Inside the Ku Klux Klan - Ron Laytner · Inside the Ku Klux Klan Klan leader Louis Beam races his...

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268 2 2 5 Inside the Ku Klux Klan Klan leader Louis Beam races his white horse on an early Houston morning. “NOBODY KNOWS WHERE HE is,” said another uniformed cop disguised in a Klan hood. “He could just disappear.” They came for me at three in the morning. In a deserted parking lot behind my hotel in downtown Houston, my driver, an automatic pistol sticking out from his belt, blindfolded me and placed me in the

Transcript of Inside the Ku Klux Klan - Ron Laytner · Inside the Ku Klux Klan Klan leader Louis Beam races his...

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225 Inside the Ku Klux Klan

Klan leader Louis Beam races his white horse on an early Houston morning.

“NOBODY KNOWS WHERE HE is,” said another uniformed cop disguised in a Klan hood. “He could just disappear.”

They came for me at three in the morning. In a deserted parking lot behind my hotel in downtown Houston, my driver, an automatic pistol sticking out from his belt, blindfolded me and placed me in the

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backseat of an old, high-powered car. He then reported in by two-way radio, “Car five and pickup heading to meeting.”

I was given instructions: I was not to talk to anyone whose photograph I was about to take. I was to obey any order given me, and above all, I was not to make anyone nervous.

When the car ground to a stop, a powerful flashlight was turned on me, and I began to see a City of Houston police officer removing my blindfold. Silently, he searched me in case I was concealing a tape recorder.

Carbine-carrying Klansmen with .50-caliber machine gun on fl oor

He was the most frightening policeman I had ever seen. For across his face and over his head he wore the mask and hood of the Ku Klux Klan, the secret terror organization dating back to the American Civil War.

His face was hidden, the number of his police badge was covered with masking tape, and so were the identifying numbers on his Houston police car. Soon we were joined by a masked member of the Galveston Sheriff’s Department, also a member of the Klan. They took me inside.

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I was in a room full of men carrying guns. Behind me and over my head was a banner: Kill the Jews.

A policeman asked me, “What religion are you?”“Jewish,” I said.“Nobody knows where he is,” said another cop wearing a Klan

hood. “He could just disappear.” I felt the beginnings of cold fear.“No,” said someone I soon learned was war hero Louis Beam.

“This guy’s got balls. Maybe he could start a Jewish Klan.” There was some laughter. The tension was broken.

The predawn meeting with the masked policemen was the highlight for me of a week of night-riding with the Texas Ku Klux Klan. And it was the modern-day Klan’s way of showing me the power of the secret terrorist organization.

And for me, it proved conclusively what black people have been crying out for years. There were Klansmen who were members of police departments in Texas.

I had been secretly approached by the Klan through Houston’s gorilla owner Charles Greer and made a tempting offer. The Klan, I was told, had a message for the world. To get this message across, they would be willing for the first time to make some major concessions in their century-old policy of ultra secrecy.

The message from the Ku Klux Klan turned out to be both an admission of defeat and the announcement of an entirely new battle and purpose for the organization.

I was told it had been decided by the new and younger leaders of the Ku Klux Klan that black people in America “are here to stay” that the Klan had given up for now its long battle against integration and acceptance of blacks into American society.

The Klan in 1972 was battling a new and far more dangerous enemy to America: Communism. The burning issue of the modern Klansman of the day was the grave threat to America of a “world communist conspiracy.”

I would be allowed to photograph nightriders and even reluctant members of Texas police departments who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan.

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War hero Louis Beam stands in his doorway.

I was warned, however, that police members of the Klan would be extremely nervous of having their identities revealed, that they faced losing their jobs and possible prison terms if their Klan association became known. I’d better be careful.

And so I entered the night world of the Ku Klux Klan.I discovered that in Houston at that time, when the modern

Klansman leaves his blue-collar, hard-hat construction, auto-mechanic, or service-station job at the end of the day, he enters a world of espionage, terrorism, infiltration, and counterintelligence activity.

This was the KBI, the Klan Bureau of Intelligence. The Klansman who might be a gas station attendant by day could spend his off hours infiltrating suspected Communist front organizations, terrorizing leftists, socialists, and liberals.

