9 From KKK Indicted on Civil Rights Charges

Nine members of the Ku Klux Klan have been indicted on charges of conspiring to violate the rights of blacks and whites in a series of cross burnings and shootings in 1982 and 1983, the Justice Department announced today.

The KKK members, all from North Carolina, were named in a 20-count indictment returned Tuesday in federal court in Asheville and unsealed today.

All nine defendants, including two who are leaders of the klan in North Carolina, also were charged with perjury. It was alleged that they had denied before a federal grand jury that they had any knowledge or involvement in the series of cross burnings involving blacks and whites who were either cohabiting or socializing.

Assistant Atty. Gen. William Bradford Reynolds, head of the department’s civil rights division, said the indictment resulted from a two-year FBI and grand jury investigation of racial violence in Alexander and Iredell counties in North Carolina.

Among those indicted, he said, were Jerry Douglas Suits, the “titan,” or leader, of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Iredell County, and his wife, Mary Vestal Suits, “queen kleagle,” or leader, of the women’s unit of the county klan.