2,200 Officers Keep Peace as 50 Klan Supporters Protest King Holiday

Fifty Ku Klux Klan members and supporters gathered Saturday at the state Capitol to protest the holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as more than 2,200 law enforcement officers kept about 100 counterdemonstrators safely away.

The rally took place at a time when racial tensions in the South have been exacerbated by four mail bombs directed at judicial and civil rights targets. The bombs killed an Alabama federal judge and a Savannah, Ga., lawyer.

The 75-minute rally at the Capitol came off without incident. The closest klan members and their opponents got was half a block.

At that point, the two sides jeered each other, with klan members giving Nazi salutes. Opponents shouted and waved signs reading “No Peace for Racists” and “Stop Racist Terror.”

The opponents tied a small klan figure to a fence and set it afire, chanting as the flames engulfed the white cloth.

“I think burning a small figure of the Ku Klux Klan is great when you think about all the burning images of black people in history books,” said Lena Shapiro, a member of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. “It’s refreshing.”

Randall Smith, grand wizard of the Southern White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, said of the King holiday: “We feel it’s a communist holiday and we want it abolished.”

King, the assassinated leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The federal holiday in his honor will be observed this year on Jan. 15.

State officials said the officers brought in to maintain order in downtown Atlanta included 1,594 Georgia National Guardsmen, 300 Atlanta police officers, 184 state troopers and 145 agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Last January, a white supremacist rally and march in downtown Atlanta turned violent as thousands of counterdemonstrators gathered to oppose a handful of white protesters.

Some in that crowd threw rocks and bottles toward the demonstrators and their police and National Guard escorts, and some law enforcement officers fought back.

In the northern suburb of Cumming, an afternoon rally Saturday drew about 60 klansmen and supporters and about 150 spectators.

About a dozen klansmen distributed leaflets at a Cumming intersection for 2 1/2 hours. Afterward about 60 klansmen and supporters gathered at Cumming City Hall for a 6-block march around the courthouse and back to City Hall.