Next Step: Button-Down Robes

Four hooded Klansmen drove into a ramshackle neighborhood of McComb, Miss., stopped at the home of a destitute Negro couple with 13 children, banged on the door--and left a box of groceries. At a Klan rally in Atlanta, K.K.K. bullies surrounded Negro spectators, moved in ominously. The shouts of their leader stopped them: "Klansmen, Klansmen, leave those Negroes alone--they have a right to be here."

Ladies' Auxiliary. By such tactics, the Ku Klux Klan is seeking a new respectability--and new members--throughout the Deep South. Its meetings are often held in the banquet halls of metropolitan hotels, just as peaceably as the Jaycees. When race trouble flares, Klan security men, wearing white helmets, sometimes circulate through crowds, calming whites. Declares North Carolina Grand Dragon James R. Jones: "The reborn Klan is absolutely nonviolent. We don't allow rabble-rousers." Says Imperial Wizard Bobby Shelton of Tuscaloosa, Ala.: "We want the kind of people in the Klan like businessmen who build--not the kind of people who by their own inner emotions destroy what they are trying to build."

Klan membership is now estimated at some 50,000 throughout the South--including, for the first time, "Klansladies" --and seems to be growing rapidly. This represents a substantial rebuilding job since the low point in 1958, when an angry group of armed Lumbee Indians whooped into a Klan rally in Robeson County, N.C., sent some 75 Klansmen fleeing in panic. Chief rebuilder has been Shelton, a tire salesman who emerged from a bitter 1961 split in leadership of the old Klan to head the new United Klans of America.

All for Love. In its attempt to modernize, the Klan organizes registration drives and car pools to put whites on voting rolls, permits members to wear civvies at rallies. A major offshoot in Georgia, the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, uses recordings narrated by former Network Radio Announcer Wally Butterworth to spread its pitch. Kluxers near Natchez, Miss., dropped recruiting leaflets from an airplane. Shelton himself uses a car radiotelephone to communicate with his henchmen.

Yet beneath the veneer lurks the same old gang of Kluxers that rode the moon-dark nights across the Mississippi Delta during Reconstruction. They still instill terror and engage in violence. That fact was demonstrated one night last week by the eerie glow of Klan crosses burning in a score of Mississippi communities. In Louisiana, TV Newsman Robert Wagner was seized by armed Klansmen as he tried to cover their secret meeting in a barn not far from Baton Rouge. He was forced to remove his trousers, lie in a poison ivy patch, where he was beaten with a belt before being shoved into a dog pen on a truck. Beaten again, he was released under a threat of death if he reported the incident.

Despite such acts, Klansmen now try to protect their public relations image, express their bigotry in relatively polite terms. Says James Jones: "I don't hate Negroes or Jews or Catholics. I just love white people. Our forefathers confiscated the land from the Indians, and it looks like some of them are doing their best to give it back to the Negroes. I'm against that."

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