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STORM AND ESCAPE TAKE PART IN PROTEST AGAINST THE KLAN

August 25, 2001, Jill Leighton and Christine Grussendorf took part in Saturday's anti KKK rally held in front of the Minnesota State Capitol Building. Grussendorf actively protested both the Klan and the police presence drawing coverage on KSTP Channel 5. Leighton filmed much of the event as part of footage for the forthcoming documentary Behind the Closet Door which will deal with prostitution, runaway teens and hatred.

The KKK rally drew approximately 30 Klan members which were countered by over 1200 demonstrators protesting their presence. Graphic evidence of the Klan's abuse of children became evident as children appearing younger than five were brought on to the State House steps and paraded as part of the pro Klan forces addressing the hostile crowd. The obviously frightened children's appearance drew an angry response from the demonstrators. Anti-Prostitution activists have often been criticized for linking white supremacist and nazi movements with prostitution. Survivors of childhood sexual abuse who have been abused with Nazi themes are often disbelieved when they testify to their experiences. Today however, the KKK clearly demonstrated the validity of the abuse claims made by survivors.

The Klan was unable to hide behind their usual sheets and robes as Minnesota law forbids hooded public demonstration.

Mangled Truths: Unmasking the history of the Klu Klux Klan

by John Tribbett

Pulse of the Twin Cities

http://www.pulsetc.com/V5I21/index.html

"The Klan supported Prohibition, yet in Denver, the police chief and KKK members controlled an underworld of prostitution, gambling, and liquor."

The afternoon of August 25, 2001 there will be a rally at the Capitol sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the Nation Socialist Movement. A group of counter demonstrators, Can the Klan, also plans a rally at the same time and location.

When I began this brief history I was surprised many felt any piece of journalism not attacking the Klan was promoting their aims. I have presented a snapshot of this hate group’s evolution along with some of the social and historical factors and personalities that shaped it. Included is a brief interview with the KKK’s leader and a top organizer for Can the Klan. The intent was to let the Klan’s legacy speak for itself. There will always be that tiny percentage of the populous that finds a distorted solace in the Klan’s message; their stubborn continuance is evidence enough. Understanding the history of hate offers the hope of acknowledging the hate among us today. With that comes, hope to move beyond its ugly grip. Secrets die in the light of exposure.

A social club gone bad

For years the origin of America’s most despised hate group was held secret. Rumors abounded. It was a sect of Chinese opium smugglers, a crew of wrathful Confederate prisoners, or possibly the remnants of the “Knights of the Golden Circle,” Confederate sympathizers living in Union States. Reality was less dramatic.

When six war-charged Confederate veterans returned to Pulaski, Tenn., they found a morose city. Used to the chaos of battle, they were inconceivably bored. John Lester, one of the six, said, “The reaction which followed the excitement of army scenes and service was intense. There was nothing to relieve it.”
In spring 1866, they formed a social club. Being schooled, they doctored the Greek word for circle, kyklos, to KuKlux and being of Scottish descent, instinctively inserted Klan. Lester said, “There was a weird potency in the very name Ku Klux Klan,” that sounded of “bones rattling together.”

To complete the ghoulish identity, Lester said they donned “a white mask for the face … [a] fantastic cardboard hat, so constructed as to increase the wearer’s height … [and] a gown.” The president was the Grand Cyclops, Night Hawkes guarded the “Den” and members were Ghouls. Initiates wore donkey’s ears while being made an “ass.”

In costume they crashed picnics and extended a skeleton hand to blacks. William Katz said, “That was the birth of the dreaded Ku Klux Klan—little whistles and strange costumes, mirrors and donkey’s ears, silly tricks, giggles and laughter.”

The “Southern Way” threatened

The post Civil War South was decimated. General Sherman said, “Mourning in every household, desolation written in broad characters across the whole face of the country, cities in ashes and fields laid waste. Ruin, poverty and distress everywhere.” The defeated saw enemies throughout—masses of former slaves now free and northerner “Carpetbaggers” pushing social change.
This was the turbulent Reconstruction Era. Confederate leaders maintained power and enacted the Black Codes to deny blacks’ their rights. The Louisiana Democratic Convention announced, “We hold this to be a government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race.”

