TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070692/07069925.000

Text File | 1993-04-04 | 13.4 KB | 268 lines

                                                                                RACISM, Page 24

WHITE & WRONG

New Klan, Old Hatred

By MICHAEL RILEY/JANESVILLE


    The placid town of Janesville, Wis. (est. pop. 52,000),
never asked for a Ku Klux Klan rally. But the Klan considered
the town, perched on the Rock River, ripe for recruits. So there
in the middle of Rockport Park stood a massive burlap-wrapped,
kerosene-soaked cross surrounded by Klansmen, and even a few
Klanswomen, their robes billowing in the soft breeze. The loud
twang of country music mixed with the angry chants of protesters
jousting with police a few hundred yards away: "Death to the
Klan!"

    The Kluxers kept a wary eye as the demonstrators repeatedly
charged the police line, only to be repulsed by chilly blasts
from a fire hose. Eventually the frustrated crowd began to pelt
the cops with mud, rocks, bottles and obscenities. The police
made eight arrests. For the man whose presence triggered the
violence, no outcome could have been better. "Oh, yeah," said
Grand Wizard Thom Robb of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. "I
couldn't have bought this advertising for a million bucks."

    Robb, 46, is the avuncular public face of a fringe
white-supremacist movement whose virulence is growing. His Klan
faction, which boasts at least 1,000 active members, is one of
the largest white racist groups in the nation. According to
professional Klan watchers, he has tapped into a growing market
for bigotry. Reported hate crimes, from painting swastikas on
synagogues to racially motivated murders, have steadily risen
over the past four years; cross burnings alone doubled in 1991.
Klanwatch, a monitoring group based in Montgomery, estimates
that there are now 346 groups, up from 273 in 1990.

    The resentments stirred by the Los Angeles riots, a still
sour economy and a resurgent nativism may help swell the ranks
of the K.K.K. In striking down a St. Paul ordinance last week
that prohibited speech or behavior likely to arouse "anger or
alarm" on the basis of "race, color, creed, religion or
gender," the Supreme Court sought to protect free speech. But
the incident that inspired the case in the first place -- a
cross burning on the lawn of a black family -- led some to
predict that the ruling would make it harder to prosecute hate
crimes. Said Danny Welch, director of Klanwatch: "I'm convinced
in my heart that we're going to see big, dark days before it
gets any better."

    At first glance, Robb seems miscast in the role of a Klan
leader. Like his role model David Duke, the Imperial Wizard
turned politician, Robb has traded in his pointed hood and robe
for a well-worn gray suit and dingy wing tips. Like Duke, he
has altered the Klan's hate-filled message to make it more
palatable. Robb's white supremacy emphasizes love for the white
race rather than hatred for blacks and other minorities. While
Robb lacks Duke's telegenic looks, he shares his flair for
attracting attention, and his plans for expanding the Klan's
influence rival anything Duke ever dreamed of.

    Robb lives deep in Arkansas' Ozark Mountains, off a dirt
road that winds through the defunct hamlet of Zinc, past
dilapidated mobile homes, rusting farm equipment and rocky
pastureland. Chickens and goats pause in the road along Sugar
Orchard Creek, and neighbors glare warily at unfamiliar
visitors. The Grand Wizard's home, a weathered cedar dwelling
and several ramshackle outbuildings, is built on 100 forested
acres. Inside, Robb's pleasant wife, Muriel, prepares dinner
while Oprah chatters away on a TV set in the cluttered living
room. One son, Jason, 18, ponders his homework; another son,
Nathan, 21, hauls in the groceries; and Robb's 11-month-old
granddaughter, Charity, toddles around in her walker. The only
jarring note in this domestic idyll is two Klan prayers hanging
on a wall.

    Just a short stroll from Robb's home lies an oak-rimmed
pasture, where the Grand Wizard hopes to fulfill his grandiose
vision of the future. Shortly after Duke lost his bid to become
Governor of Louisiana last year, Robb drew national attention to
his idea for building a high-tech propaganda mill, complete with
training on how to appear on television, history lessons and
political instruction, even a drum-and-bagpipe corps. It would
become an assembly line cranking out articulate, blow-dried Duke
clones. "They always have these pictures of people in the Klan,
flies buzzing around the head, teeth missing, wiping manure off
their feet," says Robb. "Louisiana has one David Duke. We plan
to give America 1,000 of them."