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They were all members, according to the Klan, of a massive army of subversives trying to take over the United States.

The battle between right and left in Houston was marked by bombings, shootings, beatings, and burnings, many of them attributed to the Klan’s Louis Beam Jr., my contact in the Houston Klan.

A Vietnam war hero, holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross, Beam’s friends in and out of the Klan considered him to be an American Super Patriot.

Shortly after returning from Vietnam, Beam gained national and international attention when he charged into a crowd of five hundred antiwar demonstrators in Houston and seized a Viet Cong flag they were carrying. The 150-pound Vietnam War hero was rescued by police.

The Grindle brothers left to right, John, Joseph, George “Rusty,” and brother-in-law William “Pete” Lofton. Joseph with a bayonet on his rifl e kept threatening to stab me, to make a “burble” in my throat.

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“They had to arrest me,” he told me, “but they really wanted to shake my hand.”

Beam was fond of his M60 machine gun, which fired 750 rounds per minute in Vietnam and allowed him to run up one of the highest personal body count scores of any American helicopter gunner in the war, over one thousand kills from the air.

He still likes guns. “I keep several weapons in my house. I have one by the door and another in the bedroom, and I always have a weapon in my car. I won’t drive without one,” he stated.

When I met him, he was a Texas University honor student, hoping to become a lawyer. He also told me that he was an officer in the Houston Ku Klux Klan and an active member of the KBI.

The winner of the Distinguished Flying Cross was attending meetings of the Klan and university classes while under indictment by two Texas grand juries in connection with the mysterious bombing of a liberal Houston radio station.

Beam didn’t believe Texas had grounds for a case against him, and later, just as he had predicted and to the exact day, the indictments were dropped.

“After I got home from the war,” the twenty-seven-year-old Beam told me, “things didn’t seem like they were before I went to Vietnam. Everything seemed different.

“The whole climate of the US had changed. Before I went over to fight, most of the people seemed behind us soldiers. But when I returned, it seemed the majority of Americans were against us, against the war as a whole.”

Shortly after Beam’s Viet Cong flag incident, he was approached by the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas.

“His name is Frank Converse, and he’s an extremely big man,” said Beam. “And yet this man is intelligent also, a very good and gentle man, and he’s not opposed to the black man either.

“Converse owned a gun shop before his leadership in the Klan was made known and before he was shut down, harassed, arrested by the federal government, and burned out of business,” said Beam.

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Beam in US Army uniform with Distinguished Flying Cross holds his Klan robe.

“He is an extremely well-educated man. When I got back from Vietnam, he told me a lot of things that astounded me. He put forth the idea to me for the first time that there was a conspiracy to bring about Socialism. That someday the government would own large businesses and banks. And he said the United Nations had a lot to do with it.

“This sounded preposterous to me. I thought there must be something wrong with this guy. But he gave me many books, and the more I read and the more I investigated, I began to believe that there actually was a conspiracy, and I decided then that the Klan was the proper organization to fight Communism.”

Beam said at first he didn’t want to join the Klan because he knew it had a bad reputation. “There’s a saying here in the South that on Saturdays the Klan goes out and hangs a nigger from a tree.” The Klan, instead, turned out to be the type of organization that some of its newer publications said it was, according to Beam.

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“Now this is not to say that the Klan doesn’t believe in white supremacy. It does. However, nowadays this is secondary. I personally am a segregationist. However, I am not prejudiced. I judge each black man on an individual basis and then make my value decision on him personally.”

He spoke to me of policemen in the Klan. “There are definitely quite a few policemen who are members of the Klan. We also have secret members of the Klan who are in city government.”

How big was the Klan in the United States in 1972? According to Beam, “The Klan in the US has almost reached the point now where we have more members in the northern states then we do in the South. Michigan is the largest Klan in the US. Our total membership is well over 100,000.”

And the new Klan has gone international. Said Beam, “We have a unit in Australia, we have one in Italy and we have one in England.

“In Canada, we have just recently opened up a brand-new Klan, up in Calgary, Alberta. Our new Klan almost overnight has become a tremendous influence on the people. It has achieved more success than I had any idea it would.”

