Kkk's Reign Of Fear And Fire Drawing To A Close -- `The Whole Culture Has Changed,' Says Longtime Klan Foe

ONE OF THE MOST terrifying organizations ever hatched in America, the Ku Klux Klan, is gone. The mystic brotherhood, born of fear and anger, had three lives, born and twice reborn in times of seismic change. Now the nation is seen as impervious to its peculiar virus. The Klan is dead.

PULASKI, Tenn - Call it an epilogue to the 30th anniversary observance of Freedom Summer. Or call it a final belated triumph of the Civil Rights Movement. Or call it simply a long-delayed funeral notice:

The Ku Klux Klan is dead.

Twice before over the past century the Klan has seemed to have vanished from the national scene, missing and presumed dead. Both times its hooded head rose from the cold ashes of burnt crosses and returned to burn and flog and kill again.

This time, owing to changes in the national fabric now viewed as irrevocable, a Ku Klux Klan obituary seems beyond speculation.

There remain in America, of course, various racist groups, nativists, self-styled militias, neo-Nazis, enough independent bands of zealots to keep the Anti-Defamation League and other watchdogs of bigotry as busy as ever.

But certainly the most widespread agent of terror, easily the most recognizable, surely the most enduring and, according to uncounted thousands of its victims, by far the most frightening organization ever hatched on American soil, the Ku Klux Klan, is no longer.

"Yes, we have work to do," says Stuart Lowengrub, chief of the ADL's Atlanta office, "but not because of the Klan. The Klan today has nothing left, no influence at all, political or economic. What's left of the Klan, if anything, is no more than a nuisance."

"The Klan's gone," Robert Shelton acknowledged, lunching at a hamburger joint in his hometown of Tuscaloosa, Ala. If he seemed wistful, his message was as emphatic as if chiseled on a tombstone.

Shelton is now 65 and somewhat frail after a triple bypass a year ago. In his robust days he was Imperial Wizard, top dog, of the nation's largest and most notorious Klan organization, the United Klans of America, Inc., with 40,000 dues-paying members.

"The Klan will never return," he said softly. "Not with the robes and the rallies and the cross lightings and parades, everything that made the Klan the Klan, the mysticism, what we called Klankraft."

His thumb caressed a large gold ring on his finger. A tear-shaped red blood drop on its stone gave positive identification. A Klan ring.

With Shelton's organization and about a dozen other Klan groups during the 1950s and '60s, America's kluxers totaled about 100,000, with units, or klaverns, in every state, Canada and overseas military posts. Most klaverns had ladies' auxiliaries. Anonymous hordes cheered silently from the sidelines. Shelton's newspaper, the Fiery Cross, reportedly had a mailing list of 2 million.

It was in the American South, though, in its turmoil of desegregation, that the Ku Klux Klan flourished.

But it was not parades and flummery that made the Klan the Klan. It was guns and whips and dynamite. "Klankraft" to others in Dixie meant not mysticism but mayhem and murder.

It meant a black section in Birmingham where churches and homes exploded and burned with such regularity the neighborhood, Fountain Heights, became known as "Dynamite Hill."

It meant, in 1963, four black schoolgirls killed in their choir robes one Sunday morning when Klansmen blew up their Birmingham church.

That's far from a complete list. Better to assess routine Klan handiwork is another perhaps forgotten fact:

During the FBI's 40-day search of the Mississippi outback for the bodies of the three Freedom Summer workers, agents happened upon the bodies of two other Klan victims, both black, neither connected with the summer project. They had been missing even longer. Hadn't anyone noticed?

Counting on the silent majority

"When you called the law," says Randall Williams, "the people who are supposed to protect you, they're the same people who are out to get you. Well, could life be more terrifying?"

Williams is an Alabama writer and publisher who knows the South and knows the Klan. He was director of the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery from 1979 through the mid-1980s, a period of resurgent Klan violence .

"The Klan," he says, "could count on the silence if not the outright connivance of law enforcement. That is no longer so, not anywhere. That change is fundamental. Black officers are on police forces. The whole culture has changed. Black kids go to better schools. Black people vote. And law enforcement today, everywhere, is clearly against the Klan. Nobody can turn the clock back on that."

