Ku Klux Klan

WASHINGTON - An advertisement that a leading abortion-rights organization began running on national television yesterday, opposing Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. as one "whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans," quickly became the first flash point in the three-week-old confirmation process. Several prominent abortion-rights supporters and a neutral media watchdog group called the ad misleading and unfair, and a conservative group quickly took to the airwaves with an ad countering it. The 30-second spot - which NARAL Pro-Choice America is spending $500,000 to place on the Fox and CNN cable networks, and on broadcast stations in Maine and Rhode Island over the next two weeks - focuses on an argument Roberts made to the Supreme Court in an abortion-related case in the early 1990s, when he was principal deputy solicitor general working in the administration of the first President Bush.

GIVE Janet S. Owens credit. The Anne Arundel County executive said she was prepared to end a volunteer cleanup program rather than allow the Ku Klux Klan to participate and receive a county road sign bearing its name. Not everyone agrees with her tack. An American Civil Liberties Union attorney decried the Klan's ability to shut the program even as the ACLU defended the right of the racist group to participate. Some African-American leaders also felt the KKK should have been allowed to show their faces while doing some good for a change.

In 1994, Loyola College theologian Charles Marsh left Baltimore to return to his childhood home in Mississippi. It was a trip made, at least initially, as a scholarly enterprise.Marsh was journeying back to the Deep South to write a book about different images of God that once battled beneath the surface of the civil rights movement. His focus was 1964, the year the first Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of Ku Klux Klan was crowned and the civil rights movement saw one of its deadliest summers.

Rights that protect hate groups safeguard everyone's freedoms Two recent letters criticized the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for its efforts to protect free speech and privacy ("Protecting hate and guns fosters a killing society," Aug. 24). Both letters suggested that the ACLU is somehow responsible for recent acts of violence throughout the county. The ACLU, like most citizens, was horrified by these acts of terror. In no way do we support the doctrines behind these violent acts or these hateful actions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Ku Klux Klan will make a swing through Mount Airy as part of an 11-town, three-month membership drive that is expected to culminate with an Ocean City rally on July 4."We want to let the folks in Mount Airy know what the Klan is all about, that we are against drug abuse, child molestation, rapists and all of that stuff," said Dale Reeves, an officer with the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. "We just want to let people see what we're against and what we condone."What the white supremacist group condones, however, is far more than a world free of child abuse, drug addiction and rape, says a former vice president for the Carroll County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.