Out of the Cave

In a night-shrouded field north of Los Angeles a cross burned red. The wartime shortage of sheets and bigotry was lifting. The postwar Ku Klux Klan, already on the march in the South (TIME, May 20) was on the loose again in southern California.

Soon a cross burned in front of a Jewish fraternity house on the University of Southern California campus; another illumined the house of a Los Angeles Negro. In Hollywood's cream-stucco Temple Israel, Rabbi Max Nussbaum, a Nazi refugee, gazed with dismay at the holy ark, ravaged by unknown vandals, and the swastikas and hate messages smeared on the walls of his temple.

State Attorney General Robert Kenny, charging that the Klan had been operating unlawfully in California for the last ten years,* moved that it be declared officially dead. In Los Angeles, a superior court judge hauled three former Grand Dragons and an ex-Kleagle before him. After listening to the Dragon's loud denials of connection with, or interest in, the Klan, he granted the unopposed Kenny motion.

But the Klan would die hard. After posing for court photographers in a hooded sheet, former County Kleagle Ray A. Schneider folded the costume lovingly and returned it to the court clerk. "Handle it carefully," he warned. "It's sacred to me."

*The Klan's right to operate as a "benevolent and charitable" business in California was not renewed after the national charter expired in 1936.

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