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DUKE.TXT
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1992-01-19
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David Duke
With his broad smile and boy-next-door looks, former Ku
Klux Klan leader and Nazi sympathizer David Duke has leaped
from the radical right fringes to mainstream conservative
politics in less than 3 years.
Despite White House and Republican party attempts to bury
him with scorn, Duke has bounded into the biggest political
arena of all. He announced Dec 4 that he will challenge
President George Bush for the 1992 GOP presidential
nomination and hopes to run in primaries all over the
country.
In his hard-fought but losing campaign for Louisiana's
governorship this fall, Duke tried to distance himself from
more than 20 years of involvement with neo-Nazis, white
supremacist groups and the Klan, where he was a grand
wizard.
But his background gave an overtly racist edge to the
conservative Republican dogma he now espouses.
Duke, who is 41 but looks years younger, attacked welfare
mothers, "affirmative action" racial equality policies and
rising crime, which he blamed on the "welfare underclass."
He was trounced almost 2-1 in the Nov 16 Louisiana
governor's election by former Democratic Governor Edwin
Edwards, who had the benefit of nationwide bipartisan
support including denunciations of Duke by Bush.
But Duke carried 55 % of the white vote. Analysts
attributed his strong showing, in part, to Louisiana's bad
economic times. In 1990, Duke lost to Democrat J Bennett
Johnston for the US Senate, but took 44 % of the vote,
including 58 % of the white vote.
Duke is making it clear he is not about to quit the
national political stage.
Duke has even broadened his target-issues to include
opposition to immigration and to a proposed free trade
agreement with Mexico he said would "take jobs away from
Americans".
He converted to the Republican Party in 1988 after
running for president on the extremist Populist Party
ticket, whose members include neo-Nazis and skinheads.
Shortly after the switch, he won a seat in the Louisiana
legislature from a predominantly white New Orleans suburb.
Horrified party leaders deny he is a true Republican and
Bush has called him an "insincere charlatan.
Duke has chided the Republican party for refusing to
accept him at face value and says his newfound Christianity
grants him forgiveness for his "earlier intolerances".
"As a presidential candidate, I could bring a lot of
working people across this country" into the party, he says.
Duke's activism dates to the 1960s when New Orleans was
in the throes of desegregating its schools.
He was born in Tulsa, Okla, on July 1, 1950. His family
moved to New Orleans when he and his older sister were
young.
By age 17, he held full KKK membership. Later, at
Louisiana State University, classmates often heard him
preaching white supremacy and Nazi philosophy.
At 19, Duke was photographed in a Nazi uniform during a
1-man demonstration. The photo continues to haunt him.
"I was just a kid," he says. "Everyone has done something
at some time in their youth that they regret later."
In 1972, he married Chloe Hardin of West Palm Beach, Fla,
also a right-wing activist. They divorced amicably several
years later and his 2 teen-age daughters often appeared with
him during his campaigns.
His ex-wife is now married to Don Black, Duke's
handpicked successor when he left the Klan.
Duke began receiving national attention by traveling, in
Klan robes, to areas suffering racial tensions.
He injected himself into a furor over racial school
busing in Boston and later organized vigilante border
patrols in the Southwest US to keep out illegal immigrants
from Mexico.
In 1979, he was booted out of Britain for trying to
organize KKK chapters at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
That same year he resigned from the Klan.
Duke then founded the Natl Association for the
Advancement of White People. Its newsletter often blamed
Jews for world problems and attacked blacks as being
intellectually inferior to whites. He called it a white
civil rights group.
The NAAWP continued to operate from Duke's home--and he
remained its president--until 1990.
Duke says he won't run in New Hampshire's February
primary, but will use his campaign to disseminate his views
across the country.