Playboy Interview: Robert Shelton

Conceived in 1865 by a band of idle young Confederate veterans, the Ku Klux Klan began as a harmless social club--complete with such fraternal folderol as secret words, mysterious rites and outlandish costumes made from bedsheets and pillowcases. When these juvenile mischief-makers discovered that their nocturnal frolics frightened superstitious Negroes, however, the fun turned ugly, and the Ku Klux Klan (derived from the Greek word kyklos, meaning circle) quickly evolved into a terroristic secret society dedicated to depriving the newly freed slaves of their citizenship rights. Floggings, castrations, live cremations, shootings and lynchings of "uppity" Negroes and "nigger-loving" white moderates soon became so repugnant to civilized Southerners that even the first "Grand Wizard of the Invisible Empire," former slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest, resigned from the Klan in 1869 and urged its dissolution. But the K. K. K. continued to grow--and to commit atrocities--until the forces of racial equality were vanquished in 1876 and white political supremacy was reestablished throughout the South. With the Negro again reduced to semislavery, the Klan no longer had a raison d'etre and, to all appearances, died of inanition.

Rumors of its death, however, were greatly exaggerated, for in 1915 it was sparked back to life with a vengeance by a racial and religious fanatic named William Simmons of Atlanta, Georgia, who added to the original anti-Negro malice a systematic hatred of Roman Catholics, Jews, labor unions and the foreign born of any race or religion. These new prejudices attracted bigots of every stripe throughout the nation, and the Klan grew to such power in the Twenties and Thirties that in many areas, including such Northern states as Indiana, most candidates for public office had to be Klansmen or open sympathizers to win election. Finally deprived of faith in its venal leaders, who were found guilty of crimes ranging from embezzlement to rape, the discredited Klan again faded into obscurity just before World War Two.

Then came the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954 which ordered the desegregation of public schools, and the dormant Klan spirit was reawakened once again. Catalyzed into being by the widened, sharpened Negro revolution of the Sixties, scores of Klan cells announced their rebirth with cross burnings, bombings and beatings throughout the South. Unlike the monolithic and politically powerful nationwide K. K. K. of the Twenties, many of the new Klan "klaverns" are autonomous local units that recognize no Klan authority beyond their own mountain hollow or city limits; and some are banded together in loose regional and state-wide federations. Overlapping loyalties among splinter Klans, unwritten alliances among certain Klan federations--and violent hostility among others--have confused reporters trying to make sense of the turbulent renascence of the hooded order of white, Anglo-Saxon, native-born Protestant superpatriots.

Out of the kaleidoscopic shifting of Klan liaisons, however, one leader has emerged as the most notorious, and the most powerful, of the lot: Robert Shelton of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, whose federation, rightly or wrongly, is blamed for nearly every Klan outrage from Florida to Texas. Because the K. K. K. is a secret society, no one outside the Klan knows just who and how many belong to Shelton's group, but the best-informed observers in the FBI and the Southern press estimate his membership--mostly in the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee--at about 10,000.

Little more is known for certain about Shelton himself, or his ascendancy to Klan leadership, for he refuses to discuss either his past or his private life. But investigator's have been able to ascertain a few solid facts about his personal background: Born 36 years ago in Tuscaloosa, he was educated in public schools there, dropped out of the University of Alabama after taking a few courses, then attended a vocational trade school where he studied automobile mechanics. After serving as a sergeant in the Army from 1949 to 1951, he went to work as a factory hand for the B. F. Goodrich Company in Tuscaloosa, but was fired for refusing to give up his extracurricular Klan activities. For a year he managed a local tire store, which he quit to supervise public relations for a trucking company; after another year he quit again, this time to become an air-conditioner salesman. Then, about nine months ago--having served as Imperial Wizard of the United Klans since 1961--he abandoned all outside work to devote his full energies to the K. K. K.

In the interests of finding out more about Shelton, his Klan and his racist convictions, we obtained his unlisted Tuscaloosa office phone number from a knowledgeable Southern newspaperman (who made us promise not to reveal where we got it) and called the Imperial Wizard with our request for an exclusive interview.

"You're the magazine that published that nigger pinup last March," he told us. "Well, I talk with most anybody as part of my job, so I guess I'll even talk to you."

Arriving in Tuscaloosa a week later, we drove to the address he gave us--a ramshackle downtown office building--spied the United Klan office door at the end of a dingy hall, walked in and found ourself in a room overflowing with untidy piles of newspapers, un-opened mail and mimeographed press releases. A pleasant secretary ushered us into the inner office, where Shelton himself greeted us unsmilingly with a cold handshake from behind a desk flanked by American and Confederate flags.

Ascetically thin and hawk-faced, he was totally unlike the stereotype of the hot-eyed fanatic. His speech was curiously flat, toneless and unpunctuated, and except for a solitary mirthless smile, when he commented that the Johnson-Humphrey ticket had not been on the ballot in Alabama last November, his face was inscrutably masklike and expressionless throughout our four-hour conversation. Nattily bedecked--not in his familiar Klan robes, but in an Ivy League hounds-tooth sports jacket, black knit tie, black slacks and an enormous diamond ring on his little finger--Shelton bypassed the amenities, making no secret of his antipathy toward the press, and instructed us to get right down to business. We did. (In order to preserve the flavor of Shelton's delivery, we have made no effort to correct either his syntax or his pronunciation.)

[Q] Playboy: What are the aims of the Ku Klux Klan?

[A] Shelton: To protect this great country and oppose mongrelization of the races. It is obligatory upon the nigra to recognize they are living in the land of the white race by courtesy of the white race.

[Q] Playboy: America's 20,000,000 native-born Negroes would undoubtedly take issue with that statement.

[A] Shelton: That's just why the Klan exists. White people cannot be expected to surrender control to any other race.

[Q] Playboy: They're not being asked to.

[A] Shelton: On the contrary, they are being made to do so. The white man is being defranchised as our forefathers were in the Reconstruction era.

[Q] Playboy: By Negroes?

[A] Shelton: By the Civil Rights Act, which is nothing but legislation for the nigra. This dastardly, infameous piece of legislation is designed solely to bring about turmoil.

[Q] Playboy: Why can't whites keep every right they now have and still extend rights to Negroes?

[A] Shelton: The Jewish race as well as the Catholics and other religious faiths have their rights, but this does not give them the right to destroy the faith of a settled race on this continent. Don't force something we don't want in our faith.

[Q] Playboy: How are Jews and Catholics forcing their beliefs on you?

[A] Shelton: With this liberalism, this civil rights. It's understandable that the Jew and the Catholic, being a minority themselves, would be sympathetic with the nigra. They have in the past contributed financially, morally and physically to the civil rights struggle. But now they are changing. They are beginning to see that the nigra thinks he is the all-power controlling factor. Many other people, too, that had been inclined to show partiality to the nigra in his struggle are reverting to the segregationist side because of the outside interference and because they have had an opportunity to see the low morals and the inner workings of the civil rights movement.

[Q] Playboy: If this alleged drift from sympathy for Negroes continues among Jews and Catholics, would they be welcomed into the Klan?

[A] Shelton: No. Only white, gentile, Protestant, native-born Americans can take the Klan oath. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a fraternal order of real men who are 100-percent American. But the Jew or Catholic might be welcomed into the Klan if he qualified.

