As Barack Obama’s presidential win stirs up race hate in the US, RALPH infiltrates America’s gun-toting white supremacists.
In America, authorities are worried the election of President Barack Obama will help
the Ku Klux Klan and other militant white-power factions grow stronger than ever.
Group leaders believe that the first black US leader proves Klan
nightmares have come true, and they will use Obama’s historic
win as a recruiting tool to gain thousands of new members.
Ron Laytner is the first and only photojournalist in 150 years to enter the Klan and convince them to take off their hoods. With membership on the rise and direct
threats against Obama,
RALPH goes undercover with Laytner, the first man to be invited into the KKK’s inner sanctum.
Night Rider
They came for me at 3am.
In a deserted parking lot behind my hotel in Houston,
Texas, I was blindfolded and put in the back of an old high-powered car.
My driver had a pistol sticking out from his belt as he reported in by two-way radio – “Car five and pick-up heading to meeting.”
I was given instructions. I was
not to talk to anyone whose photo
I was about to take. I was to obey any order given. Above all, I was not to make anyone nervous.
The car stopped. A flashlight
was turned on me and a City of Houston
police officer removed my blindfold. Silently, he searched me in case I was concealing a tape recorder.
He was the scariest cop
I’d ever seen. Over his head he wore the hood of the
Ku Klux Klan, the secret terror organisation which dates back to the American Civil War.
His face was hidden, his badge and the identifying numbers on his police car covered. Soon, we were joined by an anonymous member of the Sheriff’s Department in Galveston, Texas, also a Klansman.
The pre-dawn meeting was the highlight of two weeks of night riding with the Texas KKK. It was also the Klan’s way of showing me their power.
Same smell, different shit
I’d been secretly approached by the Klan with an offer. They had
a message for the world. To get
this message across, they’d be willing for the first time to make major concessions to their century-old policy of secrecy.
The message from the KKK turned out to be both an admission of defeat and the announcement of
a new battle and purpose.
It had been decided by the new, younger leaders that black people in America “are here to stay”, that the Klan had temporarily given up its battle against the integration of blacks into American society.
The burning issue of the Klan in 1972 was the threat to America of
a “world communist conspiracy”.
I would be allowed to photograph night riders and even members of Texas police departments who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan.
I was warned, however, that law-enforcement members of the Klan would be nervous about having their identities revealed, that they faced losing their jobs and possible prison terms if their KKK association ever became known.
So for two weeks, I entered the night world of the Ku Klux Klan.
I found out that when the modern Klansman leaves his construction, automechanic or service station job at the end of the day, he enters a world of espionage, terrorism and counter-intelligence activity.
Welcome to the KBI – the Klan Bureau of Intelligence. The KKK member who might have a blue-collar job by day can spend his
off-hours infiltrating suspected communist front organisations, or terrorising leftists, socialists and liberals – all members, according
to the Klan, of a massive army of subversives trying to take over the US. And the battle between right and left in Houston had been marked by bombings, shootings, beatings and burnings – many of them attributed to the Klan.
Fallen Hero
My contact in the Houston Klan was Louis Beam Jr, a Vietnam war hero and holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Soon after returning from Vietnam, Beam gained notoriety when he charged into a crowd of 500 anti-war demonstrators in Houston and seized a Viet Cong flag they were carrying. The 70kg war hero was rescued by police. “They had to arrest me,” he said, “but they really wanted to shake my hand.”
Beam was very fond of his M60 machinegun, which fired 750 rounds per minute in Vietnam and allowed him to run up one of the highest body counts of any US helicopter gunner in the war. He still liked guns.
“I keep several
weapons in my house. I have one by the door, one in the bedroom and I always have
a weapon in my car. I won’t drive my car without one.”
When I met him, he was a 27-year-old Texas uni student, hoping to become a lawyer. He was also an officer in the Houston Ku Klux Klan and an active member of the KBI.
At the time, the war hero was attending meetings of the Klan and university classes under the weight of two State of Texas grand juries
in connection with the bombing
of a liberal Houston radio station. Beam didn’t believe Texas had grounds for a case against him and later, just
as he had predicted, the indictments were dropped.
“After I got home from the war,” Beam told me, “the whole climate of the US had changed. Before I went over to fight, most of the people seemed behind us soldiers, but when I returned the majority of Americans were against us, against the war as a whole.”
