All in the Family : In the Lives of White Supremacists, a Photographer Finds Everyday Childhoods Filled with Warmth, Community--and Hate

Sweet-faced and wholesome, the children peer out at us from glossy photographs that seem, at first glance, to have captured some classic childhood moment. An anti-Martin Luther King march through a Tennessee town becomes a colorful parade, with a marching child beaming up at his camouflage-garbed father while townspeople, out of camera range along the sidewalks, stare mutely. A cross “lighting” becomes a picnic, with parents serving up a festive potluck and children warming their hands with torches readied for quite a different purpose.

These are the disturbing images made by Terri Garland, a 40-year-old Santa Cruz native who has followed the white racist movement in the United States for more than three years in an effort to document and understand modern racism. Monitoring organizations estimate that 250 to 300 skinhead and other Aryan-type groups operate in this country, with a total membership ranging from 10,000 to 30,000. In an ongoing project that has taken her 10,000 miles by car and across the country three times by plane, Garland strives for an objective study that separates her own feelings from the troubling images that appear in her lens.

By doing so, Garland has gained the uneasy trust of several racist groups who have allowed her to document their world. The result is a collection of images that are jarring for their sense of calm and of family; disturbing for their absence of self-doubt.

“A lot of my interest lies in ferreting out the mystery,” says Garland. “They love their families very much and have a genuine and sincere hope that what they are doing is really essential to ensure the survival of their bloodline. These feelings exist in many places, like farmers in the Midwest who lost their farms and are open to the claims of these groups that it’s the fault of ‘the Jewish bankers.’ ” Southern Californians were reminded on July 15 with the FBI arrests of three skinheads, for gun running and plotting to kill Rodney King, that racist groups also operate here, and Garland has photographed groups such as American Spring, which organizes anti-immigration border patrols in Southern California.

Since beginning the project in 1989, Garland has found her way into the organized world of rallies, marches and cross-burnings (called “lightings” by the Ku Klux Klan, which claims the practice is an ancient Scottish ritual to call forth the light of Christ).

In one image, titled “Chris, Stockbridge, Georgia, 1990,” an outgoing 17-year-old posed for her in a field shortly before his Klan cut a young tree from the woods and made it into a cross. The next day, before the cross was burned, Chris made his first speech as a Klansman. “This is somewhat analogous to the Boy Scouts’ system of performing certain acts and deeds in order to advance,” Garland says.

She has found that the movement, though dominated by men, includes women in a strong supportive role. Children, she says, are “introduced to the teachings from a very early age. You see babies dressed up in Klan outfits. At cross lightings they are very communal, and the kids are tossing footballs, and there is a celebratory air, as if it were a holiday.”

The first thing she noticed about a little blond girl, decked out in Klan garb and carrying a white cross in Lawrenceburg, Tenn., was that she wore tiny KKK earrings. The girl told Garland they were a gift. Says Garland of “Klan Girl”: “They had just finished parading around the town square. The red teardrop on her white cross symbolizes the blood of Christ.”

In Campbellville, Tenn., Garland made “Boys With Torches, 1990.” “I don’t know if the boys made the torches, but possibly they did because they seem to be variations of the usual burlap and are made of pieces of clothing,” she says. “The adults had gas cans full of kerosene, which they poured into buckets. The little boys dipped the torches, then laid them on the ground until it was time to light them.”

“Whenever I document an event,” Garland says, “I am interested in going beyond the Sieg Heils and all of that. I approach this as a sociological document and stick to that--regardless of my own views.”

Some of Garland’s work can be seen in “Summer Nights” at the Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7466 Beverly Blvd., through Sept. 4.