[Q] Playboy: What would he have to do to qualify?

[A] Shelton: Give up his religion.

[Q] Playboy: What is the purpose of the Klan's concealing robes and hoods?

[A] Shelton: The robes are in memorandum of our forefathers and are used in ritualistic work. We wear hoods, but this organization does not use masks. We do not hide our identity. Our meetings are public.

[Q] Playboy: What is the symbolism of the burning cross at all Klan gatherings?

[A] Shelton: The cross has been used by crusaders for the last 19 centuries.

[Q] Playboy: There weren't any crusaders until the 11th Century.

[A] Shelton: Today we use the cross as a rallying point to meet oppression and to establish Christianity.

[Q] Playboy: Christianity was established 1965 years ago. But why do you burn the cross?

[A] Shelton: Lighting the cross signifies that this is to light the way of Christ and to show light of truth to the world. We use it to rally Christians and to meet the oncoming tide.

[Q] Playboy: What tide?

[A] Shelton: The tide of world communism.

[Q] Playboy: Are you attempting to stem that tide when you burn crosses on the lawns of civil rights sympathizers?

[A] Shelton: This organization does not participate in burning crosses of intimidation. When we have a problem to discuss with any individual, a committee of one, two or three Klansmen in street clothes will approach this person to discuss any grievances we may have with him, to give him our point of view, to persuade him to see things our way.

[Q] Playboy: This technique seems to be effective. In January of this year, Klan threats forced the cancellation of a speech in Bogalusa, Louisiana, by Brooks Hays, a Southern moderate political leader. How do you justify such violations of the right to free speech and assembly?

[A] Shelton: This is not a one-sided sword. The FBI and the Justice Department has harassed members of this Klan and other right-wing organizations, causing them to lose their jobs. They have harassed Klansmen at work though the Klansmen asked them not to come to the job but to their homes if they wanted to discuss anything. And that's just part of the story of economic intimidation, reprisals and harassments that individuals receive when they become known as Klansmen--from employers who fire Klansmen, from the FBI and the Justice Department.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't the Klan under Federal surveillance and investigation because of its own intimidation and brutalization of civil rights workers?

[A] Shelton: We do not believe in violence.

[Q] Playboy: If that's true, why do the Justice Department and many local police officials, including secret infiltrators of the Klan, blame the K. K. K.--in the 10 years since its revival in 1954--for 32 bombings in Alabama, 34 bombings in Georgia, 10 racial killings in Alabama, 30 Negro church burnings in Mississippi, the ambush killing of Colonel Lemuel Penn, the castration of an elderly Negro in Birmingham, the murders of Reverend James Reeb and Mrs. Anthony Liuzzo in Alabama, plus many floggings of civil rights workers and labor leaders?

[A] Shelton: This is a prejudice of the misinformed public and harassment by this FBI and Justice Department that don't know what they are talking about. I would like to point out that no Klansman has ever been convicted of those crimes, and I think it would be only fair to not blame the Klan for things that hasn't been proved. Not one conviction. As I said, we do not believe in violence--despite that certain individuals have committed acts of violence under cover of darkness, shielded by masks and robes resembling the official regalia of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. "Ballots not bullets" is our motto.

[Q] Playboy: How do you reconcile that statement with the testimony of eyewitnesses that Dr. Robert Hayling, a Negro civil rights leader in St. Augustine, Florida, was caught spying on a recent Klan meeting and publicly beaten?

[A] Shelton: We do not believe in violence.

[Q] Playboy: In Pike County, Mississippi, sheriff's records show two Negro floggings, four Negro churches burned and one bombed, along with thirteen Negro homes, a Negro store and a Negro barbershop--all during the summer of 1964. One of the eleven men convicted of the bombings carried a card signed by you. Can you explain that?

[A] Shelton: That was merely a card that I have given to thousands of people. It is just a form of pocket card for advertising, with a calendar on the back side and the insignia of the Klan on the front side, along with my name and address, in case anybody wants to reach me.

[Q] Playboy: Then how do you explain the case of Paul Dewey Wilson, who was arrested last year in McComb, Mississippi, while wearing a deputy sheriff's badge and hauling four rifles, a pistol, eight wooden clubs, a blackjack, brass knuckles and a hypodermic syringe in his car--and carrying a membership card in the United Klan signed by you?

[A] Shelton: We don't have membership cards. The card he had was the card I described--just a business card.

[Q] Playboy: He also had a black leatherette apron and black hood, which are allegedly the Klan executioner's garb. Are they?

[A] Shelton: No--not in our organization.

[Q] Playboy: Even segregationist Governor Paul Johnson of Mississippi has said, "The Klan claims it does not indulge in violence. Its activities, however, indicate otherwise." Any comment?

[A] Shelton: He is entitled to his opinion. We are against violence.

[Q] Playboy: So you've said.

[A] Shelton: There is several Klans, you know. That is the trouble of throwing every nut in the same bag and saying it's all the same kind of nuts.

[Q] Playboy: That's an aptly chosen metaphor. But all of those arrested for recent racial murders--those of Lemuel Penn, Reverend Reeb and Mrs. Liuzzo--have been members of your own United Klan.

[A] Shelton: There are many Klans. The FBI has arrested people without any proof whatsoever.

[Q] Playboy: Are you claiming that the men arrested for these murders are not members of your United Klan?

[A] Shelton: I'm not saying they were and I'm not saying they're not. It would be a violation of my sacred Klan oath to identify members of the Klan. But speaking of violating oaths, we are finding many cases where the Federal Bureau of Investigation is purging witnesses with attempts to bribe.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you mean suborning witnesses?

[A] Shelton: I mean they are offering money to get them to make statements on promises of giving them land, relocating their family, giving them money.

[Q] Playboy: Can you cite a case?

[A] Shelton: I certainly can: that pimp Gary Rowe, the FBI informer in this Luziano case.

[Q] Playboy: You mean Liuzzo?

[A] Shelton: Even the FBI admits they gave him $3000, and we have reason to think it was more.

[Q] Playboy: You call Rowe a pimp. What do you mean by that?

[A] Shelton: There are three kinds of undercover agents. There is the spy; there is the inside informer; and there is the pimp. By that I mean the kind of fellow who eggs along, who urges on his cohorts to do his dastardly deeds and then reports them. And this man is one of those--a pimp.

[Q] Playboy: You mean he urged the three Klansmen to murder Mrs. Liuzzo?

[A] Shelton: He is a pimp and I have told you what a pimp is.

[Q] Playboy: Is Collie Leroy Wilkins, who was tried for the murder of Mrs. Liuzzo, a United Klansman?

[A] Shelton: That's only speculation. I'm not saying yes or no.

[Q] Playboy: If he isn't, we find it odd that he was defended with Klan funds by a Klan lawyer, and that you sat throughout most of the trial beside Wilkins at the defense counsel's table. Were there any Klansmen on the jury?

[A] Shelton: That is what is irksome to me. The prosecutor asked every juryman if he was a member of a secret order. But I notice he did not ask if they were Knights of Columbus, just Klansmen.

[Q] Playboy: But it was an accused Klansman on trial, not a Knight of Columbus.

[A] Shelton: Well, there was no Klansman on that jury, that much I can tell you flatly. The prosecutor made sure of that.

