An Alachua County Sheriff’s Office corrections officer who admitted to being an active member of the Ku Klux Klan has been fired.
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Residents came out of their house to find large white letters saying “KKK” on the concrete.
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A state judge ruled that a Bogalusa-area man is now competent to stand trial in connection with the killing of a woman who reportedly tried to back out of a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony in St. Tammany Parish.
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Multiple news organizations reported that the KKK was considering the march in response to Ole Miss Chancellor Dan Jones’ order for the Ole Miss band to discontinue playing “From Dixie with Love.” Jones issued his order after students refused to stop chanting the “the South will rise again” during the song.
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A woman and her son returned home to find “KKK” carved into their front door.
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Several police officers and officials converged on a high school after bomb-making materials were confiscated from a student’s home. Mark Mentzer, the alleged ringleader, talked about white power and joining the KKK.
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Michael Conklin, 18, allegedly shot a Latino teenager three times with a BB gun while wearing a shirt with racist insignias.
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The United White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan peppered white neighborhoods in Abilene, Texas with around 400 copies of a leaflet denouncing non-white immigration and interracial dating.
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The nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor, who would become the court’s first Hispanic if confirmed, has been met by a cacophony of right-wing attack dogs sounding a single furious note: “Racist!”

Reacting to Sotomayor’s membership in the Latino rights organization National Council of La Raza and comments she has made on her judging, radio fulminator Rush Limbaugh compared her to KKK leader David Duke, suggesting she is a “reverse racist.” William Gheen, president of the nativist extremist group Americans for Legal Immigration, called her a “brown or Hispanic supremacist.” Former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, the Colorado Republican and one-time presidential candidate who long headed the far-right Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, attacked Sotomayor for her membership in La Raza, which he said was a “Latino KKK.” Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich described the high court nominee on Twitter as a “Latina woman racist” and said she should withdraw.

Now comes the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist hate group which has called black people a “retrograde species of humanity,” with its own special addition: a computer-generated “photo” of “whitey-hating” Sotomayor in Klan robes that fits in well with the tenor of the more “mainstream” attacks from politicians, pundits and nativist leaders.

That’s par for the course for the gutturally racist CCC, which is descended from the White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s that battled school desegregation. Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court Justice, once referred to that group as “the uptown Klan.”

Despite the furious comments from people like Tancredo, La Raza is hardly a racist group — indeed, it is a thoroughly mainstream human rights organization.

As to her comments, Sotomayor is being attacked for saying in a 2001 university lecture that she “would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white man who hasn’t lived that life.” President Obama said earlier this week that Sotomayor wishes she had phrased that differently, but that the comments simply suggested that a diversity of experience helped judges make good decisions. Sotomayor made similar remarks, saying earlier this week: “My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept that there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

We released a new edition of the Intelligence Report yesterday, featuring a cover story about the murder of a Klan initiate in Louisiana. Here’s our press release on the new issue, with some links:

The Louisiana Klan leader indicted for the murder of a woman who tried to quit his group coerced three of his sons to join the Klan and used threats of violence to keep members from leaving, according to an interview with his wife in the latest issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, released today. The case has brought back troubling memories of a town where Klansmen fiercely resisted the civil rights movement.

Theresa Foster said her husband, Raymond Charles “Chuck” Foster, “threatened everybody,” creating the volatile atmosphere surrounding Cynthia Lynch’s death last November near Bogalusa, La. She also describes the days leading up to Lynch’s death and her attempt to dissuade the Oklahoma woman from joining the Klan.

“The way I look at it is, Raymond Foster is wholly to blame for what happened,” she told the Intelligence Report.

Lynch signed up to join the Sons of Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan after apparently reading Foster’s MySpace page. She traveled to Bogalusa by bus from Tulsa to be initiated into the group. Foster allegedly shot her when she asked to leave, and other members of the group helped cover up the murder.

Lynch’s death put the spotlight on Bogalusa, a town that was once such a hotbed of Klan activity that it was dubbed “Klantown, U.S.A.” Today, local officials who believed the Klan was a relic of Bogalusa’s past are re-evaluating this town where stark racial divisions still exist and the Klan remains a lurking presence.

“The town where Raymond Foster formed his Klan group may be the most telling aspect of this tragic story,” said Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report, a quarterly investigative journal that monitors the radical right. “This is a town where longtime black residents say they still live separate and unequal lives more than 40 years after the civil rights movement.” ( continue to full post… )