INQUIRY INTO KU KLUX KLAN

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30712, 30 March 1965, Page 13

INQUIRY INTO KU KLUX KLAN

(N.Z.P.A.- Reuter —Copyright? WASHINGTON, March 29. A formal investigation into the Ku Klux Klan is expected to be authorised next week by the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities. The Justice Department is planning sharp legal measures to stamp out terror tactics of the Klan. Legislation now being drawn up is expected to provide penalties to prevent the intimidation of Negroes, bar Klansmen wearing their ghost-like garb, and outlaw the burning of crosses.

In Atlanta, Georgia, leaders of the Klan in Georgia and Alabama asked President Johnson to meet them to discuss accusations he made against their organisation in a speech on Friday. A telegram to the President asking for a conference was signed by Calvin Craig, Georgia, “Grand Dragon” of the United Klans, and Robert Shelton, “Imperial Wizard of the United Klans,” who comes from Alabama.

The Klan, founded in 1866, has an estimated 48,000 to 65,000 members. Its members wear white hoods and robes in ceremonial events and have long been feared by Negroes as the leaders of white racist supremists. INNOCENT START The Klan sprang from innocent beginnings in Tennessee at the end of the Civil War and took its name from the Greek word kuklos —circle. But it spread rapidly and soon turned to violence.

Victims were newly-freed Negroes, many of whom believed the dreaded hooded figures were ghosts of Confederate soldiers killed in battle. Soon, the Klan grouns rampaged over the South, flogging, lynching and burning. Fiery crosses appeared at the scenes of violence. In 1916, the society was revived and broadened to deal drastically with Jews and Roman Catholics as well as Negroes.

Some estimates put active I sympathisers of the Klan at i between 16,000 to 20,000. The leader of an anti-racial < discrimination movement, Mr 1 Benjamin Epstein, national I director of the Jewish B’nai i B’rtih, warned the Klan was planning to go underground. 1 He said Klan members were ' reorganising into gun clubs. f Some were ready to in- , corporate their organisation , into a church. ‘ There were already 42 gun ] clubs in Alabama, acting as , fronts for Klan activities, he added. I In Meridian, Mississippi, 1 two Negro churches were at-' 1

tacked by fire bombs yesterday. Police were called to one church when a neighbour saw four men in a car throw a bottle filled with kerosene at it. The flames were put out there, but the front of the other church was badly damaged. In Detroit yesterday, the Vice-President, Mr Hirbert Humphrey, visited the family of Mrs Viola Liuzzo, the civil rights worker who was shot to death in Alabama last week. A Negro witness to the killing, Leroy Moton, is being held at Dallas County gaol in “protective custody.”