[Q] Playboy: In any event, the case ended in a mistrial when the jurors failed to agree on a verdict. Do you feel that justice was served?

[A] Shelton: No, I do not. After the President's accusiations on television, it was impossible for Wilkins to have an impartial trial. In the first place, the Government had no evidence whatsoever to submit at the pretrial hearing to show cause to hold these individuals. They were no witnesses presented, yet the bond was established at $50,000 each. We immediately requested a hearing before a Federal judge to appeal for a more reasonable bond; but he had already prejudged the cases--evidently he had heard the President make the accusiation on national television--and he refused to even discuss setting a lower bond for the murderers of the woman from Detroit. It shows the unfairness of prejudging, as the President did in this case.

[Q] Playboy: Haven't you just prejudged them yourself by calling them "the murderers of the woman from Detroit"?

[A] Shelton: Oh, I meant to say "the accused murderers," of course. But as I was saying, it set a low presency for the highest executive of this land to go before the general citizenry to establish himself as a megalomaniac. Meaningly, that he places himself above God to be the judge on an individual's guilt by judging him without any evidence being submitted whatsoever. Had it not been for the President's intrusions, Wilkins would have been acquitted on the first ballot.

[Q] Playboy: As part of his summation to the jury, the Klan's attorney, Matt Murphy, said: "I never thought I'd see the day when Communists and niggers and Jews were flying around under the banner of the United Nations, not the American flag of the country we fought for, not the flag of the country we are in, and I am proud to be white and I stand here as a white man and I say we are never going to mongrelize the race with nigger blood and the Martin Luther Kings, the white niggers, the Jews, the Zionists who run that bunch of niggers, the white people are not going to run before them. Jim Clark says 'Never.' I say 'Never' myself ... I urge you as patriotic Americans not to find this young man guilty." Are those also your own sentiments?

[A] Shelton: Certainly. Those beatniks, tennis-shoe wearers, sex perverts at Selma were carrying the United Nations flag for anybody to see.

[Q] Playboy: Well, it's not a crime to carry a UN flag, of course. But even if your description of the Selma marchers were accurate, how is it relevant to the innocence or guilt of the Klansmen accused of Mrs. Liuzzo's murder?

[A] Shelton: It is further evidence of the pressure of the influx of these outsiders, of the Federal Government, of the whole international conspiracy to break the back of the Klan. They will stoop to any level. They were offering only the word of a pimp, Gary Rowe. He is not a real informer; he is a political prostitute. I have letters from relatives of his in Savannah, Georgia, saying he is the lowest scum on earth. Why, just two days before the shooting, he pistol-whipped a man in Birmingham, beat him senseless to the ground with the butt of his pistol.

[Q] Playboy: What was the man's name?

[A] Shelton: The man was a religious member of a sect that doesn't permit violence, so he just held his arms to his sides while this pimp pistol-whipped him.

[Q] Playboy: What was the man's name?

[A] Shelton: Rowe did the same thing a month previous.

[Q] Playboy: Can you prove these charges?

[A] Shelton: It is on the police docket in Birmingham. Look it up. He said and kept hollering while he hit that man that nobody could touch him because he was protected by the Federal Government. When the FBI stoops to using people that low, we have come a long way downhill and it is time to stop and take a look around to see what is happening to us.

[A] [Subsequent investigation of Shelton's charges revealed that Rowe was tried for assault and battery in Birmingham Court on March 15, 1965, but the case was dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence. The other incident took place in Fultondale, Alabama, not Birmingham; the charge was public drunkenness, not assault; and the man charged, and tried on March 23, 1965, was not Rowe but a man named Charles Powell. According to the town's mayor, in fact, it was Rowe who brought the charges against Powell.]

[Q] Playboy: Let's move on, if we may--

[A] Shelton: Before you change the subject, I would like to call your attention to a few facts in connection with this Luziano case.

[Q] Playboy: Liuzzo.

[A] Shelton: From medical records which was called into this office and to my lawyer from one of the institutions in Detroit, we find that she has been an in-and-out patient in a mental hospital there in Detroit. We also find at the time she was killed she was on probation from courts in Detroit. There is even some doubt as to whether or not her and her husband were actually living together for the last three months.

[A] [Mr. Liuzzo's attorney states she was never a patient in a mental hospital and that she was indeed living with Mr. Liuzzo up to the moment of her departure for Selma. It is true that she was on probation--as the result of having refused to send her children to school, to call attention to the Michigan legislature's refusal to raise the compulsory school age from 16 to 18.]

[Q] Playboy: Even if your charges were true, do you consider this a justification for killing her?

[A] Shelton: I am violently opposed to death by violence. But if Mrs. Liuzzo had been at home with her family, this incident wouldn't never have happened. She should have stayed home and not come to Selma.

[Q] Playboy: Why? Didn't she and the other out-of-state demonstrators at Selma have every Constitutional right to go to Alabama or any other part of the United States they chose?

[A] Shelton: We're not going to Detroit to demonstrate demanding that they take nigras off registration. Let the people of Detroit clean up their own back yard and tend to their own confounded business and leave us alone. When you bring in outside agitators who are mistfits in other societies, it brings resentment from all people.

[Q] Playboy: Not all people. Nor do most Americans consider civil rights workers misfits. But speaking of Detroit back yards, a Klan-type cross was burned in the back yard of Mrs. Liuzzo's Detroit home shortly after her funeral. Does your Klan have a klavern in Detroit?

[A] Shelton: I'm not going to be specific in the location of any unit.

[Q] Playboy: A reporter quoted an unidentified Klansman at a rally in Morganton, North Carolina, as saying that Mrs. Liuzzo "got what she deserved." Do you agree?

[A] Shelton: I am not for any person's life being taken through violence. I am saying, however, that she was out of her rightful place at home; a married woman and a mother, she was off involved in immoral surroundings.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of immoral surroundings, Anthony Liuzzo said after his wife's death, "They should put a 90-foot fence around Alabama and let those segregationists live with themselves." Any comment?

[A] Shelton: The only necessity of putting a fence around Alabama is to keep some of the mistfits and sex perverts out.

[Q] Playboy: Does that include Mrs. Liuzzo and Reverend Reeb?

[A] Shelton: If they had stayed home, this would never have happened.

[Q] Playboy: At a press conference after Mrs. Liuzzo's death, you said that the Klan "Bureau of Investigation" was looking into her background for "possible Communist connections." Do you claim to have found any?

[A] Shelton: No, but we are certainly checking her background.

[Q] Playboy: Mrs. Liuzzo was a Roman Catholic. Communism is atheistic. Do you think she could be both a Catholic and a Communist?

[A] Shelton: Perhaps she was a Communist dupe rather than a conscious agent. However, there was numbers of priests and nuns at Selma, and one Catholic that viewed the march on television told me it was uncommon to see a nun in high-heeled shoes or a priest in his regalia of the Church with suede shoes on.

[Q] Playboy: Why is it that none of the several hundred members of the press on the march reported seeing this?

[A] Shelton: Well, this Catholic friend of mine saw it and he told me about it.

[Q] Playboy: What is his name?

[A] Shelton: I can't violate his confidence.

[Q] Playboy: Then let's change the subject. At a recent Klan rally in Hemingway, South Carolina, you called President Johnson "a conniving, misgiving fool." What did you mean by that?

[A] Shelton: I did not say that. That is a misinterpretation. I only called him a megalomaniac.

