White supremacists still exist in N.C.

National attention on Ku Klux Klan activism in North Carolina peaked following the Nov. 3, 1979 Greensboro Massacre, but factions of white supremacist groups continue to exist today.

National attention on Ku Klux Klan activism in North Carolina peaked following the Nov. 3, 1979 Greensboro Massacre, when Klansmen and neo-Nazis shot and killed five anti-Klan labor activists. As recently as February of this year, a white supremacist rally held in Raleigh by neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate groups and factions of the KKK proved to North Carolinians that the Klan had not entirely disappeared into the back pages of history textbooks.

Since 1979, however, the KKK’s statewide and nationwide presence has diminished, experts say. Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights watchdog group based in Montgomery, Ala., estimated that the national Klan member tally has fallen from more than 60,000 in the 1960s to 7,000 today, down from the 1920s-era peak of more than 5 million members nationwide.

Harry Watson, history professor and director of the Center for the Study of the American South, said a formal, unified Ku Klux Klan does not exist today.

“If you wanted to join the Klan, there’s no one single outfit you can join and be sure that it’s the real thing,” Watson said. “There are lots of parallel, competing white supremacy groups, some of which will call themselves Aryan Nation, Nazis, whatever—they have been more active since 1979.”

Potok, director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project, which monitors extremist groups in America, estimates that there are currently about 100 members of North Carolina Klan factions like the Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. There are about five such factions in North Carolina, Potok said, mostly based in the western part of the state. Potok also noted that some KKK factions have spread to more Northern and Midwestern states such as Pennsylvania and Indiana.

Membership of other North Carolina white supremacist organizations, such as Confederate revivalist, Neo-Nazi and skinhead groups, has surged past the KKK figure, Potok said. There are at least 30 such factions of non-KKK white supremacist groups in the state.

“The Klan is not the most important hate group nor the largest, but it still has a presence in North Carolina,” Potok said. “But I think that clearly North Carolina is not the state it was a quarter-century ago.”