Inside the Secret World of White Supremacy

By John F. Sugg
t r u t h o u t | Report

Wednesday 18 October 2006

A visit to Laurens, South Carolina.

John Sugg is group senior editor of Creative Loafing Newspapers.

The squirt-sized black kid, maybe 8 years old, pedaled his shiny orange Mongoose bike around downtown Laurens, S.C. He scooted down a side street with a cheery "hello, mister" to a passer-by, then waved at a passing police car.

A few hours later, early on a September Saturday evening, the boy was back, zipping past the old Echo Theatre on Laurens' courthouse square. Inside, a convention of the white-supremacist Aryan Nations had just boisterously concluded.

The theater, now dubbed the World Famous Redneck Shop, is crammed with racist memorabilia, everything a fashionable bigot would need, from cheap Confederate flag flip-flops and bikinis to T-shirts that announce, "Ain't Racist, Just Never Met a Nigger I Liked." The shop's operator, John Howard, boasts that he's been a "member of the Ku Klux Klan for 40-some years," many of them as a grand dragon in the Carolinas. And he proudly points to a decades-old studio photo of him in emerald Klan robes.