[Q] Playboy: We're sorry to contradict you, but that rally was televised nationally on ABC, and you were clearly heard by millions of viewers to say, and we quote you: "If LBJ thinks that he is going to run the Klan underground or break our backs by using us as a fish bait to his liberal element, the demands to investigate the United Klans of America by the House Inactivities Committee, he is a conniving, misgiving fool." In that same speech, you also said of the President, "If he continues with his yakking, he will be one of the greatest organizers the Klan has ever had." Would you elaborate?

[A] Shelton: I may make him an honorary Klansman, he has done us so much good with his yakking. You can see from the unopened mail deliveries on my desk, consisting of up to 33,000 letters [our estimate: about 300], that the ratio is running about 99 to 1 in favor.

[Q] Playboy: How do you know the sentiment of an unopened letter?

[A] Shelton: Well, the two or three I have had the time to open was certainly in favor. The people are saying if the President is going to be on the side of Martin Luther King, they want to be on the side of the Ku Klux Klan.

[Q] Playboy: At the time of his announcement that the FBI had arrested four Klansmen for the murder of Mrs. Liuzzo, the President warned Klansmen to resign "before it is too late." What do you think he was threatening to those who did not get out?

[A] Shelton: The President of the United States thinks he can force a Klansman to choose his associations and his fraternal organization for his "New Society."

[Q] Playboy: Great Society.

[A] Shelton: Whatever you call it, if this society he is advocating with the civil rights struggle is composed of sex perverts, beatniks, pinkos, Communists, the lowest mistfits from all over the country that are participating in all of these sex orgies openly, in defiance of the public eye, of indecent exposure, I want no part of it.

[Q] Playboy: Are you referring to the fornication that allegedly took place--according to segregationist "eyewitnesses"--on the march from Selma to Montgomery?

[A] Shelton: I am--and it did.

[Q] Playboy: Hundreds of clergymen, newsmen and press photographers accompanied the marchers; yet none of them reported the slightest breach of propriety en route.

[A] Shelton: Either they were blind or covering up. There has been a compiled listing of pictures and films showing these fornifications. I have over 5000 photographs--pictures of the charges that have been made of fornification. They will be shown at a later date.

[Q] Playboy: Pictures of the charges or pictures of the fornication?

[A] Shelton: Of the fornification.

[Q] Playboy: Why haven't you made them public?

[A] Shelton: At the proper time they will be presented.

[Q] Playboy: When?

[A] Shelton: In due time and to the proper investigation authorities.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have Klan secret agents among the marchers?

[A] Shelton: I'm not saying. But I don't think we could hardly have gotten all the photographs but what we have sources of getting information.

[Q] Playboy: In a telegram you sent to the President after his televised denunciation of the Klan, you said you wanted to confer with him privately about "sex perverts in Government and Communist agents in the civil rights movement." Would you elaborate?

[A] Shelton: When the President first went into the White House and went around turning out all the lights, I was puzzled what he was up to. Then the Jenkins case came along and I understood.

[Q] Playboy: What are you implying?

[A] Shelton: Everybody is familiar with the Jenkins case. The general public should become aware of the investigation that has been suppressed.

[A] [The findings of the FBI investigation of Jenkins, which was ordered by the President, were summarized in an eight-page report that was released to the press by J. Edgar Hoover on October 22, 1964.]

[Q] Playboy: How about Communist agents in the civil rights movement? Would you name some?

[A] Shelton: There have been definite indications in investigations in this area.

[Q] Playboy: Conducted by whom?

[A] Shelton: By the Klan Bureau of Investigation, among others.

[Q] Playboy: You'll forgive us if we don't accept its findings as documentary fact.

[A] Shelton: Don't take our word for it. Counteragents working with the Federal Government have also signed notarized statements saying there are many active Communists in the civil rights struggle.

[Q] Playboy: Can you show us these statements?

[A] Shelton: I have them in my files.

[Q] Playboy: The FBI has reported that there are a few Communists active in some of the more militant civil rights groups, but Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach has said that their numbers are insignificant and that the Communist Party cannot be said to exert any influence whatever over the civil rights movement or its leaders.

[A] Shelton: He is ignorant of the conspiracy. He knows better.

[Q] Playboy: How can he be ignorant and yet also know better?

[A] Shelton: I have pictures implicating many known Communists.

[Q] Playboy: Can you show us the pictures, cite specific names, tell us to whom, apart from you, they are "known" as Communists?

[A] Shelton: I am not privileged to divulge that information at this time.

[Q] Playboy: On several occasions you have called for a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of CORE, SNCC and the NAACP for possible Communist infiltration. Would you be as willing to submit to a Congressional investigation of the Klan?

[A] Shelton: Certainly. Why not? What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If the civil rights groups were being investigated, we would gladly open our doors to the same scrutiny.

[Q] Playboy: The Attorney General has said that the Klan has been infiltrated by many FBI agents. Did this come as a surprise to you?

[A] Shelton: No. We know we have infiltration. However, it's not necessary for them to infiltrate. If they fill out an application, they can do so and we'll welcome them into the Klan and have fraternal unionism.

[Q] Playboy: Have you spotted any of the FBI spies in your own Klan?

[A] Shelton: Absolutely.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have them under countersurveillance?

[A] Shelton: No, because we have nothing to hide. In some cases, these informers are actually turning the money they get for informing to the FBI back to the Klan itself.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] Shelton: These so-called informers are sometimes more loyal to the Klan than the FBI knows.

[Q] Playboy: As you know, several Klansmen besides Gary Rowe have promised to reveal Klan secrets to the Un-American Activities Committee. What's your reaction?

[A] Shelton: Any individual who would reveal secrets of the Klan would be violating his oath to his God and to his fellow Klansmen.

[Q] Playboy: If you were subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, would you do so?

[A] Shelton: No, I would not. The same law that applies to the NAACP, the Communist Party, SNCC and CORE would also have to apply to us.

[Q] Playboy: You mean the Fifth Amendment, which empowers a witness to avoid self-incrimination by refusing to testify?

[A] Shelton: That's correct.

[Q] Playboy: But if you have nothing to hide, why would you refuse to testify?

[A] Shelton: Well, if I did not have to violate my sacred oath by divulging Klan secrets, I might testify--provided the Committee was carrying out its purpose of investigating for infiltration of communism and of individuals and groups advocating the overthrow of the American Government. But if it is for the purpose of left-wing elements using the Klan as the bait to destroy the Committee itself because of its Southern membership, then I am opposed to any type of investigation, and I would refuse to testify. The FBI has already slandered the Klan by calling it a subversive organization, which is an outrageous lie.

[Q] Playboy: Four Klan groups are cited on the subversive list.

[A] Shelton: This Klan is not on the list. The four Klan groups cited are not the United Klan. Of course, the Attorney General at a stroke of a pen can put any group he wishes on the subversive list.

[Q] Playboy: Any group? How about the Boy Scouts?

[A] Shelton: Perhaps not, but I am surprised he hasn't already done it to us, since he is of the liberal mind himself.

[Q] Playboy: President Johnson said of the Klan, "I know their loyalty is not to the United States but to a hooded society." Is that true?

