Klux

WMAR-TV said "operator error" was responsible for a sudden change in the "Geraldo" program Tuesday. A show on women members of the Ku Klux Klan was stopped about five minutes after it started; the rest of the hour was filled with a show about survivors who forgive murderers of their relatives.Emily Barr, chief of programming at Channel 2, said that the Klan show had aired last week, but that the tape was played again Tuesday by mistake. When the error was discovered, the Klan show was pulled and replaced by the correct tape.

City police investigators examined yesterday the computer hard drive used by a white commander accused of ordering a black sergeant to watch online Ku Klux Klan videos, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Sterling Clifford, a spokesman for the Police Department and the mayor's office, said that the police commissioner briefed Mayor Sheila Dixon on Monday night and yesterday morning on a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint stemming from the alleged incident, but he declined to comment further on the matter.

A bipartisan, multiracial group of about three dozen legislators met yesterday in the State House to protest plans by the Ku Klux Klan to rally today in Annapolis.At a news conference sponsored by the Legislative Black Caucus, House Speaker Casper R. Taylor Jr. denounced the Klan as a "small band of bigots consumed by hatred."Del. C. Anthony Muse, a caucus member from Prince George's County, said counterdemonstrators should not be provoked by the Klan. "We cannot fight hatred with hatred.

HAGERSTOWN-- --Princeton Young attended Hagerstown's segregated schools until he was in the seventh grade and remembers integrating the city's five-and-dime store in the early 1960s. The city didn't have a single African-American police officer or postman when he was growing up, Young recounted, and because he is black, he was not permitted to ride the school bus.

WMAR-TV said "operator error" was responsible for a sudden change in the "Geraldo" program Tuesday. A show on women members of the Ku Klux Klan was stopped about five minutes after it started; the rest of the hour was filled with a show about survivors who forgave murderers of their relatives.Emily Barr, chief of programming at Channel 2, said that the Klan show had aired last week, but that the tape was played again Tuesday by mistake. When the error was discovered, the Klan show was pulled and replaced by the correct tape.

THE BODY OF Emmett Till, murdered in Mississippi 50 years ago for allegedly whistling at a white woman, was exhumed this month for an autopsy, part of the Justice Department's decision to re-examine that ancient case. And today, Edgar Ray Killen, called "Preacher" by his colleagues in the Ku Klux Klan, is scheduled to go on trial in a Mississippi courtroom in connection with the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. His prosecution, like the Till investigation, is part of what David Halberstam calls "little Nurembergs," the reopening of the civil rights era's cold cases in an effort to bring closure to the victims' families and send the message that racially motivated murder will never be permitted.

Robert M. Shelton, 73, longtime head of a Ku Klux Klan faction that once claimed 40,000 members, died Monday at a hospital in Tuscaloosa, Ala. He was once imperial wizard of United Klans of America Inc., considered the largest Klan faction in its heyday. He traveled the South in cars and planes speaking to white supremacist groups. He briefly went to federal prison in 1969 for refusing to release Klan membership rolls to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1979, 20 members of his United Klans were indicted in connection with racial violence in east Alabama, resulting in 13 convictions, according to a history of the organization compiled by the Anti-Defamation League.

Having infuriated nobody much except the U.S. Naval Academy, its commanding officers, and by extension the entire Navy family on land and sea around the globe, Dr. Carol Burke heaves a sigh familiar to anyone who has ever had a mother.It's a sigh that says, "Boys will be boys. But why?"She's an authority on such matters. Dr. Burke, now associate dean of arts and sciences at the Johns Hopkins University, taught English and directed the writing center at the Naval Academy for seven years, ending in the spring of 1991.

NONE OF US really knows why Gene Newport, an Annapolis Ku Klux Klan member, built a Klansman snow figure in his front yard recently. The most frightening possibility, of course, is that he maliciously intended to intimidate blacks and all the other ethnic and religious groups the KKK despises.It's quite plausible, however, that Mr. Newport's thought process wasn't that sophisticated. Being a self-described "creative person," he didn't want to build an ordinary snowman. So, in his quest for alternatives, he apparently gravitated toward a figure that is an integral part of his daily life.

MOUNT AIRY -- A citizens group formed after the Ku Klux Klan announced it would recruit members here will sponsor a rally Saturday to celebrate the town's diversity, organizers said.For Midge Thomas, who grew up and still lives in the black community of Dorseytown just north of town, the rally is a way to show her opposition to a group that has hurt her family.When she was a child, Ms. Thomas said, Klan members burned down her grandfather's blacksmith shop. She remembers the bucket brigade that family and friends formed to try to put out the fire.

