Missouri Balks at Letting KKK ‘Adopt-a-Highway’

The Boy Scouts can do it.

So can religious congregations.

But when the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan volunteered to pick up litter here as part of Missouri’s Adopt-a-Highway program, state administrators balked.

So now the state and the KKK are locked in a legal battle over the right to trudge through roadside weeds in search of stinky beer cans and greasy burger wrappers.

In another equally bitter court fight, the same KKK group--the “Missouri Realm”--is pressing for the right to buy a 15-second spot on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” broadcast locally by the University of Missouri’s radio station.

Just like any hometown bookstore sponsoring the news for a little good PR, the klan aims to underwrite some rush-hour programming--in exchange for a promotional spot touting its work “standing up for the rights and values of white Christian America since 1865.”

To the St. Louis attorney representing the KKK, both cases are simple tests of the 1st Amendment.

“Unless we protect everyone’s rights, no one has rights,” said Bob Herman, who makes clear he personally finds the klan’s views repugnant.

But the KKK’s foes see far more than free speech at stake. They see an attempt by the klan to insinuate itself into respected civic institutions. This public-relations ploy may or may not be constitutional. Regardless, KKK critics find it dangerous.

“There’s a movement . . . to portray the klan as a kinder, gentler Ku Klux Klan, as merely a white-pride civic organization, a group that helps little old ladies across the street, albeit white little old ladies,” said Mark Potok, who tracks hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“It’s pure hogwash,” Potok added. “It’s just window dressing to disguise the true agenda of the klan”--which is, Potok said, to promote a racist Christian identity philosophy that tags Jews as the biological descendants of Satan and blacks as soulless, subhuman “mud people.”

It is not those views, however, that bother the state of Missouri.

At least, not officially.

Insisting that they’re not trying to censor any philosophy, no matter how odious, state officials have focused instead on the KKK’s brutal history and its discriminatory membership practices in their quest to deny it Adopt-a-Highway privileges.

Allowing the KKK to join the Adopt-a-Highway program would give the group a sort of imprimatur of legitimacy, argued Steve Forsythe, a spokesman for the state Transportation Department. And the state cannot condone a group with such a violent past. What’s more, Forsythe said, because federal funds help support the Adopt-a-Highway program, public tax dollars would be subsidizing the klan if it participated. And that’s illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

“The government,” Forsythe said, “cannot support or endorse a group that discriminates.”

Oh? Herman asks, ready with a challenge.

What about the Boy Scouts? They don’t allow girls to join. May not welcome homosexuals, either. Yet they adopt miles and miles of highways.

Or what about the Knights of Columbus? They clean up litter all over the state. Yet their membership is limited to Catholic men.

What’s so different about the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Herman asks. So they preach Aryan superiority. So what? If they want to pick up trash--and Herman says he’s not sure why they do, whether it’s out of altruism or for publicity or from a deep concern about roadside garbage--why should they be barred?

Forsythe responds with a snap of anger.

“The distinction,” he says, “is that the KKK has a history of violent, disruptive behavior” that the state does not want in any way to sanction.

Plus, Forsythe notes, the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars federal money from going to any group that discriminates on the basis of “race, color or national origin.” Gender, sexual orientation and religion are not mentioned. Thus, he concludes, there’s no problem with tax dollars going to the Boy Scouts or the Knights of Columbus.

Federal attorneys back up that argument. But a U.S. district court judge didn’t buy it.

After five years of litigation, Judge Stephen Limbaugh last April ordered the Department of Transportation to let the KKK patrol for litter--and to post a sign acknowledging its help.

The state, he wrote, “cannot use its regulations to target the klan’s unfortunate beliefs.”

Or, as Denise Field, interim director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri, put it: “The government can’t deny you the right to participate in a government program just because it doesn’t like your views. That’s an important principle to uphold.”

Court rulings on the issue have been mixed.

A Texas appeals court ruled that state could reject the klan’s application to adopt a highway outside a housing project due to be integrated in the face of intense local opposition. In Arkansas, however, a federal district court ordered the state to let the KKK join its Adopt-a-Highway program--and a sign duly went up: “Litter Control Next 1 Mile Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Several other states, including Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, have rejected KKK applications without sparking legal fights. Among their arguments for turning down the klan: A KKK sign might cause traffic accidents by startling motorists. It might prompt drivers to deliberately throw trash out the window to give the klan more work. Or it might frighten away minority visitors.

In Missouri, meanwhile, despite their court victory, klan members have yet to pick up debris along their chosen stretch of Highway 55. State officials still have not approved their application. Nor do they intend to. Just last week, in fact, state lawyers asked Limbaugh to delay enforcement of his order while their appeal works its way through the system.

Also last week, the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on the public radio case. The klan lost its initial court battle on that issue last year, when a federal judge ruled that the station had every right to control its programming, including its sponsors.

A decision on the klan’s appeal is not expected for several months.