[A] Shelton: That was the remark that I called him a liar for. Better than 70 percent of the Klan are veterans of World War One, World War Two and the Korean conflict. The Grand Dragon of Tennessee has sent the President a telegram telling him what to do with the two Silver Stars, the two bronze medals, the two Purple Hearts and the left arm he left in Korea. Practically all of the leadership of the Klan are veterans that received medals.

[Q] Playboy: Victor Riesel, the labor columnist, recently wrote that the majority of Klansmen are "the unlettered, the semiliterate, the unskilled." Do you disagree?

[A] Shelton: Absolutely. I don't know what script he is reading from. We have many people in the Klan--doctors, lawyers, veterans. We have all phases of the everyday life of the people.

[Q] Playboy: Are there Klansmen in police and sheriff's departments?

[A] Shelton: Yes. We have Klans people in all walks of life.

[Q] Playboy: Calvin Craig of Georgia, your second-in-command, has said the United Klan has members holding high-ranking Federal jobs. Which jobs?

[A] Shelton: We have Klansmen in all walks of life, but I don't care to be more exact. I would be violating my Klan oath. If they want to reveal themselves as members, of course, that is their business.

[Q] Playboy: Do these Federal officeholders report to the Klan and take Klan orders?

[A] Shelton: We have loyal members in all walks of life.

[Q] Playboy: Does the Klan have connections with other conservative groups, such as the John Birch Society, the Minute Men and the Christian Crusade?

[A] Shelton: We are not associated with any other patriot group. However, we are not opposing.

[Q] Playboy: Do you endorse the views and objectives of the Birch Society?

[A] Shelton: Which views?

[Q] Playboy: Well, do you share the Society's conviction that the mental-health program is part and parcel of "the international Communist conspiracy"?

[A] Shelton: Certainly there are dangers in the mental-health program instituted by the World Council through the United Nations.

[Q] Playboy: There is no such organization as the World Council.

[A] Shelton: Part of their program was executed against General Edwin Walker at the riots in Oxford, Mississippi. In any case, there is no such thing as mental health. The Government is attempting to execute it in order to have loopholes where individuals that are outspoken critics of any Administration could be declared a lunatic, to be incompetent in his community, and giving them the power as they executed with General Walker that they might ship you off to any part of the country and hold you as a political prisoner.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying that Klansmen and other critics of the Administration, such as General Walker, have been railroaded on mental-health pretexts and held incommunicado?

[A] Shelton: I have letters from Texas from people who have had members of their families or their friends carried off. Under the new Federal mental-health laws, practically every health officer has full and unchallengeable power. A mental-health officer might enter your home without a search warrant.

[Q] Playboy: According to law, a person would have to be charged with a Federal crime before a Federal agent could concern himself with that person's mental condition, let alone enter his home--with or without a search warrant. Then the accused would have to be given a full hearing in Federal court, with testimony by psychiatric experts, before he could be committed to an institution.

[A] Shelton: Well, it's an everyday occurrence, just about.

[Q] Playboy: Can you cite specific cases?

[A] Shelton: One case, in North Carolina, recently, when the FBI entered an individual's home even without a search warrant and that individual was held incommunicado.

[Q] Playboy: What was his name and home town? How long was he held, and why?

[A] Shelton: It is in my files somewhere, but I can't just quickly answer that.

[Q] Playboy: What is your attitude on the fluoridation of water, another "Communist-inspired" bugaboo of the John Birch Society?

[A] Shelton: It is establishing socialized medicine. I am not against any individual that has a desire for his child to receive fluoride for preventing tooth decay, which I am told it does, but I am opposed to forcing or for establishing socialized medicine, which certainly injecting fluoride is--especially a chemical fluoride, which they are using to prevent tooth decay. It is not generally known that the fluoride used in water systems is a by-product of aluminum-alloy shavings, which is a deadly poison.

[Q] Playboy: Dental authorities assert that the fluoride used to prevent tooth decay does not cause harmful side effects. Do you share the view of the Birch Society that fluoridation is part of a conspiracy to poison Americans through the pretense of preventing tooth decay?

[A] Shelton: Well, it can be used in a conspiracy. Very definitely the Russians used fluoride effectively on their prisoners in the concentration camps in Russia.

[Q] Playboy: For what purpose?

[A] Shelton: To break, down their resistance to propaganda, to help brainwash them. It has the effect to accumulate. The body absorbs small doses and there is no method of the body casting this out as it does other chemicals.

[Q] Playboy: Laboratory researchers have found no evidence whatever of such bizarre mental side effects from the use of sodium fluoride. But let's move on to another Birch Society cause célèbre: the nuclear test ban treaty, which it violently opposes. How do you feel about it?

[A] Shelton: I am against making any agreement on a disarmament program, of which this would be a first step.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Shelton: The United Nations disarmament program will leave the individual citizen disarmed in his own home.

[Q] Playboy: The nuclear test ban treaty was signed to prevent further contamination of the atmosphere with radioactive fallout. What possible connection could this have with the control of private firearms?

[A] Shelton: It's the opening wedge, the start of this three-stage disarmament plot. In the event of a revolution, as is predicted by many people, America might find itself unarmed.

[Q] Playboy: What revolution? Waged by whom and against what?

[A] Shelton: From the evidence we have in regards to the civil rights struggle in Selma, Montgomery, Marion and Birmingham, the tone of speech being used in the riots in Harlem, New York, many of the nigra leaders are strong advocates of a bloody revolution. We witnessed them on television call for a hundred volunteers to go out into the street.

[Q] Playboy: Who made this appeal? The only speeches we have heard called for peaceful demonstrations.

[A] Shelton: We have witnessed these nigras in Selma making speeches saying: "If it's war the Southerner wants, we will burn Jim Crowism and any other opposition as Sherman burned the South to the ground in the Civil War. We will march through Dixie and leave a bloodbath. There is no other way out."

[Q] Playboy: Who made that speech?

[A] Shelton: Well, King was one.

[Q] Playboy: That isn't true.

[A] Shelton: Well, there is violence everywhere he goes.

[Q] Playboy: But the violence is directed against Dr. King and his followers by white segregationists. He does not initiate it. In the event of a Negro rebellion such as you predict, however, don't you think the U. S. Army or the National Guard would be adequate to put down the revolt--especially since Negroes as well as white Southerners would presumably be disarmed?

[A] Shelton: Eventual execution of the disarmament program will place us under the protection of a One World police force from the United Nations; we could not be under the jurisdiction of the U. S. Army or our own troops.

[Q] Playboy: Where did you get that extraordinary idea? It's not in the American Constitution, the United Nations Charter, or in any legislative or executive program of the American Government.

[A] Shelton: You can see it plainly, the drift to One-Worldism. If revolution was to take place and we had troops down here from the Congo or Leopoldville or some Asian country, you can realize the dangers of oppression to white Americans. We would be under a worse heel of tyranny than we are under now.

[Q] Playboy: What sort of tyranny?

[A] Shelton: I can see you've been soft-soaped like most of the unsuspecting American public. It's all part of the One World conspiracy to internationalize this country with its One World court, its One World race--even its One World language, which will probably be some mumbo jumbo from the dark jungles of Africa. This international conspiracy has as its purpose the complete undermining of the American way of life.

[Q] Playboy: By whom is this "conspiracy" being engineered?

[A] Shelton: The key individuals involved in this international conspiracy are those who are speaking out against the segregationists of the South, against the John Birch Society, against the Minute Men and the Klan.