    Robb was first attracted to the Knights after meeting Duke
in New Orleans in the mid-1970s. But his racist roots run deep.
Born in Detroit, Robb was the son of a builder and a
department-store sales clerk. His family moved to Tucson while
he was a teenager. There he devoured his mother's right-wing
political tracts and joined the John Birch Society. After
studying at a Colorado seminary under Kenneth Goff, a minister
with anti-Semitic views, Robb became a Baptist minister, opened a
print shop and started publishing his own right-wing tracts and
pushing white-supremacist causes. In 1979 he joined Duke's Klan
(one of many different Klan organizations), and soon moved up
the ranks. Shortly after Duke stepped down as Imperial Wizard in
1980 to found the National Association for the Advancement of
White People, Robb and another lieutenant staged a coup to
topple Duke's successor, Don Black, then in prison for trying to
engineer the takeover of a Caribbean island. In 1989 Robb became
Grand Wizard.

    Since then, Robb has taken up where Duke left off, using
modern marketing methods to enhance the Klan's image. The Klan
sells itself on tabloid TV and on business cards emblazoned
with three large red Ks. There is even something for Klan kids:
balloons depicting a hooded night rider on horseback. "We're
selling white pride, white power, whatever," Robb says. "It
doesn't make any difference if you're selling the Klan or used
cars or toothbrushes."

    At his rallies, Robb is a duplicitous huckster. When
protesters in Dubuque, Iowa, toss eggs at him, he responds with a
verbal sally. "They are hypocrites!" he shouts. "They are liars.
They talk about peace, but there is no peace over there. They
are being built up by hatred." Then he tells his fans that they
are on a "mission of love" at a "white Christian revival." With
his message goes a commercial tie-in. Besides the usual Klan
caps and T shirts and stickers, these rallies offer pricey Klan
kitsch, like a ceramic statuette of a hooded Klansman whose eyes
glow an eerie red when you plug it into an electrical outlet
($25 at a rally or $20 for the mail-order version).

    Those eager to catch a glimpse into Robb's weird world can
find themselves at a rally listening to a fledgling neo-Nazi
discuss with a robed Klansman the religious primacy of the
white race. A few steps away, a young Kluxer-in-training, his
eyes peering out through slits in his hood, explains the history
of a camouflaged Klanmobile, a trashed-out Ford Grenada loaded
with ham-radio equipment and emblazoned with slogans like WHITE
POWER and PRAISE GOD FOR AIDS.

    When outsiders are nearby, Robb is careful to avoid the word
nigger, though he admits to an occasional lapse. He avoids
directly denigrating blacks and other races, and he shies from
embracing white-power hero Adolf Hitler. He stresses that the
Klan, or at least his branch of it, does not advocate violence.
"We're not night riders running around beating people up," he
says, "but we're setting our sights on governmental power."
Robb thinks the future of the Klan lies in politics, and to
prove it, he is running for the Arkansas legislature. In
speeches, he blames the U.S. government for the nation's ills,
and he has adopted a platform he claims will return America to
its former greatness. He wants, among other things, to post
soldiers at the Mexican border to stop immigrants, quarantine
all aids patients, kill drug dealers and put an end to
affirmative action.

    Robb and his followers imagine a Jewish conspiracy in almost
everything from banking to the Federal Government. He advocates
eventual separation of the races, perhaps by banishing blacks,
with reparations, to Africa. "They'll never have justice in a
white society," he says of blacks. "After all, they were brought
over here against their will, which certainly was a benefit to
them, much more a great benefit to them than to the slave
owners. It put a burden on us.

    "This is going to sound awful crude to say this, and maybe
it will come out wrong," says Robb, "but at least during the
time of slavery, they earned their keep. What benefit are they
to us today, after food stamps and public housing and heating
their homes and cooling their homes and caring for their
children and taking them to the hospital and all the things
that are done? Where's the appreciation for that, and what is
the benefit to us?"

