HISTORY OF SHAME
The Ku Klux Klan was founded as a “social club” in 1866, in Pulaski, Tennessee, but quickly became a terrorist organization in the aftermath of the Civil War and legislation to free slaves. Dressed in sheets and robes to frighten their victims, Klansmen set out on night raids, destroying crops, burning houses and barns and lynching “uppity” negroes. In 1892 alone 169 blacks were lynched. Mass immigration at the turn of the century and fears that America would be swamped by immigrants provided new impetus for the Klan. By the 1925 it could boast 5 million members and another wave of lynchings, shootings and whippings swept the nation. By this time the Klan has added Catholics, Jews, foreigners and organized labour to its list of enemies. Counter-attacks by the media, the clergy and an increasing number of politicians put the Klan into decline until its resurgence with the Civil Rights era. The brutal murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 prompted a congressional investigation into Klan’s activities. During the 70-s Klan membership sank to its lowest point, but it is now once again on the increase.
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On a dark, moonless night in rural Alabama, 30 white-robed and hooded figures move like ghosts across a rough stubble field, occasionally tripping and muttering curses under their breath. Each selects a wooden stake fashioned as a crude torch and dunks the end in a bucket of kerosene before forming a circle around a cross 40ft high and just visible in silhouette against the deep purple sky. One torch is lit and the flame is passed from stake to stake until each figure, eyes glittering in the sockets of their pointed hoods, is holding aloft a bright burning flare. In silent salutation to the cross, the torches are waved up and down in unison, then from side to side. One is applied to the base of the cross and the fire licks quickly up the kerosene-soaked burlap wrapped around the timber. Suddenly it bursts into flames, casting a flickering light over the ground and illuminating a weird and sinister tableau. The robed figures march toward, cast their torches into the blaze, then take several steps backwards before saluting fascist-style, right arms and fingertips outstretched, some shouting “White power!” In an America riven once more by racial tension, the Ku Klux Klan, after years of decline, is back in business.
The largest and oldest hate organization in the United States, the Klan's new line is selling the concept of white supremacy as an attainable ideal. Social and economic pointers indicate that it may be on the brink of a boom, nurtured by a faltering economy, rising unemployment and immigration, the Los Angeles riots and a growing climate of intolerance.
The Klan last prospered during the period of mass immigration in the Twenties and the years of the Depression, when lynchings increased in direct proportion to soaring unemployment. The same worries about immigration and economic hardship that have historically inspired racism are returning to haunt America, where racial and ethnic diversity has increased faster in the past 10 years than at any other time in history.
The outcome is the return of the Klan, the festering of white supremacy and an alarming rise in the incidence of assaults and abuses motivated by race, religion or sexual orientation. Klanwatch, a civil rights organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, says it has identified no fewer than 346 white supremacy groups active in the United States, up from 273 a year previously. Many are linked by ideology and technology, creating a loosely structured movement of considerable and worrying strength.
Hate crimes, ranging in severity from offensive graffiti to assault and murder are escalating every year across America. New York reported 1110 against blacks and Jews last year. In Oregon the incidence increased by 60 per cent in six months; in Orange County, California, hate crimes quadrupled in four years. There were reports of 101 cross-burnings in 1991, compared with 50 the year before.
The Klan recently scored a significant victory when the Supreme Court ruled that cross-burning was protected under the First Amendment as a form of “free speech”. A Minnesota teenager had been prosecuted under a city ordinance for burning a cross on the front lawn of a black family, but the Supreme Court ruled that the ordinance, banning action likely to cause “anger, alarm or resentment...on the basis of race, colour, creed, religion or gender”, was unconstitutional.
“Many people seem to think that old-style hate groups like the Klan are declining,” says Danny Welch, director of Klanwatch. “Actually, the reverse is true. The number of Klan groups has increased from 69 to 97 in 12 months.” I
The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, organizers of the cross-burning ritual in Morgan County, Alabama, is the biggest and fastest-growing of the 28 autonomous Klans in the United States. It is led by Pastor Thom Robb, аn ordained minister of the Baptist church, who is also standing as a Republican candidate for the 29th district of the state legislature in Arkansas in November, where he is unlikely to get much support from the governor, presidential hopeful Bill Clinton. In the Klan hierarchy his rank is Grand Wizard, but he prefers to describe himself, less exotically, as the “national director”.
