I was a thug for KKK, priest admits

UNITED STATES: When a Catholic priest warned his flock about the ‘‘hateful and vile’’ white supremacists who had recently amassed on a college campus in Virginia, he was speaking from experience.

‘‘What most people do not know about me is that as an impressionable young man I was a member of the Ku Klux Klan,’’ said Father William Aitcheson, 62, from Arlington.

‘‘It’s public information but it rarely comes up.’’

In the late 1970s he was an active member of a paramilitary KKK unit that set fire to crosses and planted them outside synagogues and in the front garden of Philip and Barbara Butler, who were black and had moved to a predominantly white neighbourhood on the edge of Washington.

Frank Rauschenberg, an undercover policeman who infiltrated Aitcheson’s KKK group, said that he had posted two threatening letters to Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King’s widow.

One said: ‘‘Africa or death by lynching, take your pick.’’ Another warned her to ‘‘stay off the University of Maryland campus or you will die’’. He said that Aitcheson was obsessed with constructing pipe bombs and talked about placing one against the Butlers’ door. In his house police found a 9mm Browning pistol, an AR-18 semi-automatic assault rifle and 4500 rounds of ammunition along with survival rations.

He was jailed for three months and, in 1982, was ordered to pay the Butlers US$23,000 ($NZ31,800) in damages.

In a newspaper interview Mrs Butler said: ‘‘He’s sleeping fine wherever he is, but he’s changed my whole life.’’ Their lawyer doubted that they would be paid because Aitcheson had no assets. The paper reported that he ‘‘is said to have left the state and the Klan and found God’’.

In fact, he was studying at a seminary in Rome. He was ordained in Las Vegas and then moved back to Virginia.

Four decades later Father Aitcheson wrote of his past in The Arlington Catholic Herald. ‘‘When

"When I think back on burning crosses, a threatening letter and so on, I feel as though I am speaking of somebody else." Father William Aitcheson

I think back on burning crosses, a threatening letter and so on, I feel as though I am speaking of somebody else,’’ he wrote. ‘‘It’s hard to believe that was me.’’

He decided to exhume his past after seeing the images of white supremacists marching with torches through a campus in Charlottesville. ‘‘The images ... brought back memories of a bleak period in my life that I would have preferred to forget. The reality is we cannot forget, we should not forget.’’

He offered a message to white supremacists: ‘‘Your hate will never be satisfied and your anger will never subside.’’

He had asked to step away from his public ministry temporarily ‘‘for the wellbeing of the church and parish community’’. Members of his congregation praised his record as a pastor and some mentioned St Paul on the road to Damascus. The Butlers have declined to comment, because ‘‘to do so would bring back difficult memories’’. - The Times