This ghost has never gone away

From Harpers Magazine, February 19, 1868

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Photojournalist Anthony Karen has published recent KKK photographs he took for the London Independent.  It makes me wonder if things ever really change.  Click here for link to Anthony Karen's photo essay on the KKK.

Also see dream act texas post "The Reality of the KKK in Virginia," September 16, 2007

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America unmasked: The images that reveal the Ku Klux Klan is alive and kicking in 2009
The USA has a new president but an old problem - and nothing typifies it like today’s Ku Klux Klan. The photographer Anthony Karen gained unprecedented access to the ‘Invisible Empire’

Words by Leonard Doyle
London Independent
Saturday, 21 February 2009

These images show members of the Ku Klux Klan as they want to be seen, scary and secretive and waiting in the wings for Barack and his colour-blind vision for America to fail. Anthony Karen, a former Marine and self-taught photojournalist was granted access to the innermost sanctum of the Klan. He doesn’t tell us how he did it but he was considered trustworthy enough to be invited into their homes and allowed to photograph their most secretive ceremonies, such as the infamous cross burnings.

When he talks about the Klan members he has encountered he tends not to dwell on the fate of their victims. Karen’s feat is that he takes us to places few photojournalists have been before, into the belly of the beast. The scenes he presents portray a kinder, gentler Klan. The mute photographs present an organisation that is far less threatening than the hate group of our popular imagination. Consciously or otherwise, his photographs hold our imagination in their grip while doing double duty as propaganda for the extremist right, much as Leni Riefenstahl’s work did for the Nazis. more

The KKK is still killing people

Where else could there be these secret meetings that few people know about?  DREAMers on a camping trip west of San Antonio witnessed one of these meetings a couple of years ago...  They saw the white gowns and the torches.  They are sure they were not hallucinating.  The event in Bogalusa should further convince them they were not seeing ghosts.

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KKK killing evokes bad memories in Louisiana


By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN and KEVIN McGILL
The Associated Press/Washington Post
Wednesday, November 12, 2008; 4:44 PM

BOGALUSA, La. -- Hattie Dillon got a first-hand taste of the racial hatred that gripped this city in the 1960s when a metal bolt flung by someone in an angry crowd gashed her head as she marched for civil rights.

On Wednesday, sitting on her front porch just off Main Street, the 61-year-old said Bogalusa is better now. But the bloody legacy of racial violence and brazen Ku Klux Klan activity in the area remains _ evidenced by the arrest of eight local people in the death of an Oklahoma woman shot when a weekend Klan initiation went awry.

"History was made this month," Dillon said, referring to Barack Obama's election as the nation's first black president. "Then our eyes opened again."

Bogalusa, a logging town dominated by a huge paper mill about 60 miles north of New Orleans, is the largest city in Washington Parish, which, like the whole state, was won by John McCain, not Obama last week.

Sunday's killing was in St. Tammany Parish, just across the Washington Parish line and all the suspects are from Washington Parish. Cynthia C. Lynch, 43, of Tulsa, Okla., was shot in an area of vast piney woods, farms and bedroom communities separated from New Orleans by Lake Pontchartrain...more

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