An accomplished and charismatic speaker, Robb is viewed by civil rights experts as the most dangerous of the new breed of white supremacists because of his communication skills, political ambitions and his impressive ability to cloak the underlying message of hatred and intolerance in an avuncular garb of reason and logic.
The “new” Klan does not hate anyone, says Robb, not blacks, not Asians, not Mexicans, not Jews, not homosexuals. Nor does it condone violence in any form, no, sir! All it seeks to do, he claims, is to promote “equal rights for whites”. Is that so contentious, he asks, at a time when immigration into the United States is running at such a rate that within 50 years whites will be a minority? Is that not legitimate, reasonable cause for concern?
It is a creed that strikes chords with many alienated white citizens who would not formerly have associated themselves with the Klan and its long history of mayhem and terror. But things are different now. Poor whites, resenting what they see as jobs, housing and welfare being handed out to minorities at their expense, are looking for scapegoats and are particularly susceptible to the manifesto of the "new" Klan. Thus it is that the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan have not only doubled its membership in the past 12 months, according to Robb, but it is the only Klan organization to have successfully broken out of the traditional recruiting grounds in the south, setting up cells in Illinois, Idaho, New Jersey, Maryland, Colorado and California.
Unlike most of the Klans, which still operate in secret, the Knights welcome media attention. Although he will not talk about numbers, Robb says he now receives more inquiries about membership every day than he used to get in a month one year ago. “We have to sell the Klan like any other product, get people to understand what we really are and not what they have read about or heard about. So often the perception is that everybody hates the Klan, but on a one-to-one basis the very same person who says publicly he would never join the Klan might privately be for you.”
“Robb is a master of media manipulation,” says Dan Levitas of the Center of Democratic Renewal in Atlanta, Georgia, an organization that monitors white supremacist groups. “He has constructed a crafted and successful marketing strategy for the Klan. He understands that the old image of the Klansman brandishing a rope and a gun and yelling nigger all the time, with tobacco juice seeping from the corner of his mouth, is no longer helpful to recruiting. He has, in a totally calculated way, set out to mainstream white supremacy ideology, to market a message that plays on the deep-rooted fears of thousands of white Americans. ”
“The Klan reproduces a code of racism and hate and is able to penetrate and infect society when conditions are right, and conditions are right now, with white attitudes becoming increasingly hostile to ethnic minorities. I believe race relations in the United States are going to continue to worsen and the influence of hate groups is going to increase.”
Grand Wizard Robb lives with his family, all members of the Klan, in a cedar cabin he built with his own hands on a 100-acre lot deep in the Ozark mountains in the Boon County, northern Arkansas. It is approached along a dirt road which winds through an abandoned mining settlement and fords several streams. A few dilapidated trailer homes along the road are still occupied. Their owners shade their eyes and peer suspiciously at strangers in out-of-state cars bouncing along the track, while scrawny chickens peck forlornly in the dust around rusting farm equipment, assorted junk and a variety of broken-down trucks, buses and cars.
Boone County is dry and God-fearing. You cannot buy alcohol but you can praise the Lord everywhere, in any one of hundreds of little churches and chapels. The Robb family belongs to an obscure sect called Christian Identity, which holds that Aryans are the true lost tribe of Israel; in Harrison alone (population 9567), their nearest town, there are three Christian Identity churches.
Some folk say that if you could buy a drink in Boone County you'd get tourists in, but heck, who wants strangers poking their noses in everywhere? Ask the old men who sit in the shade of the oak trees around the courthouse in Harrison and they'll tell you that people don't take too kindly to strangers in Boone County. They will also tell you they don’t take too kindly to ‘nigrahs’ neither. That’s why Boone County is white and that’s why Thom Robb chose it as an ideal place to live 20 years ago.