    These ideas are mild compared with those Robb expressed in
the past. Before remaking his image, he castigated blacks and
Jews, embraced Hitler and endorsed killing homosexuals, calling
for "the death penalty to the faggot slime." His newspapers (the
Torch and White Patriot) have featured racial slurs including
a cartoon showing a hanging of a black man and a bigoted ditty,
The Negro National Anthem. Despite his toned-down persona, he
still hawks copies of Mein Kampf and swears the Holocaust is a
hoax.

    Like an infectious virus, the Klan has learned to mutate and
survive, and that's just what Robb is doing. "It's the shadow
side of the American character, and it's not going to go away,"
explains Wyn Wade, author of The Fiery Cross, an excellent study
of the Klan. "The power is their history. We can never forget
their potential to do it again."

    Robb's ultimate goal is to hang a WHITES ONLY sign at
America's borders. He fears his race will soon disappear
beneath a tide of nonwhite immigrants and homegrown minorities.
It is a stance that appeals to poor, alienated whites,
especially males, who feel they have been forgotten. While
militant racists talk freely of conflict, even of race war, one
thing the white-supremacist movement agrees on is the preferred
color of this nation. "From my perspective, America is a white
nation," Robb says.

    This concept springs from Robb's Christian Identity
theology, an obscure faith shared by many white supremacists.
Descended from a shadowy 19th century creed known as
Anglo-Israelism, Identity interprets the Bible to mean that
white Europeans, and thus their American descendants, are God's
true chosen people. Though not endorsed by all believers in
this anti-Semitic faith, the use of violence has been linked to
the Order, a radical fringe underground group that sought
unsuccessfully to overthrow the government in the mid-1980s.

    While the natural inclination is to dismiss Robb as merely
another member of the lunatic fringe, one cannot so easily
dismiss the forces that drive his crusade or its impact. His
updated rhetoric provides a paper-thin layer of respectability
to a noxious creed that appeals to alienated white youths like
Shawn Slater, whom Robb is grooming as a future Klan leader. An
ex-skinhead, Slater now heads the Klan's chapter in Aurora,
Colo. Like his mentor, Slater has mastered the art of
attracting publicity by staging events that draw the wrath of
protesters. In Denver last January, he orchestrated a Klan rally
on Martin Luther King Day that turned violent when anti-Klan
protesters threw bottles, overturned a police car and battled
police. The incident allowed Slater to score a publicity coup
on CBS'S 48 Hours.

    Today a crew-cut Slater walks Denver's streets in a gray
wool suit with a small Klan pin on his lapel. He carries a cocky
attitude and a black Samsonite briefcase; inside is a copy of
American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell's White Power. His
favorite slogan -- "Equal Rights for Everybody; Special
Privileges for Nobody" -- even shows a gift for glib
phrasemaking.

    As the 26-year-old sits at a Denver bar, he points to a
young interracial couple strolling past. "This stuff makes me
sick, white girl walking with a black," he says. "This guy's
got a Malcolm X hat that stands for `Kill whitey,' and he has
this white girl walking with him." Though Slater denies he is
a racist -- "I'm white and I'm proud" -- he has been linked
directly to antiblack and anti-Semitic literature passed out in
local high schools by supporters. His true beliefs are evident
in the garish tattoo beneath his white shirt and tie. It
features a montage of his heroes, including Hitler, Mussolini
and Charles Manson.

    While the tactics of white supremacy may change, Robb's goal
is to "preserve" his "imperiled" race. "If that could be the
only way of saving white people," says Robb, his hand sweeping
across the Ozarks, "I'd burn the whole forest down." To that
end, Robb will travel the country this summer in his green van
with his boys and a loudspeaker system, a regular racist road
show, holding rallies from Georgia to Colorado. He will probably
draw more protesters, TV crews and publicity, which will bolster
his membership, increase his profits and, of course, foment
hatred and violence. Whether the Klan wears a hood and a robe
or a business suit, its message is unchanged.