The Ku Klux Klan, low-profiled for the past decade, is now rising again. In the half-moon from central Texas eastward to the Atlantic and up into Virginia, the ugly signs are all there: quasi-secret meetings ("Dens now forming, be there"); open rallies and marches ("Come downtown Saturday to show the Commies some American spirit!"); a flood of literature ("The Ku Klux Klan Is Watching You--Fight For White Rights!"); KKKK (Knights of the Ku Klux Klan) signs marking the roads in the moody, red-clay hill country of Mississippi; crosses burning on the darkened outskirts of Southern towns and cities; astonishing Klan political support in some areas; threats levied--and violence and sometimes death in the Greensboros, Chattanoogas, Okolonas, Wrightsvilles, and Decaturs.
If many people of good will are dangerously oblivious to this upheaval, there are many others who are not. Cries of "Kill the Klan!" abound in some quarters. Calls for legislation outlawing it are rife. The Klan is labeled by some as an outgrowth of American fascism and, by others, as the prime Nazi spearhead. "Scum" and "beasts" are two epithets that seem especially popular among some Northern liberals, while the KKK's critics in the South often prefer to imply Satanic motives.
Anyone who minimizes the dangers posed by the Klan or comparable groups is being, of course, substantially less than realistic. But someone who misses the people part of it is way off base.
On a cool fall night in the mid-1960s, I stood in the shadows of thick Southern pine trees and, with several black colleagues, watched a Klan rally 300 yards away in a cotton field. It was illuminated by floodlights hooked to generators on flat-bed trucks--and by three large burning crosses.
It could have been any hard-core Southern county of the time. In this case it was Halifax County--large, and central to the northeastern North Carolina black-belt--where we had been pressing a civil rights movement with relative success. Local government resistance and repression had been adamant and widespread, accompanied by traditional night-riding terrorism.
The sheeted and hooded gathering in the cotton field, perhaps four or five hundred of the faithful, was interesting and chilling. The oratorical attacks, punctuated by "Dixie" and "The Old Rugged Cross," were focused on many: Communists, blacks, Jews, Catholics, Indians, the federal government, and eventually on several of us by name. We were fascinated.
But what was particularly intriguing in this firsthand look at the "enemy" en masse were the signs of bleak economic poverty that characterized the rank-and-file: battered cars and pickups, the stooped and broken gait of malnourished folk. This I had known intellectually but, in the fervor of the civil rights movement, had skirted emotionally. In sharp contrast were the white new Cadillacs of the state and regional Klan leadership who periodically dispersed "ushers" with collection buckets throughout the crowd.
This was the first, formal "high-church" Klan rally I had witnessed. We were certainly no strangers--the Klan and comparable groupings, and I. For several years I had occupied a prominent position on racist death lists in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South; my home had been shot up and I had been beaten by thugs--and had almost died in an assassination attempt on a street in Jackson, Mississippi. Colleagues had been killed, homes had been fired, and black churches bombed by the dozens.
I knew exactly what the people gathered in the cotton field, given the opportunity, would do to me. But this was the first time I fully grasped the economically destitute and intellectually poisoned atmosphere out of which this inflamed movement of poor whites sprang.
I saw them again--now about 12,000 garbed men, women, and children--marching through Raleigh, North Carolina, in '66. This time I .saw their faces, for the most part gaunt and worn, and with their defiant fervor not too successfully transcending a basic tiredness and a certain quality of fear.
The faces haunted me then and they haunt me now, reinforced, as always, by many trips into the Deep South. In the never subtle atmosphere of Dixie--that harsh mirror of America--the contrasts are clear: the attractive homes and groomed faces of the well-to-do (most of them white, but now some black); and the rundown, ramshackle housing and battered expressions of the poor who are, to use the Mississippi expression, the "black, white, Chinese, and Choc-taw."
But the poverty seems bleaker now as the South, always at a recessionary level, slips in a resigned and hopeless fashion into outright economic depression.
And so now, like a murky swamp specter, the Klan is rising again.
It has been a long time coming, and it's been coming for a long time. The use of racism to justify genocide against Native Americans and the enslavement of blacks ought now to be generally known by most informed Americans. What may still not be broadly known is that racism has been traditionally and cynically used by well-to-do whites in the South (and to some extent elsewhere) to drive wedges between the dispossessed: poor whites on the one hand and, on the other, the almost always poor non-whites, to maintain the economic and political control by a few. This began in earnest following the Civil War as the dispossessed grouped interracially into promising populist movements which were subsequently wrecked; it produced de jure Jim Crow segregation; and it has continued ever since with an increasingly special interest in keeping labor unions at arm's length. ("You may not be making a lot," the poor white is told by his "captain," "but you're still making more than the niggers.")