Robb is 47, the son of a sometime builder and sales clerk. He grew up in Detroit and Tucson, Arizona, where he met Muriel, his future wife. Married and ordained by the age of 21, he opened his own print shop and began publishing right-wing tracts with a strong bias towards anti-Semitism and white supremacy. The tide of illegal immigrants flooding into Arizona across the Mexican border prompted them to move, in 1971, to Arkansas, where Robb found work in a factory and launched his own newspaper, The Torch, to propagate his increasingly extremist views. In 1979 he joined the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, then led by an aspiring and telegenic Louisiana politician called David Duke.
Duke set the style for the "new" Klan, publicly denouncing violence and racial terrorism while privately espousing both. He toned down inflammatory rhetoric in favour of a more tempered, populist approach and steered the Knights towards political activism and moderation. Yet behind the facade the Knights remained hardcore racists united by a common obsession – white, Christian, homosexual supremacy.
Robb rose quickly through the ranks of the Knights. When Duke stepped down to form the Advancement of White People, he handed over the reins to Don Black, a young hothead who was soon arrested for taking part in a plot, inspired jointly by the Klan and a neo-Nazi group, to overthrow the government of the Caribbean island of Dominica. While in prison, Black entrusted the leadership to Robb and another lieutenant who promptly ousted Black and put themselves in charge. Robb became the Grand Wizard in 1989. He is, he says, a full-time Klan leader, supporting himself and his family (although only in part, since his wife works in a local factory) from subscriptions to his newspaper, voluntary donations and a small stipend from the Klan.
Sitting and talking in the garden – really no more than a small clearing in the woods – of his home in the Ozarks, Robb comes over as the most affable and plausible of men. He answers all questions good naturedly, laughs a lot, and offers apparently rational explanations for his behaviour and beliefs. He could be just another decent husband and father, a regular guy, a scout leader, or a member of the local РТА.
Yet contradictions abound. Tacked to one side of the front door of his house is a typical piece of Americana: a little plaque that says "Welcome friends". Inside, the house is stuffed with hate literature and Klan propaganda.
Robb insists that Christian Identity is simply a shared religious philosophy, rooted in the belief that the Aryans are the true descendants of Israel. It seems harmless enough, if a little far-fetched. Yet Christian Identity also goes under the name of the Aryan Nations, one of the most violent neo-Nazi movements in America. Christian Identity also holds that Jews are the "spawn of Satan", that blacks are subhuman and that only whites will survive an impending worldwide race war.
He professes to advocate "Christian revival and love", the love of family, heritage and culture. Yet his writings, in The Torch and in the Knights' newspaper, the White Patriot, is old-fashioned rhetoric: "We must endorse and support the law of God, which calls for the death penalty to the faggot slime." "I hate Jews. I hate race-mixing Jews. We've let anti-Christ Jews into our country and we've been cursed with abortion, inflation, homosexuality and the threat of war." "When the Negro was under the natural discipline of White authority, White people were safe from Negro abuse and violence...can we really blame the Negro for acting in the savage manner which is his instinct?"
Here is Robb defining, in grotesque parody in the White Parrot, the black man's concept of freedom: "Dat's when A'hs does what A'hs want... Dat's also when A'hs kin have da white girls, da free food stamps..."
The Grand Wizard is far too canny an interviewee to be drawn into such obnoxious discourse during an interview with a foreign journalist. The most he will concede, even then prefaced by the disclaimer that is probably going to sound “awful crude”, is bizarre notion that slavery was a crime inflicted on white people. “Who benefited from slavery? Not us. At least during the time of slavery the blacks earned their keep, but now we give them public housing, food stamps, heat their homes in winter, cool them in the summer, look after them when they are sick, pay for them to have babies. I think the white tax payers in this country have shown more than their share of Christian benevolence towards blacks and do you know, I never hear of any black man standing up and saying thank you.”
On the perceived threat to the future of the white majority in the United States Robb is on surer ground and confident of his figures. "When I was growing up in this country in the Fifties the American population was 92 per cent white. Now we are down to less than 70 per cent. In 50 or 60 years' time the whites are going to be a minority. We think this is a matter of very real, legitimate concern for the future of our people. It's not being paranoid, it’s just a matter of fact – we're being dispossessed of our own land and our own race is in danger of extinction."