THE BODY OF Emmett Till, murdered in Mississippi 50 years ago for allegedly whistling at a white woman, was exhumed this month for an autopsy, part of the Justice Department's decision to re-examine that ancient case. And today, Edgar Ray Killen, called "Preacher" by his colleagues in the Ku Klux Klan, is scheduled to go on trial in a Mississippi courtroom in connection with the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. His prosecution, like the Till investigation, is part of what David Halberstam calls "little Nurembergs," the reopening of the civil rights era's cold cases in an effort to bring closure to the victims' families and send the message that racially motivated murder will never be permitted.

FOR MANY who are old enough to remember, the summer of 1964 was particularly poignant. It was called "Freedom Summer," in recognition of the hundreds of volunteers who went to Mississippi to register blacks to vote. But amid the hope, promise and sheer determination that prompted so many, mostly college students, to give up their summer to help reverse decades of disenfranchisement of African-Americans, came the cold reality of sacrifice: Three of those fearless workers would also give up their lives.

Robert M. Shelton, 73, longtime head of a Ku Klux Klan faction that once claimed 40,000 members, died Monday at a hospital in Tuscaloosa, Ala. He was once imperial wizard of United Klans of America Inc., considered the largest Klan faction in its heyday. He traveled the South in cars and planes speaking to white supremacist groups. He briefly went to federal prison in 1969 for refusing to release Klan membership rolls to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1979, 20 members of his United Klans were indicted in connection with racial violence in east Alabama, resulting in 13 convictions, according to a history of the organization compiled by the Anti-Defamation League.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Nearly 37 years after a bombing that horrified the nation, authorities here charged two longtime suspects with murder yesterday in the deaths of four black girls in the explosion at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. Thomas E. Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, both of whom were affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan and have been considered suspects for decades in the 1963 bombing, turned themselves in yesterday morning after being indicted by a state grand jury Tuesday.

In response to Ku Klux Klan leaflets that have been distributed throughout Ellicott City for the past five or six weeks, an Annapolis-based coalition of churches and peace groups is planning to visit Main Street Sunday to promote unity and equality.Ten to 20 members of the Unity Now Coalition will visit Main Street between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. to hold signs and pass out leaflets promoting peace, said George Law, an organizer."We don't feel there's a whole lot of room for such a degree of hatred in this day and age in this society," said Law, a member of Unity-by-the-Bay in Severna Park, a nondenominational church.

An artist whose prints of Ku Klux Klansmen caused a community outcry has withdrawn his work from a showing at Harford Community College.The drawings, several of which showed hooded and robed Klansmen, prompted an emergency meeting of the school's multicultural advisory committee Tuesday night, during which several area residents described the prints as "menacing."Dan Witmer, the artist, attended that meeting and decided Wednesday to end his show, which began July 22 and was scheduled to run through Aug. 28 in the Chesapeake Gallery.

HAGERSTOWN-- --Princeton Young attended Hagerstown's segregated schools until he was in the seventh grade and remembers integrating the city's five-and-dime store in the early 1960s. The city didn't have a single African-American police officer or postman when he was growing up, Young recounted, and because he is black, he was not permitted to ride the school bus.

FOR MANY who are old enough to remember, the summer of 1964 was particularly poignant. It was called "Freedom Summer," in recognition of the hundreds of volunteers who went to Mississippi to register blacks to vote. But amid the hope, promise and sheer determination that prompted so many, mostly college students, to give up their summer to help reverse decades of disenfranchisement of African-Americans, came the cold reality of sacrifice: Three of those fearless workers would also give up their lives.

A small group of people wearing Ku Klux Klan garb handed out fliers about white racial pride yesterday afternoon at Catherine Avenue and Mountain Road in the Green Haven neighborhood of Pasadena, area residents said.A 17-year-old girl said members of the group wore white hoods and sheets, and she saw them talking with state police officers."The lack of white pride is truly a sad and strange thing, because no group has more right to rightful pride than the white people of the world," the fliers said, according to Michael Arrington, 18, of 225th Street in Pasadena, about five blocks from where the Klan distributed the leaflets.

A bipartisan, multiracial group of about three dozen legislators met yesterday in the State House to protest plans by the Ku Klux Klan to rally today in Annapolis.At a news conference sponsored by the Legislative Black Caucus, House Speaker Casper R. Taylor Jr. denounced the Klan as a "small band of bigots consumed by hatred."Del. C. Anthony Muse, a caucus member from Prince George's County, said counterdemonstrators should not be provoked by the Klan. "We cannot fight hatred with hatred.