KKK leaves fliers on porches

Recruiting drive stuns, angers many who received pamphlets.

When Amanda Davis walked out the front door of her South Austin house Sunday morning, she saw a pamphlet in a plastic bag on her doorstep. “I picked it up and I squealed like there was a snake,” she said.

The front page of the pamphlet said, “A Introduction to the Platform and Principles of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”

“I said to my husband, ‘Oh, my God, we just got a flier from the Ku Klux Klan on our front porch,’ ” said Davis, who lives near the intersection of Manchaca Road and Chappell Lane, south of Slaughter Lane. “I was so angry. I was just on my way to a job at a church and here’s this thing that’s the most antithetical to faith and what it means to be a Christian,” Davis said Monday.

Around the corner, one of her neighbors stepped out of her house Monday morning and said she hadn’t received a KKK pamphlet.

Then she gasped as she looked down and spotted one where it had just blown off her front porch.

“This is bizarre that’s it’s here,” she said, picking it up. “This is insane. This is not cool.”

The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist and anti-immigration group that has existed in the United States off and on since the end of the Civil War, has a history of cross burnings, lynchings and other terrorism against African-Americans.

“I don’t know if they are trying to recruit or trying to intimidate,” said Davis, who is white. She said her subdivision is racially diverse, with Hispanic and African-American neighbors.

Robert Jones, a Klan spokesman and one of the group’s leaders in North Carolina, responded to the American-Statesman’s call Monday to the group’s “hotline,” the phone number printed on the pamphlet. He said a KKK recruitment effort is underway because of all the “racial tension” in America.

“They are trying to take down our Confederate flag and trying to erase whites out of history, and a lot of whites are starting to get fed up,” he said. “Look at that killing about two weeks ago when an African-American killed two white reporters. When you mix the races, you are distorting God’s creation.”

Jones said the Klan’s unit in

Austin wanted to pass out recruitment pamphlets over the weekend. He said he didn’t know yet whether the group has received any responses or how many pamphlets were distributed.

“We tell our members to make sure you do no less than 500,” he said.

He said the KKK has been getting a lot of calls from people interested in joining ever since July, when the group rallied in Columbia, S.C., to protest the removal of the Confederate flag from