slowly, and carefully—with its eyes trained on the future.” Like Carto, finding a mass constituency remained Duke’s central concern throughout his career. Practically speaking, however, most of the Knights’ initial leaders had long résumés before they joined his outfit, and the internal organization of his Klan actually approximated Pierce’s model, which was more appropriately geared toward building a relatively small organization during a period when “millions” were not joining.

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In addition to dropping the anti-Catholicism of past Klans, Duke aimed at recruiting women as well as men. History does not recall the involvement of women in the Reconstruction-era Klan and its guerrilla war. Rather, white women were regarded as pure and fragile vessels the Klan needed to protect from a hypothetical ravaging by black men. During the Second Era Klan in the 1920s, by contrast, women participated on their own terms. According to Kathleen Blee’s groundbreaking history of that era,
Women of the Klan
, five hundred thousand women joined their own organization, known as Women of the Ku Klux Klan. Ironically, recruits often came from the same organizations that were also well-springs for the (white) feminist movement, including the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
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Although Duke echoed Pierce’s charge that the contemporary feminist movement had been invented by Jews to help destroy the white race, women were able and encouraged to join Duke’s Knights itself rather than a second-status women’s auxiliary. At one point, Duke claimed that approximately 35 percent of the members nationally were women. Individual women became local leaders in their own right, and an early chief of security was a woman. One of the best-known recruits worked as a horse jockey and enjoyed a reputation for outlandishness. Most women who joined were already married to Klan men. Wives of local leaders became officers themselves, often handling the dues income and other “secretarial” work, much as they did in their local churches. Duke’s
Crusader
tabloid did publish one article that argued for including women at all levels of leadership. “Our women must be aware of their unique roles, to be sure. Yet, they must be restored to the even more common roles of our fighting partners, capable of heroism and with a potential for leadership in all areas.” And in a remarkably egalitarian statement, the author reasoned that there should be “no chains imposed by kitchen duties not shared by all.” That writer’s goal was “to free the ones most capable for other tasks.”
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Otherwise, little of the massive amounts of propaganda the Knights produced aimed directly at recruiting these young wives and girlfriends. When it came to talking specifically about women, the message was directed at men, warning them to protect the sexuality of white women from the supposed rapaciousness of black men, a mythic theme in American life that had emerged after slavery. Most often, by recruiting women, Duke simply managed to get two new members for the price of one. With Duke’s Knights as an example, the Klan factions that formed in its wake also admitted women directly to their ranks.

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The success of Duke’s Knights during the 1970s encouraged others to set up their own Klan factions. One of the most prominent was Bill Wilkinson’s Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Wilkinson had been a parish-level leader in Duke’s operation when he struck out on his own. “I’m the only Klan leader who believes in having guns around,” Wilkinson famously said. “These guns aren’t for shooting rabbits, they’re for wasting people.”
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According to Randall Williams, who interviewed dozens of Alabama Klansmen while serving as the founding director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch Project, Wilkinson’s Klan attracted poor and working-class white men in Alabama and Mississippi with a penchant for violence. When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) announced plans to march in Decatur, Alabama, on May 26, 1979, the Invisible Empire planned to stop them. They attacked the SCLC marchers with clubs, starting a three-way melee with a small number of city police in between. Shooting broke out, and two Klansmen and two civil rights demonstrators were wounded. Miraculously, no one was killed.
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The following November five anti-Klan protesters were shot to death, and nine wounded, in Greensboro, North Carolina. In this instance, several different neo-Nazi and Klan factions banded together, calling themselves the United Racist Front. Forty white supremacists drove in a caravan of nine cars to the site of a demonstration by a small communist group. The Klansmen and neo-Nazis calmly got out of their cars, took weapons out of their trunks, and began shooting point-blank.
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According to the most authoritative account of this event,
Codename Greenkil
, by Elizabeth Wheaton, at least one local police informant and one federal agent had infiltrated the Front and driven with the caravan. Apparently, the authorities had not learned to use their informants to prevent violence rather than abet it, and the incident was eerily reminiscent of the murder of Viola Liuzzo by a carload of Klansmen in 1965. At that time FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe had been in the car but had done nothing to stop the killing.
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In addition, Bill Wilkinson—Mr. Guns Are Not for Rabbits—served as an FBI informant for seven years, from 1974 to 1981, when a
Tennessean
(Nashville) reporter finally exposed his double-faced role.
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Another faction, the Justice Knights in Tennessee, sprayed bullets at five black women walking down the street together in Chattanooga the following April 1980. These incidents were only the most visible acts of violence by members of organized white supremacist groups during
these years. From California to Connecticut, crosses were burned and homes were shot at, all in the name of the Ku Klux Klan.
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