Robert Gregoire, the police chief of Augusta, Maine, was sipping coffee at home Monday morning when a neighbor knocked on his door to report something disturbing.
The Ku Klux Klan had visited their street in the dead of night and left neatly folded fliers on people’s lawns.
The flier said a neighborhood watch was being formed by the group. It offered an 800 number to call for reporting neighborhood concerns. It also contained an image of a hooded Klansman flanked by the flaming letters “KKK.” It featured the message, “You can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake!”
About two dozen fliers were found in Augusta on Monday.
“We’re not the only town or the only city in Maine to have this,” Gregoire said, naming several locations within a 40-mile radius, including Freeport, Appleton and Union. “I think it seems like a trend going on across the country.”
The KKK is “the most infamous, and oldest, of American hate groups,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremists in the United States. KKK groups may have leafleted U.S. towns about 100 times in the past two years, according to data compiled by the center.
The fliers in Maine came from the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of at least 31 Klan groups active in the United States, said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. He said leaflets were a “high impact, low effort” way for the racist group to get attention.
“It is typically one person driving around at night,” he said. “They are completely anonymous, they don’t risk any confrontation, and they are virtually guaranteed to get press out of it.”
Maine residents were alarmed, but the fliers are not illegal.
“We’re treating it as an exercise in free speech (that unfortunately involved littering),” Susan B. Nourse, the police chief in Freeport, Maine, said in an e-mail. Two dozen fliers showed up there this week.
Cornell William Brooks, the president of the NAACP, said any KKK activity was “very alarming” because of what he sees as similarities between the current political climate and that of the 1920s, when the Klan re-emerged after a period of post-Civil War dormancy.
At that time, the KKK grew “from a relative handful of members to several million people in the span of a few years as a consequence of three factors: anti-immigrant sentiment, a misguided sense of patriotism and a bastardization of the Christian message,” Brooks said.
He said KKK activity, like leafleting, on a local level was one part of a larger extremist trend manifested in the growing popularity of the far right in recent years.
“There is a narrative here,” he said. “This is not a set of aberrational isolated incidents of hate. There is a mood and a climate in this country that we are concerned about.”
Nighttime leafleting has become a “tried and true” tactic for the KKK, said Ryan Lenz, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center. He described it is a distinctly “analog” form of outreach and intimidation in an era when hate and extremism have found a thriving home online.
“People can avoid places where racism thrives online; they can set up filters so none of this stuff ever appears in front of their eyes,” he said. “But when it comes to throwing something in your yard, it’s impossible to avoid it because you have to pick it up. Then you call the phone number because you think, ‘What is this?’ ”
A call to the phone number on the flier led to Frank Ancona, the leader of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which is based in Park Hill, Missouri.
He declined to say who had distributed the fliers in Maine or how many people his group has there or nationwide, citing its members’ vow of secrecy. Potok said, however, that he believed there were fewer than 6,000 Klansmen nationwide.
Ancona said he did not understand why anyone would be afraid of the KKK.
“If you follow the doctrine of the Klan, it is a positive Christian organization that brings benefits to people,” he said. “I don’t focus on the negative history.”
He allowed that there was one thing that might bother some people.
“The only thing people might see as a negative is we don’t believe in the mixing of the races,” he said. “We need to preserve the white race because we are the ones who keep civilization civilized.”
Ancona described the KKK’s violent history as a thing of the past or the result of FBI efforts to make the group look bad, which he compared to actions by law enforcement officials in the 1970s to discredit the Black Panthers.
He said that violent Klansmen were “bad apples” and that the group now wanted to educate white people to be good citizens who reject “equality propaganda.”
He asked several times, “You don’t see Klansmen harming anyone in this country, do you?”
Since it was founded in 1865, the KKK has killed scores of people, the vast majority of them blacks, Potok said. Many of the crimes believed to be committed by the KKK were not investigated, he said, so the precise number of those killed may never be known.
“It is very disquieting to have the Klan describing themselves as a self-help organization,” Brooks said. “Anybody who adopts the name of the Klan adopts the legacy of the Klan, and the legacy of the Klan is death and injury of people of color.”
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