Again, the Klan

Atlanta, before the war, was headquarters for a profitable national business in hocus-pocus for race-prejudiced joiners: the Ku Klux Klan. Since the war, it has been no secret in Georgia that the Klan was trying to come back in a big way. In the past eight months there have been cross-burnings atop Stone Mountain. But secrecy is a part of the Klan's appeal--and the Kluxers kept their affairs to themselves.

Last week they decided to put on a show of strength, invited the public (in newspaper ads) to come to an initiation party. About 2,000 responded, clambered to the treeless, rock-strewn peak at night. They saw some 700 men wearing white, hooded sheets, and one who wore a rich green robe. When the Grand Dragon took off his mask he was, as everybody well knew, Dr. Samuel Green, a middleaged, small-mustached Atlanta physician.

Stone Mountain was well lighted: cans of inflammable fuel had been placed in niches in its rounded mile-long face, to form a fiery cross some 300 feet high. It was visible for many miles.

The initiates--about 500 men and a few women--knelt before the Grand Dragon, and were thus granted (at $10 a head) the right to wear sheets and masks. Cried Grand Dragon Green: "We are revived."

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