[Q] Playboy: That includes most of the American public. Are they all in on the conspiracy?

[A] Shelton: In the first place, don't be too sure the American public is all that much against us. It is later than you think. We've got to realize when we refer to Russia and the Communist state, this is not where the financial structure was that brought about the revolution of the Bolsheviks against the Czar. The money was supplied and many men was supplied from New York City.

[Q] Playboy: By whom?

[A] Shelton: By the international banking concern of Kuhn and Loeb.

[Q] Playboy: Do you mean the Wall Street investment banking house?

[A] Shelton: Yes, this international banking concern--with a network of confederate banking interests in England, Switzerland, and so forth--is not only the moneybags but the brain trust of the international Communist conspiracy.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying, in other words, that the secret headquarters of world communism is New York rather than Moscow or Peking, and that Kosygin, Brezhnev and Mao Tse-Tung take their orders from a group of international banking firms headed by Kuhn, Loeb and Company?

[A] Shelton: Absolutely right.

[Q] Playboy: That will come as news not only to political scientists but also to Kosygin, Brezhnev and Mao, not to mention Kuhn and Loeb. How did you come by this fascinating bit of intelligence?

[A] Shelton: I have my sources. I cannot name them for fear of reprisal against them by the conspiracy.

[Q] Playboy: Can you tell us the names of those who head the conspiracy?

[A] Shelton: I told you--Kuhn and Loeb, and a group of other international financiers.

[Q] Playboy: Are these financiers Jewish, by any chance?

[A] Shelton: All of them, to my knowledge. They are financial wizards, and they head an international cartel that already owns our monetary system and controls the economy of this country.

[Q] Playboy: How, exactly?

[A] Shelton: By keeping us drained through taxation and by executing their liberal spending policies abroad.

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps you didn't know that tax laws are passed by the Congress, and that the nation's spending policies are determined by the President and the Bureau of the Budget.

[A] Shelton: Don't you believe it. Not only does this international cartel control the economy, but it is financing a Bolshevik revolution right here in the United States, just as it did in Russia in 1917. This conspiracy existed even at the time of the War Between the States.

[Q] Playboy: Kuhn, Loeb and Company, which you called the brain trust of the conspiracy, wasn't founded until 1867, after the War was over. Who was in charge of it in 1861?

[A] Shelton: The House of Rothschild. This was their method of maneuvering the country into civil strife to divide in order to conquer.

[Q] Playboy: Has this remarkable conspiracy been going on ever since then?

[A] Shelton: Indeed it has.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe that Jewish financiers were also responsible for, say, World War One?

(continued on page 141)Playboy Interview(continued from page 54)

[A] Shelton: Absolutely. And when Hitler was gaining his power, he had the financing of Jews. Then he more or less double-crossed them. You know, of course, that Hitler's grandmother was Jewish. The Police Gazette had an article showing gravestones and saying that some of his forebears were Jewish.

[Q] Playboy: Most scholars do not consider the Police Gazette an unimpeachable source. But tell us: Did you approve of Hitler's actions against the Jews?

[A] Shelton: I don't approve of the destruction and death of any person.

[Q] Playboy: Was the Jewish conspiracy also responsible for the Depression, in your opinion?

[A] Shelton: Absolutely. Herbert Hoover has gotten the blame for it, but he was placed in leadership when this country was already at its lowest ebb because of the conspiracy engineered by these international financiers.

[Q] Playboy: Actually, the Depression didn't begin until after Hoover had been President for several months. In any case, it hardly seems likely that these international financiers would have conspired to create a monetary crisis that would result in their own bankruptcy--which happened in many cases. What's your opinion of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which many credit with rescuing the country from the Depression?

[A] Shelton: Roosevelt did more than any other President to liberalize, to socialize and to bring this country into the social revolution we are experiencing today.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying that he was a conscious agent of the conspiracy?

[A] Shelton: Either that or he allowed himself to be duped.

[Q] Playboy: Was Harry Truman a dupe, too?

[A] Shelton: He was a fair President, but too many of the conspirators had already infiltrated the Government, so that he had no choice but to follow their conspiratorial policy.

[Q] Playboy: How about Eisenhower?

[A] Shelton: If he had had the initiative to take the steps his conscience told him he should, he could have reversed this trend to communism.

[Q] Playboy: But he didn't?

[A] Shelton: No.

[Q] Playboy: Did John F. Kennedy?

[A] Shelton: President Kennedy had realized he was being guided into the deep-blue end of the stream. He was struggling to get back on dry land, and this was the reason of the assassination.

[Q] Playboy: He was assassinated because he was resisting the international financiers' conspiracy?

[A] Shelton: He was trying desperately to pull away. That was the reason of the assassination.

[Q] Playboy: Oswald was not an independent agent?

[A] Shelton: Absolutely not. He was a Marxist assassin acting on orders. The Warren Commission was nothing but a Sunday-coating dress-up to suppress the facts.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying that the assassination, and this alleged suppression of "the facts," were engineered by the international Jewish financiers' conspiracy?

[A] Shelton: Absolutely.

[Q] Playboy: And Jack Ruby, of course, being Jewish ...

[A] Shelton: Absolutely. Hired to silence Oswald.

[Q] Playboy: Is President Johnson, too, in on the conspiracy?

[A] Shelton: Clearly. President Johnson is a power-hungry politician. In statements he made in the Senate, he was opposed to civil rights as being unconstitutional, saying that he hoped he would never see anything so drastic as the Civil Rights Bill being brought forth. Now we see a complete reversal. It reminds me of LBJ vs. LBJ in a lawsuit.

[Q] Playboy: What's your opinion of Barry Goldwater?

[A] Shelton: He was the lesser of two evils in the race. There was things of Senator Goldwater that I didn't agree with.

[Q] Playboy: For instance?

[A] Shelton: Well, the mental health. He was instrumental at the beginning of this program.

[Q] Playboy: Then is he in on the conspiracy, too?

[A] Shelton: Well, he certainly was not a segregationist, since as governor of Arizona he desegregated the National Guard.

[Q] Playboy: Goldwater was never governor of Arizona, nor did he have anything to do with the desegregation of the Air National Guard, as claimed by his supporters during the campaign. Considering what you apparently believed to be his integrationist convictions, however--plus the fact that he is half Jewish and William Miller is Catholic, why did the Klan endorse the Goldwater-Miller ticket rather than the Democratic nominees, who were white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants?

[A] Shelton: In Alabama the Johnson and Horatio ticket was not even on the ballot, so we didn't have that problem.

[Q] Playboy: If not Goldwater or Johnson, who do you feel would make a good President?

[A] Shelton: Governor Wallace. Of course, it's an impossibility. It shows the Southern people is the most discriminated against than even the nigra race. It would be impossible for a Southerner to become President.

[Q] Playboy: President Johnson is a Southerner.

[A] Shelton: He is a Texan, not a Southerner.

[Q] Playboy: Well, Texas was one of the Confederate states; most of the state lies farther south than Tuscaloosa; the eastern half lives on cotton; segregation is widespread; and almost everybody stands when the band plays Dixie. That sounds like a Southern state to us. But let's get back to Governor Wallace. What qualifications do you feel he has for the Presidency?

