Ku Klux

An artist whose prints of Ku Klux Klansmen caused a community outcry has withdrawn his work from a showing at Harford Community College.The drawings, several of which showed hooded and robed Klansmen, prompted an emergency meeting of the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.

W. HORACE CARTER, 88 Newspaper publisher, editor W. Horace Carter, a North Carolina newspaper publisher and editor whose crusades against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s earned him a Pulitzer Prize, died Wednesday at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in North Carolina after suffering a heart attack one week ago. Mr. Carter's paper, the Tabor City Tribune, and the nearby Whiteville News Reporter shared the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service...

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.

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.

More than a dozen Anne Arundel politicians and civic leaders of both parties gathered at an Annapolis church yesterday to denounce a planned Ku Klux Klan rally."

A Baltimore Circuit Court judge, who accepted guilty pleas from two members of the Guardian Angels charged with assault, has compared the self-styled crime fighting group to the Ku Klux Klan.An angry Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Angels, said last night that he is thinking about pulling the Angels out of Baltimore. "We may have to leave," he said. It would be the second time the unarmed "safety patrols" left Baltimore amid controversy.Two Guardian Angels and two former members pleaded guilty to charges of assault and false imprisonment yesterday, the third day of their trial before Judge David B. Mitchell.

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.

Inside the modest Silver Spring home Daryl Davis shares with his two cats, Spanky and Miss Ann, the walls speak of passions and paradox.Davis is a 39-year-old black boogie-woogie pianist with a five-piece band that plays 200 gigs a year. Photos from his music career crowd one wall, pictures of Davis with musical heroes like Muddy Waters and Little Richard.On another wall, a visitor finds a shrine of sorts to Linda Evans, the night-time soap goddess of the '80s.The pictures of Davis jamming with celebrities such as Chuck Berry and Bill Clinton have a definite pop culture cachet.

A one-time volunteer for former presidential candidate Ross Perot who was dismissed from the staff for alleged ties to the Ku Klux Klan has lost his bid to sue the campaign for slander.The Court of Special Appeals ruled yesterday that Lawrence Way of Middletown failed to show any harm from his 1992 dismissal as Perot's volunteer coordinator in Frederick County."Way failed to offer or even suggest the existence of any evidence of damages," the intermediate appeals court ruled.Way, 59, a former mayor of Burkittsville and a 1990 candidate for Frederick County commissioner, said he is weighing an appeal to the Court of Appeals.

A flustered Baltimore councilwoman insisted yesterday that she did not mean to compare the Nation of Islam to the Ku Klux Klan but stopped short of issuing the apology her black colleagues demanded.Rodney A. Orange, president of the Baltimore branch of theNAACP, said the remarks would only serve to inflame "the tensions in the community now between the black and Jewish communities."He asked for a complete retraction. But Ms. Spector said she could not do so because her remarks had been misinterpreted.

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - The long-awaited murder trial of Edgar Ray Killen got under way yesterday with attorneys for both sides acknowledging to a racially diverse jury that the 80-year-old defendant was a member of the Ku Klux Klan when three civil rights workers were killed in 1964. But the difference in the opening statements was that state Attorney General James Hood wants jurors to believe that Killen, a former high-ranking state leader of the white supremacist group, was responsible for seeing that "troublemakers" targeted for "elimination" were murdered.

The Informant: The FBI, The Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo By Gary May. Yale University Press. 432 pages. $35. Gary Thomas Rowe Jr. was the FBI's man on the inside of the Klan. Inside and up close. Very close. Rowe had a knack for being in the vicinity of just about every conflagration of racial violence in the virulently segregated Alabama of the early 1960s. He was around for beatings, bombings, ultimately even murder. Many in the FBI, including J. Edgar Hoover himself, considered Rowe an incomparable asset in the war against racist extremists.

WASHINGTON - Some people say unsolved civil rights-era murder cases should be left alone. The quest for long-delayed justice, they say, is not worth the reopening of those old social wounds. For others among us, those wounds never healed. Forty years have passed, for example, since Freedom Summer, but I still vividly remember the massive project to register blacks in the South to vote. The Constitution had granted blacks the right to vote almost 100 years earlier, but that radical notion had not taken hold in the South.

"Carry Me Home," by Diane McWhorter. Simon and Schuster. 701 pages. $35. Within the next month or so, two spent old Ku Klux Klansmen will go on trial for the most monstrous act of violence committed during the civil rights revolution, the 1963 bombing that killed four children in a Birmingham, Ala., church. Most likely, the trial will receive only cursory news coverage and defensive Birmingham residents already are dismissing the whole affair as something "unfortunate" that happened in the distant past, of little relevance to a dynamic industrial city in the New South.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court asked the Justice Department yesterday for advice on the legality of barring the Ku Klux Klan from joining "adopt-a-highway" cleanup programs. The department's response is unlikely to be ready before the end of the Clinton administration, so the next president's administration will have the chance to influence the justices' action. The court's order seemed to signal that the justices have an interest in the Klan's claim that it has a free-speech right to be considered as a sponsor of highway cleanliness.

An internal investigation into a series of racial incidents at a Baltimore police station is nearly complete, and one of the officers targeted is scheduled to be promoted today. Officer Sonia Young, a 12-year veteran, served a one-day suspension after an argument with a colleague at the Southwestern District in which she was accused of labeling him a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Young is also involved in a case in which a white lieutenant remains under investigation for allegedly giving a speech with racial overtones.

Apropos of the Ku Klux Klan's re-appearance in the news, with its request for a parade permit in Elkton, we found of interest an explanation for Klan membership in this letter to the editor published in the winter 1992 issue of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, which is a publication of the Indiana Historical Society:"The reminiscences in the Winter 1991 Traces entitled 'H.L. Mencken and the Indiana Genii,' and 'A Gentleman of the Press in Skirts: Janet Flanner and the New Yorker,' bring back a plethora of memories."

Residents of Savage are voicing contempt and concern after they found leaflets recruiting members for a white separatist group on the front lawns of several homes in the southern Howard County suburb this week."

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.

Racially charged fliers with invitations to join the Ku Klux Klan were left on North Laurel driveways over the weekend, leaving residents upset and angry.Several dozen leaflets from an organization identifying itself as the Invincible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were apparently rolled up with rubber bands and randomly delivered to area homes Saturday.The letter made an appeal to residents who "believe in White pride and God and want to see this county put back into the hands of honest law-abiding people," and it asked them to join the national organization, based in Rocky Ridge.