Unofficial war and the synthesis of hate
On May Day of 1866, the Memphis city recorder incited a crowd to riot, screaming, “Let us prepare to clear every Negro son-of-a-bitch out of town.” Forty-six blacks were killed and 80 wounded. Riots in New Orleans killed 34 Blacks and wounded 200. Throughout the gloomy south, scattered night riders terrorized blacks and radicals.

Soon the mushrooming KKK “Dens” adopted white supremacy as their task. In 1867 they formed a chain of command. Secret codes were conjured. Days of the week became “Dismal” and “Dark”—orders were titled “Horrible Shadows.” General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate commander accused of exterminating blacks at Fort Pillow, was inaugurated as Imperial Wizard and the unfettered spawning of violence began.
A Senate committee investigating KKK atrocities noted that in nine South Carolina counties the Klan had lynched and murdered 35 men, whipped 262 men and women, and raped, shot, mutilated or burned out 103 others within six months. They demoralized the populous by targeting community leaders. W.E. Du Bois on the Klan’s rationale for victims said, “They were Republicans; they were radical; they had attempted to hold elections; they were carrying arms; they were ‘niggers;’ they were ‘damn niggers;’ they boasted that they would own land … they were whipped for debt, for associating with white women and for trying to vote.”
In 1870 and 1871 the “Ku Klux Klan Acts” were passed. Many claim the Klan’s fading was due to Northern and Southern intolerance to the litany of atrocities. Reality was, through terrorism, the Old South regained had power. Katz’s notes, “Those who rode horseback in white sheets and hoods now sat as judges, jurors and senators or as sheriffs and deputies. The Invisible Empire faded away, not because it had been defeated, but because it had won.”

The Klan reborn

It would be almost 50 years before the Klan would awaken. Not that the ugly cord of American bigotry had been severed. The American Protection Society, vehemently anti-Catholic and foreigner, claimed 500,000 members at the century’s birth and Teddy Roosevelt ranted, “We must take Hawaii in the interests of the White race.”
In 1915 a filmmaker, D.W. Griffith, released the nation’s first feature-length movie. “The Birth of a Nation,” was based on a novel by Thomas Dixon, “The Clansman, An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan.” The movie satisfied the South’s fanciful longing to portray the Klan as chivalrous knights struggling against a dictatorial North during reconstruction.

The syrupy love tale contains disturbing stereotypes, including a black rapist. The closing depicts the Klan rescuing white southern womanhood from black hands. Many Americans left the theater believing the terribly mangled truths were historic fact. After a private screening at the white house President Woodrow Wilson exclaimed, “It is like writing history with lightning … my only regret is it is all so terribly true.” The movie grossed more than $60 million, evoked race riots and set the stage for the Klan’s reincarnation.

I’m a fraternalist

Enter one William Joseph Simmons, Spanish-American war vet, born-again Christian, backwoods preacher and garter belt salesman with a taste for liquor and membership cards in two churches and 15 fraternal lodges. During a sickness he claimed visions of Klansmen riding “across the wall in front of me.” In 1915, an accident confined him to bed for three months when, author Wyn Craig Wade said, “He slipped into the most sustained period of monomania of his life. He began having dreams of the ultimate fraternity.” That fraternity would be the Ku Klux Klan.

On Thanksgiving 1915 he chartered a bus with 15 members, two from the original Klan, and drove them outside of Atlanta to Stone Mountain. At the summit before a burning cross, Simmons said the Klan would, “take up a new task and fulfill a new mission for humanity’s good…” He then, author Norman MacKenzie said, “turned the gibberish of the old Klan into a new mumbo jumbo of idiocy.” Obsessed with the magic letter K, meetings became a Klonvokation, and the dens Klaverns.

Simmons hired two public relations agents, Bessie Tyler and Edward Clarke. They were, as Mackenzie said, “two of the most successful merchandisers of hate known in modern times.” The agents sent “Kleagles” to recruit by capitalizing on community fears, then drummed up members at $10 a head. The agents were highly motivated. They received 80 percent of the take. By 1924 there were 4 million members. Simmons’ “new mission for humanity’s good” became particularly good for his pocketbook. By mid 1921 he had earned $170,000, owned a Klan home and his “fraternal organization” contained two factories and a real estate company.

