Hate Is Always in Style At a Gathering of the Klan

I wanted to see what a 21st-century Ku Klux Klan rally was like, so I went to one Saturday at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia. About a dozen or so people showed up in white sheets and pointy hoods. And I assure you they were treated a lot better than they treat others.

For starters, the Klan arrived in white vans chauffeured and escorted by U.S. Park Police. Then they were guarded by a phalanx of law enforcement officers from federal, state and local agencies. Civil rights activists in the last century should have been so fortunate.

In a racial irony to top all racial ironies, some of those assigned to protect the Klan were black. And as the Klan's racist rants droned on, one of the officers began strumming his thigh, absentmindedly, just below his holstered gun. You got the feeling that he was ready to draw just to end the boredom. "Some way to spend a Saturday afternoon," he said, faintly irritated.

The Klan had gathered on a bucolic strip of national parkland near the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. Although the park is public land, a huge swath was made off-limits to the public. Only skinheads, Nazi sympathizers and media were allowed inside the cordoned-off area.

This was my first Klan rally. Here was a group that for more than a century epitomized white hatred of blacks in America; the KKK was infamous for rallying in the light of a burning cross, then heading off to burn your home, bomb your church, drag you from your bed for a lynching. All with impunity. Klansmen were once powerful as well as ruthless, killers by night who melded into the ranks of upstanding white citizens by day. Among them were judges and police officials. And they were still rallying into the 21st century.

Concerned friends advised me not to go -- or not to go alone. The image of the Klan as a pack of rabid dogs lives on. What I found at Harpers Ferry was not that far off -- except that the dogs were old and mangy, rabid still but largely toothless. More sickening to me than their racist rambling was that my tax dollars were being used to underwrite their pointy-headed freak shows.

I had no idea that Uncle Sam rolled out the red carpet for such groups. During the past few months, the World Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in Sharpsburg, Md., has held rallies at Civil War battlefields and landmarks. Tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money has been spent on events that, in effect, rob others of the right to use public space.

The Klan gathered at the sites of two of the war's bloodiest battles, Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania and Antietam National Battlefield near Sharpsburg. Now they had come to Harpers Ferry, which was marking the 147th anniversary of abolitionist John Brown's ill-fated raid on the federal arsenal there. The Klan had come to celebrate Brown's being captured and hanged "by his greasy neck," as one Klansman put it.

Lt. Scott Fear, a Park Police spokesman, told me, "We are not just protecting the Klan; we're protecting the protesters and the general public as well." But the rights of the public weren't being protected when people felt compelled to leave the park because of the poisonous atmosphere created by the Klan.

A speaker who called himself Stonewall Jackson addressed the tourists and townspeople outside the cordoned-off area. "You try to make our children think we are all the same. But we are not," he said. Swastikas and Confederate flags were on display around him. "I am not a Negro, Mexican or Jew. I am white, yes, a white supremacist and proud of it."

Some of the ranting echoed sentiments that are scrawled in the night on cars and buildings -- such as the "white power" graffiti found this year in Charles County -- or that are whispered among people who believe that any black man on the streets at night must be a criminal.

The Klan members insist that they were only saying in public what millions of other white Americans harbor in their hearts. "All white people know that there is not a black person on earth who is equal to them," said Gordon Young, head of the World Knights. "Blacks are only here to entertain whites. And all they want is to sexually assault our white women."