How can the Ku Klux Klan avert such a fate? Robb says he would repeal all the civil rights laws forcing people to integrate, because no one, black, brown, yellow or white, really wants to integrate anyway. "Integration has not produced the harmony that the government said it would; it's only produced friction, yet the government acts as if it has some kind of divine mandate written in the heavens that says 'Thou must integrate.' They're experimenting with our blood heritage; I think that's horrifying."
Once the government was off the back of the people, he believes ethnic communities will form naturally because people prefer to be around their own kind, they get along better that way. If that did not work, some kind of "geographical separation" would be necessary. What did this mean? Certain zones designated for certain races? Racial border police? He is not sure how it would be done; it is far away, future generations would be able to work it out.
He also favours voluntary repatriation of blacks to Africa. "1 see nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying that we should just haul black people across to Africa and drop 'em off on the shore, but I certainly think we should work with all those who want to go back."
All this is explained in genial tones as if it were the most sensible and pragmatic platform imaginable. Only once does Robb expose a raw nerve, when asked about his children. Supposing his daughter, Rachel, now 23 and married, had wanted to date a black man, how would he react? His smile drops. "I would feel," he says slowly, "that she had betrayed me." Would he kick her out? "Absolutely," he replies, without hesitation. What if one of his sons, Nathan, 21, and Jason, 18, turned out to be homosexual? "1 believe homosexuality is a violation of the laws of nature and if either of my sons were homosexual I would consider it an act of treason against everything I believe and everything our people stand for. That son would no longer be welcome in my house; he would no longer be part of our family."
A few minutes' walk from his house, in a sylvan meadow speckled with marigolds and fringed by oak trees, is a campsite where Robb intends to set up a "finishing school" for future Klan leaders, to be called "The Soldiers of the Cross Training Institute". At the moment there exists only a field kitchen, a big marquee, picnic tables and three flagpoles – one for the Stars and Stripes, another for the Confederate battle flag and a third for the white and gold banner of Christian Identity. It looks like a perfect setting for a youth hostel, a base from which apple-cheeked young Americans could set out for healthy hikes through the mountains. But Robb has different ideas – he sees it as a kind of Club KKK, a mecca for ambitious young white supremacists.
Here he intends to run intensive courses for promising Klansmen, teaching them marketing and communication skills, public relations, history and politics. The basic idea is to churn out clones of Duke, his hero. "America has only got one David Duke," he says with a slow smile. "We plan to give America thousands of them." Work is to start soon on building an office, a video production centre, bunkhouses, recreation facilities and lavatories. There will even be a Klan drum and bagpipe marching band, which will use the camp for parade and music practice.
At present the site is used twice a year, for what he calls the "Patriot Day Picnic" in the spring and the Knights' annual congress in the autumn. This year he is expecting some 400 delegates to the congress – about double last year's number.
Robb sees his planned training school as a powerful recruiting tool and an essential element in finally ridding the Klan of what he says is an outdated image, that of night riders on the rampage, shooting and lynching blacks. "We've got to attract bright, positive, intelligent and articulate young people," he says. "Basically, we want people who are already successful in their private lives. We don't want losers joining the Klan.
"We've got our sights set on government. Things can change very quickly in politics – look at what has happened in Russia, Berlin and South Africa. While we are certainly considered as outsiders today, an aberration, by the same token I think that those who oppose us recognize how quickly things can change. Those on the outside today can be on the inside tomorrow."
Robb's dream of the Klan as a respected and accepted political force is the nightmare of civil rights supporters. "Yes, we are very concerned about the Klan," says Tom Halpern of the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors white supremacist groups. "We have to work hard to make sure that people are not hoodwinked by Robb and that they understand the real nature of the Klan – that it is a virulently anti-Semitic and racist organization and always has been, that it is a serious danger, that it attracts to its ranks people who are virtually wedded to the rope and the gun."
