Dark Days in Weird Week

In the privy Kalendar of the Ku Klux Klan, the code names for October, November and December are Sorrowful, Frightful and Appalling. In this Year of the Klan 100, they may be Ruinous too. For whatever individual nemeses may await the Klan's various leaders during 13 weeks of public hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee, daylight and logic are as lethal to the huggermugger mystique of the "invisible empire" as Lysol is to microbes.

Inferior Lizard. As the Klan's high mugwumps fidgeted through four days of congressional catechism in the old House Caucus Room last week, they resorted to the same Pavlovian routine of pious nonresponse as their avowed archfoes the Communists. The Klan's chief panjandrum, Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton, 36, probably challenged the Communist record before the same committee by taking the First, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments a total of 158 times in two days, invoking the mumbled formula: "I respectably decline to answer that question."

The sallow malaprop from Tuscaloosa apparently infected Republican Committee Member John Buchanan, a fellow Alabamian, who in one felicitous tongue-trip referred to Shelton as the "inferior lizard." During the fruitless questioning of James R. Jones, 37, the Klan's Grand Dragon of North Carolina, his attorney explained that Jones was having trouble understanding the questions because "he does not have a high-school education." Virginia's Grand Dragon, Robert Kornegay, 37, would not even admit that he was a U.S. citizen. The request that most clearly affronted Shelton and his reluctant dragons was the Congressmen's repeated demands for financial records.

Klandestine Kash. Committee Investigator Donald Appell's questioning of Shelton disclosed that the Klan's monthly "Imperial Tax" of 50-c- per member went into the account of a dummy organization called the Alabama Rescue Service, whose only ostensible mission was to provide Klandestine Kash for Shelton's 1965 Cadillac, diamond rings and grocery bills. Furthermore, Shelton's tax returns showed only about $18,000 of the $32,000 received in 1964 Klan taxes as Klan corporate income. Cried Ohio Republican John Ashbrook: "It's just a question of who gets him first--the Internal Revenue Service, or Congress on a contempt charge."

Dragons Jones and Kornegay were not much better off. Jones was accused of using Klan funds to buy a Cadillac and a station wagon, making personal use of a fund raised for a Klansman indicted in a bombing, and pocketing outrageous profits on sales of satin Klan robes--without turning in a corporate-tax return. Kornegay, it appeared, had been forced to flee to Virginia from North Carolina, where, as lecturer for the Klan, he had set up an insurance company, sold policies to Klansmen, then failed to reimburse them when the company was disbanded.

Achilles' Heel. While such activities were not classifiably unAmerican, the Congressmen's well-documented attack on the Klan surprised many critics of the committee, which heretofore has focused its investigative zeal on left-wing groups. Its hostility to Klan witnesses was all the more noteworthy because the committee is dominated by Southerners and Republicans--seven of whom voted against House passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Though the House committee's strategy was to hit first at what Georgia Democrat Charles Weltner called the Klan's "Achilles' heel"--its murky financial practices--there were hints that in coming weeks it would also be looking into the more lurid aspects of K.K.K. imperialism. Dragon Jones was questioned in vain about cross burnings and racist handbills that have been distributed in North Carolina. Kornegay took refuge in the familiar four amendments when confronted with a newspaper story quoting him as advocating "mass killings in Selma, Ala."

Nevertheless, as tangible evidence of the Klan's retaliatory zeal, the committee displayed a White Knights of Mississippi pamphlet that catalogues forms of harassment to be used on suspected foes. Among other tactics, it recommends pouring sugar into gasoline tanks, dumping snakes, dead rats or decapitated chickens into mailboxes. To "obscure the deadly seriousness of our work," the circular suggested, the Knights should refer to such ploys as "Halloween pranks"--enough, in Klan verbiage, to make any night Dark Day in Weird Week of Month Sorrowful.

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