Robert Shelton (klan member)

Robert M. Shelton (1930-2003) was a former car-tire salesman who became nationally famous as the Grand Wizard of United Klans of America (UKA), a Ku Klux Klan group.

Shelton served as the UKA leader starting in 1961, which peaked with an estimated 30,000.cite news | url=http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D1FF938550C738EDDAA0894DB404482 | title=Robert Shelton, 73, Leader of Big Klan Faction | publisher=New York Times |date= March 20, 2003 | first= | last= | accessdate = 2007-09-18] In 1966 Shelton received a year in prison and $1,000 fine for contempt of the United States Congress, "for refusing to turn over membership lists to the House Committee on Un-American Activities."

Four UKA members in 1963 firebombed the 16th Street Baptist Church killing four young black girls in Birmingham, Alabama.cite news | url=http://www.adl.org/issue_combating_hate/uka/default.asp | title=The Ku Klux Klan Legacy of Hate: United Klans of America | publisher=Anti-Defamation League |date= 2000 | first= | last= | accessdate = 2007-09-18] The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing became one of the most notorious events in the civil rights struggle.

Then in 1984 James Knowles, a UKA member of the UKA's Klavern 900 in Mobile, was convicted for the 1981 murder of Michael Donald.cite news | url=http://www.adl.org/issue_combating_hate/uka/rise.asp | title=Emergence of the UKA | publisher=Anti-Defamation League |date= 2007 | first= | last= | accessdate = 2007-09-18] At trial Knowles said he and Henry Hays killed Donald "in order to show Klan strength in Alabama." In 1987 the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) brought a civil case, on behalf of the victims family, against the United Klans of America for being responsible in the lynching of Donald, a nineteen year old black man.cite news | url=http://www.splcenter.org/legal/docket/files.jsp?cdrID=10 | title=Donald v. United Klans of America | publisher=Southern Poverty Law Center |date= 1988 | first= | last= | accessdate = 2007-09-18] Unable to come up the $7 million dollars awarded by a jury, the UKA were forced to turn over its national headquarters to Donald's mother who then sold it. [Morris Dees and Steve Fiffer. "Hate on Trial: The Case Against America's Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi". Villard Books, 1993. page 11] During the civil trial Knowles said he was "carrying out the orders" of Bennie Jack Hays, Henry Hays's father and a long time Shelton lieutenant.

In 1994, he said "The Klan is my belief, my religion. But it won't work anymore. The Klan is gone. Forever." In the late sixties, Shelton ran for Police Commissioner in Tuscaloosa Alabama. He finished in fifth place, right behind a University of Alabama graduate student named John Gary Simpson.

References

External links

* [http://www.adl.org/issue_combating_hate/uka/rise.asp United Klans of America History]
* [http://www.enotes.com/terrorism-biographies/shelton-robert-m-bobby Endnotes: Robert Shelton Biography]