[A] Shelton: He would not show prejudice against nigras, Northerners, Catholics, Jews. He has shown that he is interested in the welfare of this country.

[Q] Playboy: In the opinion of many who have followed his career, little if anything the Governor has done since taking office could be considered in the best interests either of the Negro or of the nation. Is it true that your father is an officer on Wallace's staff?

[A] Shelton: I believe so.

[Q] Playboy: Do you know the Governor personally?

[A] Shelton: Certainly I know him.

[Q] Playboy: Does he ever confer with you about state affairs?

[A] Shelton: If I would answer you about that, there would be questions raised, so I don't care to comment.

[Q] Playboy: Governor Wallace has denounced the press for its "leftist bias" in reporting about the civil rights movement--particularly about racial incidents in Alabama. Do you agree with him?

[A] Shelton: Absolutely. The vast majority of the press is in on the conspiracy. The local reporter is usually all right; he has to make a living for his family. It is in the editorial head offices that you find the distortion directed by dais conspiratorially controlled press. The national news medias creates anything that is sensational, that will sell copy. They go out of their way to grasp anything that appears sensational in racial demonstrations to sell news.

[Q] Playboy: Such as the Reeb and Liuzzo killings, and the deaths of the four Negro girls in the Birmingham church bombing?

[A] Shelton: The Klan can be made a sensational issue by reaching into the past pedestals of history and trying to place the Klan of today in the same category as the Klan of the Reconstruction era. But this Klan is definitely not the Klan of our forefathers, because this is a different time.

[Q] Playboy: All the murders we mentioned have been committed during your administration as Imperial Wizard of the United Klans.

[A] Shelton: As I said before, we had nothing to do with any of them. We do not believe in violence.

[Q] Playboy: Let's change the subject. How do you feel about mixing the races?

[A] Shelton: I would say race mixture is definitely harmful.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Shelton: There are various hereditary diseases that certainly would bring about withholding of advancement. For example, the nigra has a dread disease called sickle-cell anemia that is only found in the nigra. It is not found in the white race unless there is mixing of the blood.

[Q] Playboy: A national survey conducted some years back reported that almost one in five "white" Americans had some Negro blood. Do you accept those figures?

[A] Shelton: It is possible.

[Q] Playboy: Would you consider someone of, say, 1/32 Negro ancestry to be white?

[A] Shelton: If you're breeding animals for registration and you don't have the full breed, you don't get your papers. For maintaining the heritage of the race, we've got to maintain a pure race.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Shelton: To maintain the power to govern for future generations. Only the pure race have to the highest degree the power to govern. You cannot show me any nation in history that did not crumble once they allowed their races to become amalgamated and thus lost their moral foundations.

[Q] Playboy: Call you name one that did?

[A] Shelton: The Roman Empire, for instance, fell after their morals collapsed.

[Q] Playboy: The Roman Empire was at its height during the reigns of its pagan emperors and did not collapse till after its emperors and most Romans had been Christians for more than a hundred years. Since you profess to be a Christian yourself, can you tell us where it says in the Bible that segregation is morally right?

[A] Shelton: There are many verses in the Bible that verify and maintain this.

[Q] Playboy: Name one.

[A] Shelton: Well, Acts, 17th chapter, 26th verse, for instance.

[Q] Playboy: Let's look it up in this Bible on your desk ... The opening words of that verse are "God hath made of one blood all nations of men ..."

[A] Shelton: Many so-called students of the Bible attempt to use partial phrases of the Scripture as you just did to justify intermingling of the races, to create a false image of the fatherhood under God and the brotherhood of man.

[Q] Playboy: There's no such thing as the brotherhood of man?

[A] Shelton: Only of white, native-born, gentile, Protestant Americans. I don't have to accept a nigra into my home, and if I refuse him this hospitality, I am not a sinful person.

[Q] Playboy: The purpose of the civil rights movement is not to force anyone to accept Negroes into his home, but to win for Negroes the same fundamental human rights enjoyed by whites--the vote, adequate housing and schooling anywhere they choose, equal job opportunities, equal access to public accommodations.

[A] Shelton: Asking me to take a nigra into my home is the same as a minister of the Gospel being forced to accept a criminal, or a bootlegger, or a gambler into his home on a social basis.

[Q] Playboy: Are you equating Negroes with criminals, bootleggers and gamblers?

[A] Shelton: Certainly not. Not in all cases. But if it is distasteful to me for nigras to be in my house, it is my right not to have them in my house.

[Q] Playboy: That is your privilege as a private citizen. Federal law clearly states, however, that it is not your privilege to refuse the use of public facilities--including churches--to anyone on the basis of skin color, no matter how distasteful it may be to you personally. Recognizing this fact, the national governing body of the Methodist Church, to which you belong, has urged racial integration of its member churches. Has yours complied?

[A] Shelton: No, sir, it certainly has not.

[Q] Playboy: What would you do if it did?

[A] Shelton: I would leave the church. Many people would leave the church. I have no desire to meet the nigra. I don't want him forcing himself on my society.

[Q] Playboy: Do you know any Negroes personally?

[A] Shelton: Certainly. How could you avoid it?

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any Negro friends?

[A] Shelton: I do not. I don't want the nigra forcing himself socially.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any white friends?

[A] Shelton: Those who feel as I do-- and there are many of them. But about these churches and integration. The Southern Baptists and also the so-called Methodists have went to the extent of recommending such books as James Baldwin's Another Country and Martin Luther King's books. In these books are nodiing but the utmost of filth.

[Q] Playboy: Filth in Dr. King's books? Where?

[A] Shelton: You have to read them for yourself.

[Q] Playboy: We have, and we don't find any in them.

[A] Shelton: For any church that calls itself a church to recommend this type of literature for the age group of 14 to 19 is beyond anything I can say. The beginning of Another Country is a sex orgy of interracial participation. Definition of sexual feelings and desires and how they are animally carried out.

[Q] Playboy: How can you place Baldwin's erotic novel--which has received wide critical acclaim--in the same category with the writings of Martin Luther King?

[A] Shelton: I have just given you two examples. I could name countless others. The newsstands are flooded with filth.

[Q] Playboy: Magazines as well as books?

[A] Shelton: All kinds of publications are going overboard in trying to create a sexual desire, a lust for sexual latitude in this country. When you create a lustful desire in the younger generation, you break down the morality of the country, and once you do that the country itself will tumble.

[Q] Playboy: Can you give us the titles of a few magazines that you feel are generating this moral decay?

[A] Shelton: Playboy is one of them. Why, you even had a nude nigra model in the March issue, who incidentally comes from Tuscaloosa.

[Q] Playboy: You sound a strange note of civic pride. Do you think movies are obscene, too?

[A] Shelton: Absolutely, many of them. They should be cleaned up. There should even be a cleaning up of television programs.

[Q] Playboy: Which programs?

[A] Shelton: It's not exactly what they say, but the motions that's carried out on the programs. [Shelton stood up and did an animated imitation of a belly dance.]

[Q] Playboy: What show did you see that on?

[A] Shelton: I am too busy to be memorizing the names of television shows. I am too busy combating the civil rights phase of this international conspiracy to demoralize our children and adults, to weaken our moral strength and introduce debauchery so as to make the eventual take-over easier.

[Q] Playboy: Do you subscribe to the common segregationist belief that Negroes have lower standards of sexual morality than whites?

