When the Ku Klux Klan was granted a permit to rally on the Illinois state capitol steps the day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, it made instant news. The Klan’s an anachronism, its endurance a signifier of how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go. Undeniably evil, not as bizarre as racist skinheads or as politically slippery as neoracists like David Duke, the Klansmen are almost exotic in their old-fashioned, pedantic approach to hatred.
Most of the folks at the meeting had been arrested before, but they differed over when it’s politically imperative to hurl yourself at a cop’s nightstick. Finally they decided that rather than hold up the returning coalition buses for anyone who got arrested, they’d pass out commercial bus schedules, along with Xeroxed sheets on arrest wisdom.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Susan and Ellen, from “tactical,” herded everybody over to join the 200 or so people clustered along the east side. They set up their “half-mile hailer,” a kind of mega-bullhorn, and started chanting “KKK, Go Away!” But it was hard to hear them over the north-side group, which was smaller–only about 40 or so–but had superior PA power.
But they did have music. First “Dixie” blared out, and many of the Klansmen raised their arms in the Nazi salute. It was followed by “The Ride of the Valkyries” and then by Scottish bagpipe marches. When the music concluded, a figure in a white jacket stepped up to the podium and began to speak in a voice that was thin and reedy with a southern rhythm.
He didn’t explain how his own children were falling prey to these crises associated with inner-city schools. Instead he described the Klan’s proposed system of religious, privatized, and segregated schools.
We hung around to watch them being ferried out of the underground parking garage, wanting to get a good look at the people who’d kept us out in the snow all day. We never did. A caravan of police cars drove out with suspicious forms barely visible through the windows. The cops had made the Klan members lie down across the back seats.