It will be several hours before the sun comes up this day in the Ozarks, but Robb and his two sons are already up and about, loading up their green Ford van for the 10-hour drive to Alabama where Robb is to speak at two Klan rallies, in Decatur and Athens. He spends much of his time criss-crossing the country to attend rallies; he has owned the van for only three years, but it has 250,000 miles on the clock. It has a single bumper sticker on the back, "Duke for President", a reminder of the heady days last year when David Duke, having polled a surprising 44 per cent of the vote in the election for governor of Louisiana, briefly announced himself to be a candidate for the White House.
Robb's sons invariably accompany him to Klan rallies. "They love it. You can't beat them away," he says with a grin. Nathan, the elder, works full-time as his father’s assistant; Jason is still at school. They are nice boys – good-looking, well-mannered, forthcoming and friendly. They certainly don't fit the stereotype image of the racist, but they have grown up in the Klan, in all-white Boone County.
On long journeys the boys usually take turns at driving, while Robb works in the back of the van with a mobile telephone and a laptop computer. If ever there is trouble at a rally he can rely on his sons to protect him, but it happens rarely. Once he was hit on the side of the head by a rock, but that was only because he did not duck quickly enough; another time someone took a swing at him with a baseball bat. Usually it's just demonstrators yelling and screaming that they want to kill him, rather than physical violence.
But at Decatur, a little town in north Alabama where he is due to make his first stop, there was serious trouble at a Klan rally a couple of years ago when Klansmen clashed with civil rights demonstrators and a full-scale gun battle broke out. It ended up with the National Guard being called out and the astonished citizens of Decatur witnessing a tank rumbling down their main street.
It is for this reason that the town's police chief has called every possible officer out for tonight's rally, which is due to take place outside the courthouse. At 5 p.m., an hour before it is due to begin, the parking lot in front of the courthouse is milling with law enforcement officers of аll kinds – local police, sheriffs, marshals, drug agents and state investigators. So far, only one Klansman has arrived, a goofy-looking guy with no chin standing on the courthouse steps holding the Stars and Stripes in one hand and the Confederate flag in the other.
Presumably imagining himself a dashing figure in his Klan uniform, he motions his wife and baby daughter out of the way whenever a photographer appears, but there is nothing he can do about his stomach which hangs over his belt, nor his strangely splayed legs which curve outwards from his knees. I ask him why he is carrying the Confederate flag. "To me it is the true flag of the Aryan race," he says, adding helpfully, "that's Aryan with a capital A."
At around 5.30 p.m., Robb's van arrives, leading a small convoy of other vehicles with various bumper stickers, the most favoured being homophobic: "In the beginning, God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." Robb's sons, now in uniforms, begin directing the setting up of equipment. Robb eschews a uniform in favour of the corporate look, a well-worn brown suit, striped shirt and tie. By the time all the flags and banners and glowering, Klansmen are in position on the balcony of the courthouse. There are tables set to sell Klan souvenirs – T-shirts with slogans like "Racial Purity Is America's Security", baseball caps, pens, key rings and knives.
The small crowd that has gathered is made up mainly of poor white farmers and blue collar workers, sitting in battered pick-up trunks picking their teeth and swilling cans of soda. A few teenagers have also turned up to demonstrate, but they are told by police that they must have a permit and eventually are persuaded to shut up.
For all the fire and passion that Robb puts into his speech, he could have been delivering the Sermon on the Mount. He learned oratory from fundamentalist preachers and it shows. He strides back and forth on the rostrum, carving the air with his hands and bellowing into a radio microphone, appealing to patriotism and pride and warning of terrible consequences ahead if whites become a minority in America.
Only the Klan was speaking up for whites. "Name me a preacher who stands up and defends the rights of white people. Name me one! Shout his name out so I can hear it! Name me a politician who will stand up and defend the rights of white people. Name me one! How about a school teacher? Or a college professor? Name me one who says I think white people should be proud of who they are. There are none, ladies and gentlemen. THEY HAVE ABANDONED YOU!"