[A] Shelton: Yes.

[Q] Playboy: Do you also share the conviction that Negroes are endowed with larger sexual organs, greater lasting power and more active libidos than whites?

[A] Shelton: I do.

[Q] Playboy: Do you base that belief on firsthand knowledge?

[A] Shelton: Certainly not. But scientific texts I have read show this clearly.

[Q] Playboy: What texts?

[A] Shelton: I can't name them offhand.

[Q] Playboy: You announced in a speech not long ago that Negroes are "responsive to the phases of the moon." Just what did you mean by that?

[A] Shelton: Our research and studies have found that there is more stirring and movement of the nigra when they have a full moon. They show a higher increase in the rate of crime and sex during the full moon.

[Q] Playboy: Can you name the scientific sources on which this "research" was based?

[A] Shelton: Not right off.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe that Negro men yearn after white women in preference to Negro women?

[A] Shelton: Why else do we see so many attacks being made in New York and Chicago, where the nigra thinks he is strong with his civil rights movement? Why do we see all of these assaults and rapes being committed against white women? There is a psychological reason why they have eliminated the practice of describing rapists in Northern newspapers as being nigra.

[Q] Playboy: A study of nationwide police records by an NBC investigating team found tliat only an insignificant percentage of rape cases are interracial. The vast majority are rapes of black by black and white by white. In Philadelphia, to name one Northern city, the number of whites raped by blacks is almost identical to the number of blacks raped by whites.

[A] Shelton: Well, all I can say is, let the nigra have his enjoyments with his own race, but meantime don't interfere with the same activity of the white. PIAYBOY: Do you think that so-called "unconventional" sex practices are more common among Negroes than among whites?

[A] Shelton: From some of the whites that I witnessed participating in this civil rights struggle--these sex perverts and beatniks and pinkos, tennis-shoe wearers and all--these whites that have been involved in the civil rights movement here in Alabama are mistfits and in all probability are perverts just as oddball as some nigras.

[Q] Playboy: You have been quoted as saying if the police cannot stop civil rights demonstrations, the Klan will. You said you will use "whatever means are necessary." Would those means include the use of firearms?

[A] Shelton: That is a misquote. I said if it reached the point the police could not stop the nigra invasion of private property and the protection of the home, then the Klan would take whatever steps were necessary.

[Q] Playboy: Would those steps include the use of firearms?

[A] Shelton: An individual must maintain the power to protect his home. His home is his castle, or it was till the advocates of civil rights, as at Selma, denied the right of a man to his private property by walking up on his porch and asking to use the rest room and when refused exposing themselves oil the front porch and into the front yard.

[Q] Playboy: Can you document these charges?

[A] Shelton: When a case such as this occurs, an individual should have the right to protect his property and I am certainly going to protect mine.

[Q] Playboy: What would you do if Martin Luther King were to launch a Negro voter-registration drive in Tuscaloosa?

[A] Shelton: The Klan has never had any objections to a nigra qualifying to vote if he is qualified. However, we are opposed to nigra or white who are not qualified to register and vote.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the voting test in Alabama has been honestly run?

[A] Shelton: There might have been some discrepancies because of the nigras' intimidations and demands for massive demonstrations instead of coming up as individuals. The Klan has never had any objections to a nigra qualifying to vote if he can qualify. But there must be some type of aptitude test on the national level.

[Q] Playboy: But the Klan has protested that they did not want the Federal Government intruding in the state's control of its own voting requirements.

[A] Shelton: You have to screen out the unqualified. But the majority of the nigras have never had a desire to vote, anyway.

[Q] Playboy: How do you know?

[A] Shelton: They have never even requested the vote on many occasions. But they have never been denied this right to the extent that the news medias make an issue of it. The only time that we see a collection of nigras is when an individual like Martin Luther King or some such professional agitators and promoters come into town and, through the superstitional belief of religion, they whip the local nigras into a frenzy so that they can just about guide them into the streets and do anything else they want to. But once they leave, then you see the nigra going back to his daily routine of life. They do not have and have not shown the initiative to have any mass voter-registration drives in the past.

[Q] Playboy: The mass march from Selma to Montgomery to demand those voting rights was led by Nobel Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King. Doesn't this honor indicate that world opinion is with the Negro rather than with the Klan?

[A] Shelton: It was a pathetic thing to give King the Nobel Peace Prize. He has done more than any other individual to create turmoil and tension and to divide the races, white and black.

[Q] Playboy: Many would feel that is a curious statement coming from one of the nation's leading exponents of racial segregation. But speaking of dividing the races, many of your views are shared by the Black Muslims, the segregationist Negro religious sect headed by Elijah Muhammad. What do you think of their proposal to gather the nation's 20,000,000 Negroes into black enclaves from which all whites would be excluded?

[A] Shelton: It would be a workable solution, whether in the United States or in north Brazil or in South America.

[Q] Playboy: Brazil or South America?

[A] Shelton: Or wherever. It might be Africa.

[Q] Playboy: The Muslims have suggested that Negroes might take over a whole state. How about Alabama?

[A] Shelton: Why not New York instead? I know what you are trying to get me to say. You want me to agree with the Black Muslims.

[Q] Playboy: You just did when you said that the Muslims' segregated resettlement plan was "a workable solution."

[A] Shelton: Well, I have never associated with the Black Muslims. I have never met with any Black Muslim and I have no desire to meet one. Jim Venable, the head of the so-called National Klans, used to be associated with me till I heard of him defending a Black Muslim in Shreveport. That was the last I cared to have to do with him.

[Q] Playboy: Several reporters who covered a recent United Klan rally in Atlanta said that Jeremiah X, the Atlanta Muslim leader, attended and was favorably referred to by the speakers.

[A] Shelton: Not by me.

[Q] Playboy: What was your reaction to Malcolm X's statement, shortly before his death, that he was going to present evidence in court that the Black Muslims have received financial and moral support from the Klan?

[A] Shelton: This Klan does not have money to give to the Black Muslims or anybody else.

[Q] Playboy: Malcolm was murdered by Muslim assassins before he could testily. You have said Martin Luther King will also be assassinated. By a Klansman?

[A] Shelton: Certainly not. No, it will be by one of his own people. There is a power struggle within the movement. They all want to sit in the King's seat. And that seat they want is in the best restaurant in town.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any plans to thwart the public-accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act? How are you going to prevent integration of schools, lunchrooms, hotels, swimming pools, playgrounds and golf courses?

[A] Shelton: We shall borrow a page from the North and resort to de facto segregation. And eventually, when the Negroes realize we will never give in or give up, both races will go back to peaceful segregation by the natural grouping of races in different residential neighborhoods and in their own places of worship, schooling and recreation.

[Q] Playboy: In view of the quickening pace at which integration is proceeding throughout the South, and the determination of the Administration to enforce it, your prediction would seem to be wishful thinking. There is every indication that most Southerners are beginning to realize that integration cannot be stopped. Do you seriously believe that the Klan can hold it back forever?

[A] Shelton: Certainly. That is the purpose of my life. The Klan can hold back any massive movement for right now. Then a cycle or revolution is going to come to pass and it is going to revert back. Then one day we are going to witness a stronger, even more segregated society than we have ever before witnessed in the past.

[Q] Playboy: We hope and believe, Mr. Shelton, that you couldn't be more wrong.