“Americanize America”—the moral police

The 1920s were a period of massive flux. Urban populations swelled with new languages, jazz sparked the night, unions flexed, woman sought independence and black veterans returned. Aliens, radicals and agitators seemed to be lurking everywhere. It was not a hooded reactionary who lectured, “biological laws show us that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races,” or that immigrants “would be tolerated only if well behaved.” It was Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Henry Ford penned anti-Semitic essays for the Dearborn Independent, 96 of which were later published as “The International Jew” by the Klan.
The Klan reacted with cries of “100 percent Americanism.” A Grand Goblin admonished his devotees to “protect our homes, our lives, our people and our nation’s future against a wave of living hell.” This expanded “wave of living hell” now included Jews, Catholics, unions, nightclubs, foreigners, dope, bootleggers, scandalous behavior, liberals, modern dress and premarital sex.

Their first public act was breaking a shipyard strike. A TWK, Trade With Klan, policy of economic boycott was implemented. They manipulated the media for press of their street brawls and massive parades. In 1925, 40,000 robed men and women marched in Washington, D.C. In 1924 both major party conventions voted down resolutions condemning the KKK by name and Klan-backed candidates held seats throughout the heartland. It seemed as if every white protestant belonged.

The mutilations, branding and torture continued. In 1919 there were 74 documented lynching of blacks, some still wearing veteran uniforms.

The inner workings of a tax-free Christian “benevolent” society

In the early ’20s it was revealed the two PR agents had been arrested half-naked and drunk in a house of ill repute. The Klan supported Prohibition, yet in Denver, the police chief and KKK members controlled an underworld of prostitution, gambling, and liquor. It was a blow to Klan claims of morality when David Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of the enormous Indiana Klan, was convicted of second-degree murder after the rape and mutilation and subsequent suicide of a young woman he courted.

Internal power struggles mounted in 1922 when Texas dentist Hiram Wesley Evans led a successful coup and defrocked Simmons. What followed was a melee of lawsuits that culminated in the assassination of Simmons’ lawyer. The press was delighted.
By 1929 membership had dwindled to 100,000 and continued to decline in the following decades. Businessmen and politicians distanced themselves from the spectacle of the Klan. As one organizer said, “We got so desperate for votes, we just took in anybody who had $10. Consequently, we wound up with all sorts of scum and riffraff.” Greed, lawsuits and investigations almost finished the job.

A dangerous inferiority complex

The hooded order slowed but refused to halt. The major activity of the ’30s was, as Katz said, “War against the new industrial unions … They hunted down, tortured and sometimes murdered union organizers.”
The “Red Menace” replaced the Catholics. The hatred seethed from the South where MacKenzie said, “The Southern poor white had only one feeling of superiority in the world: He was better than the Negro. If the Negro inched upward to his level of poverty, he himself would be reduced to the status of most despised of all.”

In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court found “separate but equal” in violation of the Constitution and integration was ordered. Eldon Edwards returned to Stone Mountain, nearly 1,500 strong, to host the largest rally in years. Other groups formed and by 1965 membership had reached upwards of 50,000.
Working with the Klan were White Citizen Councils, filled with affluent citizens attempting an air of respectability in their bigoted resistance to integration. The wealthy gave political and legal protection to the thugs in sheets. In 1957, a black Birmingham, Ala., handyman named Edward Aaron was castrated and had hot turpentine poured over his wounds. Four Klansmen received 20 years but were paroled in 1963 when George Wallace became governor of Alabama. The group’s leader “Ace” Carter later shot two of his own Klavern, escaped conviction and graduated to Wallace’s personal staff.
With most of the effective leadership shrouded in councils, the membership of the Klan was, as Wade said, “the violence-prone dregs of Southern white society.” Sociologists said, “The Klan had become a collection of uneducated misfits … [that] had little recourse but to engage in violent acts.”

A second Reconstruction and fluoride threaten the South

The freedom riders, the federal troops enforcing desegregation and charismatic leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. coaxed paranoia of a second reconstruction. Robert Shelton, with his armed guards, became a symbol of resistance for the fearful. In 1961 he became Imperial Wizard.

Shelton’s world was claustrophobic. Fluoride was used for brainwash—what’s a better way to take over this country than to give an overdose of fluoridation? His racial views were paranoid—“I don’t hate niggers, but I hate the Jews. The nigger’s a child, but the Jews are dangerous people … all they want is control and domination of the Gentiles through a conspiracy with the niggers.” The National Mental Health Association was a communist-inspired organization bent on integration. Shelton had plans.