He speaks for half an hour, rarely referring to his notes, and concluding with a promise that Christian revival was coming and all those present could be a part of it, could take a stand for righteousness. "If you do that you'll be given the strength of providence on high, given the courage of He who died on Calvary and America's future can once again take that road from whence she came ... and the future of America will not be dark and dismal, but bright and glorious..."
The crowd manages a few cries of "Amen" and disperses peacefully. More than 20 per cent of Decatur's population is black but none have turned out to protest against the presence of the Klan in their town, because local black community leaders have advised people to stay away, counselling that the best way to deal with the Klan is to ignore it.
It is the same story the following afternoon in Athens, an even poorer town some 20 miles distant. Here a slightly larger crowd – perhaps 200 people – waits in the shade of the shop blinds opposite the courthouse as the Klan sets up its paraphernalia on the courthouse steps. The same goofy guy with the flags is there, still trying to push his wife and child out of the picture, and there is the same heavy police presence, this time with snipers on the rooftops. "I just hope," the police chief mutters under his breath, "this thing gets over quickly and quietly and they will then go away and leave us alone."
So it proves, but not until after Robb has delivered another lengthy speech, again without notes, this time attacking illegal immigration, the free trade agreement and the "November criminals" in Washington. It is an impressive performance. Robb could teach American politicians a thing or two about off-the-cuff public speaking.
That same evening the Klansmen and their wives and children gather on the stubble field in Morgan County for the cross-burning, the highlight of the weekend. In one corner of the field they have set up hay bales for seats, a hotdog and soda stand, another souvenir stall and a loudspeaker system playing country music before the speeches. This time there are no cops present and the Klansmen are talking to their own kind. The speeches arc markedly more inflammatory and greeted with yelps and fascist salutes and shouts of "White power!"
What had started as a seemingly harmless social occasion, faintly reminiscent of a village fete, steadily deteriorates as the night grows darker and the racist demagogy worsens. "Half-breeds" and "non-white mongrels" are now constantly referred to, with contemptuously curled lips. By the time the Klansmen start helping each other into their robes the atmosphere is charged, malevolent. As each dons his pointed hood he falls silent. I try asking one a question, but receive no reply except a cold stare from behind the black eye-sockets in his hood,
Robb had explained earlier how cross-lighting (the term the Klan uses for cross-burning) is actually a deeply Christian ceremony, intended to symbolize the light of Christ dispelling darkness and ignorance. But as the Klansmen trooped out across that field that night, and as the ritual began, and as the hooded figures lit their torches, and as the giant cross burst into flame in the sky, I could only think of the naked terror I would feel if I were standing there and I were black.
GUIDE
Translate the following phrases into English:
- возрождение Клана
- теория превосходства белой расы
- преступление на почве нетерпимости (расовой, религиозной)
- нестабильная экономика
- прогрессирующая безработица
- число нападений и оскорблений
- хорошо образованный и харизматичный оратор
- оправдывать насилие
- обоснованная и разумная причина для беспокойства
- публично осуждать насилие, но негласно его поддерживать
- заклятый расист
- свергнуть правительство
- передать руководство
- отменить закон
- штамповать
- воздерживаться / отказываться от чего-либо
- импровизированные выступления
Match the words with their synonyms:
1. impetus
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a) genial, pleasant
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2. to escalate
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b) unlikely, difficult to believe
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3. affable
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c) malicious, wicked
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4. far-fetched
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d) stimulus
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5. friction
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e) extremely dangerous, harmful
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6. virulent
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f) to increase
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7. malevolent
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g) tension
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Fill in the correct preposition:
- The KKK quickly became a terrorist organization … the aftermath of the Civil War.
- During the 70-s Klan membership sank … its lowest point, but in the 90-s it was once again … the increase.
- Social and economic pointers indicate that the Klan may be … the brink of a boom.
- Poor whites, resenting what they see as jobs, housing and welfare being handed … … minorities … their expense, are looking … scapegoats.
- Unlike most of the Klans, which still operate … secret, the Knights welcome … media attention.
- On long journeys the boys usually take turns … driving, while Robb works in the back of the van with a laptop computer.