There has always been, however veiled, a flow of some corporate money into the Klan. Rumors used to be rife among poor whites in Halifax County to the effect that the J.P. Stevens textile operation, located at Roanoke Rapids in the northern part of the county, was a very good and very tangible friend of the Klan.
The rise and expansion of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s saw the Southern economic-political power structures, which were heavily influenced by and often outrightly synonymous with "up-town, country-club" racist organizations such as the white Citizens' Council, concentrate heavily on building the fires of poor white paranoia ever higher and encouraging grassroots terrorism. But as the civil rights movement feathered out, with mounting national support, "cost factors" gradually convinced the Dixie establishment that massive resistance was too expensive and, however grudgingly, the "big people" began a skillful retreat into tokenism. But they've always maintained their traditional grip.
And when the Klan, still on its racist high, attempted to continue what it perceived as patriotic resistance, the Southern power people joined with the federal government to suppress it, often through the use of infiltrators and provocateurs. Because of all of this, the Klan eventually fell apart in a spate of bickering and factionalism. Its obituaries were published in a flood of regional and national media accounts, and the Southern establishment moved back to the business of luring Northern industries into its "favorable industrial climate" (generous tax exemptions, right-to-work laws, obliging judges and injunctions, anti-union lawmen and thugs, and low wages).
The industries came as the '70s unfolded and, with them, the doughty labor organizers. And then there were Klan stirrings. Aided by civil rights statutes, blacks began to secure a measure of fair employment practices. There were more Klan stirrings. Then for the South (as now it seems for the nation), recession fell away toward depression, and it's all breaking loose again. Conservative estimates of Klan strength in the spring of 1981 place it at about 15,000 in the South--with a far greater support base--and building rapidly. And it has had Northern ramifications.
The average Klan member (not the leaders who invariably display efficient entrepreneurial qualities) is an inherently decent human being: a person who is hungry spiritually and economically, starved educationally, relatively powerless, and in many cases, someone who has done virtually no traveling from his home area. The country and the world as a whole are even more confusing and fearful to him than they seem to be to our federal government. He strikes out against non-whites instead of challenging the wealthy captains in the establishment because he's been taught to do so for generations by the captains themselves, of whom he's quite justifiably afraid. When he lashes out against "Jewish money" and "Jewish communism" (he has very likely never known a Jewish person in his life), he is actually going after, in twisted fashion, the same multi-ethnic Eastern business establishment railed against by the much healthier farmers and miners of the West. In viewing massive federal bureaucracy as oppressive, he joins most other inhabitants of our land. And his very individualism--often characterized by turbulent in-fighting and dramatic factionalism--is, however warped, much closer to Jeffersonianism than it could ever be to fascism or Nazism.
The Klan, after all, is people. It isn't going to be defeated, and its people helped, by counterhatred and contempt. "Kill the Klan!" sloganeering can only reinforce a dangerous (and sometimes mutual) paranoia. Enforcement of the law vis-a-vis criminal acts is one thing; efforts to secure legislation to ban an idea are hardly consistent with the First Amendment, would set dangerous precedents for everyone, would be unworkable, and would be assumed by too many to be the ultimate answer to the "poor-white problem."
And that would be very dangerous indeed.
The only solid answer to the people of the Klan is to make their fundamental human needs for spiritual, libertarian, and material well-being a reality. Giving a genuine recognition to their humanity, their bond with us all, and their necessities is the first step. Racially integrated labor unions and collateral approaches make very good sense; and Klan people make good union members (and then usually leave the Klan). But that, like all bona fide grassroots community organizing, is the hardest work of all.
"Just look at our people," cried a hot-eyed Klan leader at a recent Deep South rally. "Every time we try to go up, we get beat back. We've got nothing!"
"The hands of our people are battered and scarred with trying to make a dream come true," said William D. "Big Bill" Haywood of the thoroughly indigenous and libertarian Wobblies a long time ago. "We've got to organize--all of us together--the poor of the whole world."
It will be one way or the other: either struggling through the darkness or on the trail to the sun together.
John R. Salter, Jr., taught sociology at Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona when this article appeared.
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