When northern students arrived in Birmingham they were attacked by 25 plainclothes Klansman. The mob received 15 minutes from a detective to beat them, bomb them, burn them, shoot them, do anything (they) wanted with absolutely no intervention whatsoever by the police. Freedom Riders throughout the South met the same fate.
Beginning with the home of Dr. King in 1956 and lasting until 1963, 138 Klan-related bombings occurred. The most notorious was the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham were four black girls were killed. Former Klansman Thomas E. Blanton, Jr., was recently sentenced to four terms of life in prison for the outrage.
When deputized Klan killers murdered three civil rights workers the nation finally became sickened with the blood-drenched south. President Lyndon Johnson called for a congressional probe in 1965. Shelton and two of his cronies spent a year in jail. By the late ’60s about six percent of Klansmen were employed by of the FBI, who conducted a Cointelpro operation of psychological warfare which included agents sleeping with Klansmen’s wives and spreading financial disinformation. The Klan again retreated

The KKK suits undressed

By the mid 1970s Shelton was reduced to selling used cars when a good looking and articulate Klansman named David Duke arrived. A master of media manipulation, he charmed the talk-show circuit using words like “racialism,” avoiding epithets while claiming, “White people today are becoming … second-class citizens.” His veneer of repackaged hate faded when he lost his bid for political power.

Bill Wilkinson, still in a suit, appeared with his gun-toting goons explaining, “These guns aren’t for killing rabbits … they’re to waste people.”

Five anti-Klan demonstrators were murdered at a Greensboro, N.C., rally in 1979.
In 1981 Michael Donald was beaten, had his throat slashed and was hung by two young Klan butchers. The father of one, Bennie Hays, a Klan Titan, drawled at the carnage. “That’s gonna look good on the news. Gonna look good for the Klan,” Hays said.
Moving through the ’80s the Klan became increasingly infatuated with paramilitary activities and media. Klansman Tom Metzger, one-time winner of a Democratic nomination for Congress, hosted a racist talk show and began exploiting young skinhead recruits with his White Aryan Resistance telephone hot lines. Skinhead violence and murders peaked in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Reagan sympathetically visited a family whose home was attacked by the Klan. He then said “affirmative action [was] a kind of reverse discrimination,” while gutting federal safety nets for minorities.

The KKK in the Computer Age

The once powerful Klan has been reduced to 6,000 members today with the 50 known groups no longer centered in the South. They have caused trouble by attempting to sponsor a highway cleanup program. A 1991 Anti-Defamation League report stated that there was small chance they would become a significant threat again.

Yet, searching the Web a dizzying array of racist groups appears. World Church of the Creator, Sheriff’s Posse Comitatus, National Socialist Movement, and Church of Jesus Christ Christian-Aryan Nations. Today’s hate has diversified. There are 602 groups named by the Southern Poverty Law Center in which an estimated 200,000 Americans are active and another million are sympathetic.

The modern racist targets the young. Thomas Leyden, former racist skinhead recruiter said, “With the Net, you’re getting the bright kid, the 11- or 12-year-old who knows how to surf … by the time he’s 18 or 19 and going into college, we’ve already indoctrinated him.”
Behind the technology, the barbarism endures. In 1998 three Texas men murdered and mutilated James Byrd by dragging him behind a truck. Two had ties to the KKK and Aryan Nations.

The Klan unmasked

The Klan has consistently emerged whenever the nation has found itself in the grips of change. Its one ability has been to exploit the fears of a white society refusing to accept this as inevitable. The Klan continues, not because it offers a viable solution to the complex issues that face our society today, but because it allows its adherents to deny the reality of the larger world surrounding them. Finding solace in the Klan are frightened men and women, following charismatic, scarred individuals, fascinated by a ghoulish imagery that masks a crude, sadistic and simplistic means of coping with the complexities of life.

The Klan and their ilk are the scab on the wound hiding the deeper infection. They create the space that allows the insidious forms of racism and hate to quietly fester and seem reasonable—in our schools, our homes, our jobs, our government, our police and our children. Only when we realize the bigotry, the oppression and the hate that lurks within our own skin and history, no matter the color, can we begin to unmask our American legacy of hate.

Works Cited

Axtman, Kris. “How the South Outgrew the Klan.” The Christian Science Monitor. 4 May 2001.