Have attitudes changed?

"It may happen that people calling themselves kluxers show up here and there," Williams says. "These are free lancers. They're isolated. They don't mean a thing. They have no organization. The back of the organized Klan is broken and it will never come back.

The Ku Klux Klan was the creation of six Confederate veterans eight months after the end of the Civil War.

They met on Christmas Eve in 1865 in a one-story brick law office kitty-cornered from the courthouse in Pulaski. The building is still standing.

The war had left their homeland a smoking ruin, its economy in chaos, its society in turmoil. Time seemed out of joint as well.

The six concocted a sort of fraternity. Their aim, they claimed, was to put a little scare into those presumptuous black folk, see what happens. No harm intended. They devised ghostlike costumes of hoods and bedsheets and composed a hierarchy of scary titles: Dragons, Cyclops, Titans and the like.

They named their circle of spooks for the Greek word for circle, kuklos, fiddled it into Ku-Klux and for poetic alliteration added Klan. Thus began a lasting affectation for K-words. Like Klankraft.

They devised ceremonies, passwords, codes, prayers - the Klan remained forever larded with religiosity - and wrote a fustian prescript that included, above all, a solemn oath of secrecy.

The Klan virus spread into Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi. By 1869, a full-blown vigilante force rode throughout the South. White-robed Klansmen paraded brazenly. Terrified blacks slept in the woods - and stayed away from the polls. Within five years, murders attributed to the Klan approached 1,000.

At length the U.S. Congress passed the 1871 anti-Klan law. Then, the outlawed Ku Klux Klan faded away. It was not, it turned out, dead, just dormant, a poisonous baccilus awaiting another receptive body politic weakened by fear, frustration and anger.

It found it a half-century later and the plague spread to the entire nation.

From 1924, for about a dozen years in America, it seemed the whole country was on a regular Ku Klux Klan spree. In the nation's capital, 40,000 merry Klansmen paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in full regalia. In Chicago, 1,500 college students made Klan robes and hoods their prom costume. In New York, a brisk-selling piano roll was titled: "Daddy Swiped the Last Clean Sheet."

Depression cuts into ranks

Almost as abruptly, the orgy was over.

By 1930, under the Depression's dour dictates, Klan membership fell to fewer than 30,000.

Once again, however, the Ku Klux Klan was not dead.

Its last and, we are now told, final resurrection followed the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation. No social earthquake since Reconstruction had so shaken the South, and there was nothing remotely jocular about the Klan's reappearance.

In the 10 years after the court decision, the Justice Department blamed the Klan for at least a dozen killings, 70 bombings, 30 church burnings by arson, many others by "causes unknown."

When the Klan was in full howl in Dixie, beatings were so frequent most were unreported. Bombings were routine. While the mayor of Natchez, Miss., was out pleading with the Klan for peace, his house exploded. At Klan picnics in Louisiana, a faction called the Silver Dollar Group kept sharp by dynamiting stumps while the women cooked catfish.

The Louisiana Klan took on a less-coarse look, even slick, when David Duke of New Orleans took over as wizard in the mid-'70s. Duke was a college graduate who targeted "other intellectuals" as recruits. He shunned hoods and sheets, wore a suit and tie and called himself national director rather than wizard. He was twice elected as a Republican to the state Legislature.

A lot has changed. Here in Pulaski, birthplace of the original Klan, some are noteworthy.

After the Klan was reborn, the United Daughters of the Confederacy proudly installed a 2-foot-square bronze memorial plaque in Pulaski next to the front door of the place of its original birth, officially designated as a historic site.

A few years ago. a new owner of the building quietly, without announcement, unbolted and reversed the plaque so it faces the wall. That's one change.

Still, for old times' sake, remnant diehard members of what's left of the Klan come to Pulaski once a year for a march around the square. But at a recent march every storekeeper on the square closed, shut down the town in silent protest. That's another.

One more:

Last January Pulaski started its own annual observance on Martin Luther King Day. The direction of the march is reversed.