Cops to KKK: Help not needed

Updated: 5-year old dies in boating mishap
July 31, 2016
Virges France
August 2, 2016
Updated: 5-year old dies in boating mishap
July 31, 2016
Virges France
August 2, 2016

Sweet wisps of jasmine scent floated on a lazy Sunday morning breeze as a cheerful mother of two stepped out of her Mulberry subdivision home, bound for the Rouses Epicurean Center to buy breakfast treats, when her eyes caught something white and rectangular in the driveway.

She squinted at a single-page flier in a clear plastic bag of rice grains, noticing the large letters at the bottom.


“Patriotic Brigade Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”

“I thought it was scary,” she later said. “I don’t want anyone putting something hateful on our property. I felt uneasy that someone had placed that.”

At churches, on telephones and in particular on social media forums, the leafletting was a hot topic, as members of the mostly-white, middle class subdivision tried to figure out who had left the fliers, which urged “men and women of courage” to join the cause of thwarting the Black Lives Matter movement and the New Black Panther Party, and why they chose Mulberry.


“We must unite white America. Stop these animals. Run

them out of our towns before they kill your sons and daughters,” reads the flyer, which on the back states “Neighborhood watch. You can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake!”

Leaders of the group that distributed the fliers say there is no need for fear. They describe themselves as a benevolent, defensive organization that seeks to inform and protect.


“The early 1960s was a bad time for the Klan, the Klan did bad things,” said James Dawson, Imperial Wizard of the Patriotic Brigade Knights. “That is not the Klan we are. We are promoting more the traditional, early concept of the Klan, doing charitable work like the Masons and the Shriners.”

Long-time Klan watchers and local civil rights advocates, however, are not convinced and scoff at the suggestion of a kinder, gentler Ku Klux Klan.

“The message is still the same,” said Jerome Boykin, president of the Terrebonne Parish NAACP. “They are a bunch of racists. This is how they formed their organization, by burning black people, being against civil rights, being against races associating with each other. If that isn’t evil, I don’t know what evil is. They are cowards who hide behind sheets. How can you be anything but a racist when you base everything on race?”


Rejection of the Klan group’s message is not limited by race, not to the neighborhood where the fliers appear.

A family that lives in the Broadmoor subdivision, upon learning of local recruitment efforts, posted an anti-Klan photograph on Facebook, making clear their belief that the organization has no place in Houma.

“The idea that they thought we were a good target audience was offensive,” said Raegan Crepell, whose children and a nephew appear in the photo bearing anti-Klan signs. “We are not a recruitment ground for their organization. We are not interested. I try to teach my kids that as human beings we have to stand up against hate and injustice. This is our way of saying we are not afraid of you.”


HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

With its frightful imagery and cultural icons the Ku Klux Klan — in various incarnations and manifestations — long ago became synonymous with racial hatred and domestic terror in the national consciousness. Klan members murdered civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner during Mississippi’s fateful Freedom Summer in 1964; That same year, the Mississippi Knights of the KKK firebombed no less than 20 prominent black churches; the year before that members of a KKK group firebombed Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four little girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair.

The most terrifying aspect of Klan activity during the Civil Rights era were the well-documented alliances between Klan groups and members of local governments, particularly in the south. Beneath the pointed hoods that are a trademark of the group were the faces of police officers and politicians, claiming as their own the crossed blue bars on the red field recognized as the Confederate battle flag. While much smaller than the organizations of the civil rights era and before, Klan groups are still seen as breeding grounds for violence and hate by advocates who have devoted their lives to studying, tracking and fighting the movement.


“Although Klan violence is nowhere near what it was during Reconstruction, during the 1920s or the 1960s, the violence remains,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center. “In 2015 a Klansman from upstate New York was sent to prison for plotting to build an X-Ray weapon to kill hundreds and even thousands of Muslims. He was fairly close.”

Potok, whose group charts activities of the Klans and other organizations they deem to be “hate groups,” said that in 2014 the SPLC’s official count of Klan groups stood at 72 nationally but that the number in 2015 had risen to 190.

“Some of it is not real,” said Potok. “Very often in the Klan world one group shuts down and its members go to two or three other groups, so you have the same Klansmen shifting from one group to the other. But there was also some real growth.”


CHARLESTON BACKLASH

Attacks on the Confederate Battle Flag following the massacre of nine black people at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Potok reasons, was one reason for growth. Dylann Roof, accused as the Charleston gunman, had no affiliation with the Klan but was believed self-radicalized through Internet studies.

“The other thing that happened last year and even more relates directly is the rise of Black Lives Matter,” Potok said. “That has energized not only Klan groups but other radical right wing groups, especially since the shootings of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge. They are essentially making hay while the sun shines.”


The presidential candidacy of Republican nominee Donald Trump, Potok said, has also energized hate groups whose members say the billionaire businessman speaks messages they have carried all along. Former Louisiana state representative David Duke, a former Klan leader, has said as much after declaring his own run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by David Vitter R-La.

Klan groups have traditionally had autonomy, and differing missions and philosophies among them, although core values are essentially the same, experts agree.

The Patriotic Brigade organization, responsible for the leafletting in Mulberry, is a small, new group, said Carla Hill, a researcher with the New York based Anti-Defamation League, which investigates and tracks hate groups.