Bullard, Sara eds. The Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism and Violence. Southern Poverty Law Center. 4th ed. Montgomery: Klanwatch, 1991.

George, John, and Laird Wilcox. American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists, and Others. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1996.

Katz, William Loren. The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan Impact on History. Washington, D.C.A: Open Hand Publishing Inc., 1986

MacKenzie, Norman. Secret Societies. London: Aldus, 1968.

Southern Poverty Law Center. Intelligence Project. 3 Aug. 2001. http://www.splcenter.org/

Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

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Protesters

More Protesters

below racists which are part of hate groups which often prostitute and rape women and children

From WCCO

Klan Rallies, But Few Hear
While less than four dozen people attended a Ku Klux Klan rally at the Capitol Saturday, hundreds of counter demonstrators did all they could to create noise and drown out the Klan's message. More Details

Klan Rally On Capitol Steps

Some Counter At Rally, Others At Festival

'poem after the kkk rally at the minnesota state capitol'
by beth ribet

i heard you tonite
each word each piece
the fence holding back the protesters
and the 200 brown shirted cops
with full riot gear and bottles of water
for their convenience

and the little girls

and nothing i can say is enough
for what i feel
or need to tell you
or to respond to anything

and you are right
that being alone
among 1200
who are watching this all go down
without more powerful weapons than eggs
is not enough

not enough to stop what is happening tonite
as i write
as i only write
i hate that i am only writing

and chanting when the people around you do not have
the clarity or energy or knowledge
to really know how to join you
is not enough

and trying to make the god-damned left
understand that these fucking racist monsters
are about sexism and rape
is too hard and too slow and too fucking painful

and you are right that you need to speak,
you are needed, to speak
and you are right that it feels bad and is too hard
to be the one, now, to have to do this

but you screamed at those fucking cops
and you called them by their real names
and i love that you did that

and you are also right that if there had been five of you
five of you
so many things would have been different
you would have changed more and done more together

if there were five of you
if there were ten of you
if there were more and more of you
if the people who can scream and scream and fight and know
filled the streets and the schools
and the churches you would all tear apart
and you occupied the state capitol

the horror and grief that are making my heart freeze
and my tongue tie itself up
would shake loose
and nothing would be enough to stop me
from screaming because i am so glad you are in the world

and those girls would be with us tonite.

copyright 2001 held by beth ribet

Anti-racism protesters drown out supremacists

Patricia Lopez Baden, Howie Padilla and Kavita Kumar

Star Tribune

Published 08/26/01

By Patricia Lopez Baden, Howie Padilla and Kavita Kumar

A white-power rally of 46 Ku Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazis at the State Capitol on Saturday drew more than 1,200 counterdemonstrators who chanted and waved signs but were mostly nonviolent.

Authorities said five people were arrested before and after the hourlong rally, which was held by the Klan, the Aryan Nation and the National Socialist Movement. State troopers also escorted three disorderly protesters from the Capitol mall during the rally, authorities said.

At 1 p.m., the crowd erupted in boos and jeers as white-robed Klan members and more than a dozen men in full Nazi uniform -- including jackboots, brown shirts and red armbands -- emerged from inside the building to the top of the stairs at the Capitol's main entrance.

Klan members and neo-Nazis waved Confederate flags, red-and-black Nazi flags and a black flag that bore the twin lightning bolts of the Nazi SS. The white supremacists yelled "White power" and held their arms aloft in Nazi salutes, the prelude to an array of speakers who espoused a message of hatred and exclusion sprinkled with racial and ethnic epithets.

The crowd often responded with expletives. Steel barricades and a line of nearly 80 uniformed state troopers kept the crowd on the mall separated from the speakers by about 60 feet.

About two-thirds of the way through the rally, one man broke through the barricade and was immediately arrested. He and two other protesters were taken into the Capitol on suspicion of disorderly conduct and failing to obey officers' orders, said Kevin Smith, spokesman for the state Public Safety Department. As of 7 p.m., they had not been booked into the Ramsey County jail.

Five other people were booked into the jail. A shirtless man with a swastika tattoo on his chest was arrested at 11 a.m. after he proclaimed himself a Nazi and yelled expletives at anti-Klan protesters and troopers. Once inside a cruiser, Smith said, the man threatened to kill the officer and President Bush. The man, who refused to give his name, was being held on suspicion of terroristic threats, authorities said.

