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The Injured Image. The Klan's operations provided tidy profits for Imperial Wizard Simmons and the publicity team of Young and Tyler, but by 1924 the Klan's great days were ending. Several states invoked anti-Klan laws; others forbade the Klan to wear masks. Corruption among the bosses and internecine battles for leadership further weakened the organization. In 1926 David Stephenson, the posturing Grand Dragon of the Indiana Realm, was convicted of murder after the lower-berth Pullman-car rape of a young woman. The Indiana affair hurt the Klan image considerably more than the castrations and lynchings that Klansmen had perpetrated in all the years before. Members resigned by the hundreds. In the '30s the Klan cuddled up to U.S. Nazis, and continued all the while to murder Negroes and "immoral" whites, chiefly in the South.
During World War II, the Klan slept again. But in 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court's school desegregation decision awakened it once more. As in the beginning, the Klan made the Southern Negro—and civil rights "agitators"—its target, and turned to dynamite bombings as its chief form of violence. Much of the Klan's terrorism is handled by goon squads with such picturesque names as "The Holy Terrors" and "The Secret Six." Such groups were held responsible for the mutilation and murder of three civil rights workers who were found in an earthen dam in Mississippi last June, for the killing of Washington, D.C., Educator Lemuel Penn in Georgia last July, and for the death of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo in Selma last month.
The Mentality. No longer a monolithic organization, the Klan today consists of several ragtag independent groups, the best known of which is the United Klans of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., headquartered in Tuscaloosa, Ala., with an ex-tire salesman named Robert Shelton as its Imperial Wizard. Estimates of Klan strength range from 10,000 to 40,000 members, many of whom for some peculiar reason seem to be rural service-station attendants. Most members, in any case, are deluded rednecks whose only skill is sharpshooting. That the FBI has infiltrated deeply into their ranks is indicated by the speed with which agents rounded up the four suspected killers of Mrs. Liuzzo.
Crushing the Klan is tougher than infiltrating it. Local Southern juries ordinarily let Klansmen off no matter what the accusation. The only federal charge that can be leveled in most cases—such as in the Liuzzo murder-deals with "denying the civil rights" of the victim, and the maximum penalty for the crime is only ten years in prison. Even though Congress might now enact legislation outlawing the Klan, the deeper problem is that the law alone can never erase the Klan mentality.
*Kleagle, Klabee, Kladd, Klaliff, Klexter, Kligrapp, Klarogo, Klokan and Klokard are officials of various sorts; Klectoken is the initiation fee; Kloran is Klan bible; Klonvokation is the Imperial legislature; Kloncilium is the Klonvokation's advisory group; Klonklave is the Klan's monthly meeting; Klorero is a state meeting; and Kludd is the chaplain.