“They are new, they are small,” said Hill, who confirms the existence of a Louisiana group, or “realm,” of the Texas-based organization, along with realms in Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas. “The Louisiana membership is new.”

She does not brand the group as dangerous, especially, while noting the propensity of Klan members in general for violent acts.

“They mingle with their own and try to recruit others to join in their thought process,” is how she describes what she knows of the Patriotic Brigade’s activities.


IN THEIR OWN WORDS

A Facebook page and a Web site confirmed as official in interviews with group leaders include mention of last week’s leafletting activities. Imperial Wizard James Dawson requested that 1,000 fliers, which could be downloaded by those wishing to participate, be distributed in each realm.

The concerted effort was officially called a “night ride,” whose 21st Century twist was dissemination of information rather than the turn of a hangman’s noose.


“We get a lot of phone calls, a lot of positive feedback and negative feedback, people love you or they hate you,” Dawson said, explaining that current events supply plenty of reason for what he describes as the protective and defensive activities his group offers.

“The New Black Panthers are ordering the execution of whites everywhere,” said Dawson who claims 17 states within his empire. “Americans have had enough and they are our biggest recruiting tool. Black groups in the US got their equality, now they want supremacy. They want to turn the tables. The Confederate flag was taken down in South Carolina because a kid went to a church and murdered people. Black soldiers fought for the Confederate flag during the Civil War, it is the flag of rebellion in the south, a symbol of southern heritage.”

Dawson condemned Roof’s actions, along with the lowering of the flags. He was asked why, in consideration of the Klan’s legacy of violence and hate, anyone would wish to perpetuate the name, Dawson acknowledged that the brand has some value.


“It already has an image that attracts attention even if they are just curios,” Dawson said. “The name makes a lot of people squeamish. But once they meet us and hang out with us they realize that we are not monsters. Attacking black people and lynching, that is not what the Klan is about. It is unfortunate that it happened.”

LOUISIANA VOICE

The Grand Dragon of the Louisiana Realm, who refused to identify himself by name and referred to himself as the “security director,” was directly involved with the flier distributions in Louisiana last week, although he was not in Terrebonne Parish that night.


“They are designed so that when we put it in a driveway it doesn’t fly into the street, it doesn’t become a littering hazard,” he said. “It is just a friendly reminder that we are here. We are patrolling, helping law enforcement, being an extra set of eyes.”

The Grand Dragon lamented lack of media coverage about his organization’s good works.

“We donate to schools … I don’t know how much we have donated to schools and hospitals. We help people who have trouble on the road,” he said. “I have stopped from my work and helped people change tires. If we are riding through a neighborhood and see someone breaking into a vehicle we are going to call law enforcement. We are not the law by any means.”


Asked as well why people who profess doing good would claim the name of an organization with blood on its hands, the Louisiana Klansman said, “Why start an organization that nobody knows what the name is when you have the same beliefs? We are taking and trying to restore the good name of it.”

Asked if the name of one Bourg man, supplied by intelligence sources, is a member of his group, the security director said he is not.

He also acknowledged that his organization, like others, can be vulnerable to people using its name while not being true to its principles.


He — and Dawson — spoke of earlier incarnations of the Klan, stressing the benevolent nature of those organizations. While it is true that, particularly in hardscrabble Reconstruction times, the Klans may have fed the poor and provided other community services, there remains an ample record of violence, particularly directed toward blacks.

Claims by leaders that they want to help law enforcement were brushed aside — and outright rejected — by local officials.

“I would tell them we don’t want your help,” said Terrebonne Parish Sheriff Jerry Larpenter. “I don’t know what help they could give anyway. I don’t know what they could offer other than hatred and racism. And I don’t know if any of this would be more than one or two people looking for attention.”


Houma Police Chief Dana Coleman said he does not see where the organization would be useful for anything beyond what his department already asks of residents, that they report crimes or suspicious activity, something the Klan group says is all it plans to do.

WEB SITE SLURS

Dismissed as “eyewash” by the SPLC’s Mark Potok, the Patriotic Knights’ claim of a kinder, gentler Klan appears supported by a Web site that does not outwardly advocate violence, but within its pages makes ample use of a racial epithet when describing blacks and perpetuates stereotypes of a Jewish-controlled news media.


Links in the site — rife with Bible passages in one area — lead to other sites full of racial invective.

Support for law enforcement, long a seemingly innocuous draw for right-wing groups like the John Birch Society, is expressed as part of the platform. But anti-Klan advocates like Potok say the glitter of popular ideals and Christian ideology are a mere draw, allowing the weak to be suckered in to the deeper and darker philosophies that Klan members espouse.

Even if not encouraged by their fellows or leaders, “lone wolf” fringe people may be emboldened by Klan presence and messages. Potok points to a list of violent acts by Klansmen or sympathizers as proof of that.


“I don’t believe the Klan has really changed,” Potok said.

Madison and Kennedy Creppell, their cousin Jacob Pirkey and brother Carter stand in front of their Broadmoor home with signs denouncing recruitment efforts in Houma by a Ku Klux Klan group, which they and their mother, Raegen Creppell, posted on Facebook.

COURTESY


This photo, posted to the Facebook page of the Patriotic Brigade Knights of the Ku Klux Klan June 19, is headlined “Afternoon with Louisiana Brothers.” The Texas-based group claims to have members in Louisiana, including Terrebonne Parish.

COURTESY