Three men and a woman were arrested on suspicion of second-degree rioting shortly after the Klan rally. They reportedly threw rocks at a car occupied by two men, a woman and two children, said St. Paul police Cmdr. Mark Pearson. It was unclear whether the attack was related to the rally.

The State Patrol spent $40,000 to assemble 200 troopers for the rally, Smith said. The preparations included stockpiling tear-gas canisters and other riot gear. Estimates for the St. Paul Police Department's efforts were not available Saturday.

During the rally, anti-Klan protesters tossed eggs at the white supremacists. Most fell far short of the speakers, spattering on the steps near where TV cameras were set up.

About 2:30, a faction of the protesters turned on several crowd members they believed to be Klan supporters. They hurled expletives and eggs at two men they thought were neo-Nazis. They kicked one man, spit on him and slapped him in the back of his head for wearing a T-shirt with the likeness of a Confederate flag.

After about 15 minutes, the man pushed the yellow metal barricades to the ground, bringing demands from state troopers for the crowd to back away. The man was escorted into the Capitol.

Another man who had hoped to hear the Klan's message was disappointed when the group emerged from the Capitol building carrying banners with swastikas and yelling expletives.

"That's not a way to stir up support for a movement," said James Powell, who said he is pro-white but not racist. "All that does is stir up hatred."

There were elements of whimsy to be found among the crowd. Several people blew soap bubbles as Klan Grand Dragon Michael McQueeney of Mercer, Wis., talked about racial separatism. Among the dozens of signs was one that said "Love begets love" and another that said "I Have to Poop."

On the lower level of the Capitol mall, the atmosphere was festive. Rappers took the stage, drums drowned the voices of protesters and white supremacists alike, and families sat on the lawn.

Toward the end of the rally, crowd members started a countdown, shouting "One more minute, one more minute." As members of the Klan and the National Socialist Movement were ushered off the steps by state troopers, the crowd cheered and erupted in a chorus of "Don't come back."

Just before the Klan rally, about 200 DFLers gathered at the Fitzgerald Theater in downtown St. Paul for their own anti-Klan rally, then walked to the Capitol mall.

"We speak because we should speak out," said U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., one of several politicians who addressed the crowd at the Fitzgerald. "So let them have their little moment and then slither off into their respective holes."

One of the marchers was Gail Cerridwen, a high school teacher from Anoka, who said that some of her friends had urged her to stay home and ignore the Klan.

"But I think silence means acceptance," she said. "People need to stand up and get moving again."

A group called Can the Klan had organized the major counterrally on the Capitol mall, and some disagreements broke out over who controlled the podium set up on the mall.

One man tried to speak at the Can the Klan podium but was denied because he was not on the speaker list. Michael Simpson of St. Paul, who was kicked off the stage, yelled at the Can the Klan organizers, "No justice, no peace."

"We are not the enemies," countered Michelle Gross, a Can the Klan organizer.

A separate anti-Klan demonstration at St. Paul's Central High School was more like a picnic than a protest. More than 300 people ate hot dogs and chips while listening to music and speeches and watching dancers perform. The group also held a healing ceremony in which they used eagle feathers to envelop themselves in sage-and-cedar smoke. Then they joined hands and prayed for peace.

Calling the Klan rally a "a bad thing, a horrific thing," St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman urged crowd members to reflect on what they could do to combat racism.

Also on Saturday, the Minnesota Vikings rescheduled their annual family barbecue to coincide with the Klan rally. Players, coaches and front-office executives gathered on a practice field at 1 p.m. for a Unity Day rally led by the Rev. Keith Johnson, the team's chaplain.

The Vikings are the only NFL team with a black head coach, two black coordinators and a black quarterback. None of them mentioned the Klan by name Saturday, but their message was clear.

"I just call it that other hate group," coach Dennis Green said. "The bottom line is that we stand for what's right in the world."

At 4 p.m., the Minnesota Black Republican Coalition and the Minnesota Republican Party held a Unity Day rally in the Capitol rotunda.

"For some reason the Klan thought they were going to have the final victory," said coalition chairman Lucky Rosenbloom. "I don't think so."

-- Staff writers Kimberly Hayes Taylor and Kevin Seifert contributed to this story.-- The reporters are at pbaden@startribune.com ,hpadilla@startribune.com ,kkumar@startribune.com .

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