Next evening, Beam picked me up at the hotel, and we set out together for Livingston, a few hours’ drive southwest of Houston.

John Grindle, thirty-one, gas station owner, white Anglo Saxon Protestant, staunch member of the Texas Ku Klux Klan, was sitting on the edge of his desk in Livingston.

In one hand he held a big, black Bible. In the other he held a hair-trigger semiautomatic rifle. On his head he wore a western hat with a Confederate flag. I felt nervous around him.

He spoke of God and love, but on the John Grindle and son

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wall behind him was a yellow Klan bumper sticker of hate. It listed as “signs of the anti-Christ” peace movements, the United Nations, Jews, and Communism.

A giant American flag was pinned on the wall next to the restrooms, and beside an assortment of Confederate flags was a badge sticker saying “Friend of Police.” A collection of loaded rifles and shotguns stood in various corners around the room.

Staring down from its place of honor was a glass-covered colored portrait of the imperial grand wizard of the United Klans of America, Robert Shelton, complete with a fiery cross in the background.

Actual Klan enrollment application

Beam had been excited about our trip to Livingston, loading up his semiautomatic carbine in his car and laying in a supply of ammunition after hearing KBI reports that black militants had been seen driving around the Grindle gas station in the little town.

But when we got there, the only black people around the gas station were the drivers and occupants of out-of-state cars who dropped in for gasoline. They received quiet, and not unfriendly, service from the Confederate-flagged attendants.

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Beneath a picture of the grand dragon, John Grindle chatted respectfully with a black father while his son visited the restroom.

“I have belonged to the Klan for a good while,” said John Grindle. “And I really and sincerely believe it is the last chance for a free and Christian world.

“And what a lot of people don’t stop to think, when I call myself a Klansman, they say, ‘Well, he does this.’ But they’re wrong. I belong to the Klan because I can do some good for my country, but I’m not appreciated.”

“The local newspaper ran a story on me and said I was a cancer in the community and should be removed. Can you imagine that? A cancer! It really hurt me to have such a thing said.”

The rest of the week was spent visiting Klan homes with Louis Beam. He was welcome anywhere we went. Klan mothers made cornbread biscuits, apple pie, and loved showing me their Klan uniforms.

Epilogue: Almost every Klansman I photographed who gave his permission to be identified lost everything he owned. His business or home was burned out. He was fined or sent to jail by the FBI.

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Three generations—Grandpa with gun stuck in his belt

The Klansmen I met were dangerous to their enemies but totally loyal to their friends and actually believed they were defending America.

My story ran all over the world and was syndicated in three Texas newspapers. But after it ran, they were warned to never run my stories again or risk daily police tickets on all their cars and trucks and no cooperation on news stories.

I lost those papers and didn’t go into Texas again for many years.A few years later, an FBI task force gave lie detector tests to every

policeman in Texas, resulting in the firing and resignations of more than two hundred Klan member cops and high-ranking police officials.

I managed to track down Louis Beam a few years later when he was organizing American fishermen to fight and terrorize Vietnamese

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immigrants who were taking over the shrimp trade off the coast of Louisiana.

He told me the Klan experiment with me had failed, that black militants attacked and burned down the businesses and homes of the Klansmen identified.

Beam went on to become a grand dragon in the Ku Klux Klan. His name was briefly associated with Timothy McVeigh, the American terrorist who was executed for blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He was last

reported to be living somewhere in Mexico.An official of the US Anti-Defamation League told me, “Beam is

a brilliant man who went bad. I hear he is sick these days. He won’t be missed.”

The Klan Today

In America today, the Klan has been trying legal means to promote its agendas. Klansmen have rallies at which no one wears secret hoods. They have open barbecue parties and promote charities.

When they have marches, they are often in fear of being attacked by black militants.

In 1981, when a black man was not convicted of killing a white policeman in Mobile, Alabama, two Klansmen drove around looking for a random victim and hanged eighteen-year-old Michael Donald.

His mother won a judgment of seven million dollars in court, which bankrupted the United Klans of America (the group I had photographed). One of the Klansmen killers was electrocuted in 1997, and the other is still in prison.

Last known picture of Louis Beam