OSCEOLA, Ind. — Railton Loy leans across the table and proposes a deal: You ignore me and I'll ignore you. But he is not an easy man to ignore.
He has the bifocals and wispy gray hair of a grandpa. He calls the waitress "hon." Yet he is dressed in all-black military garb. And his most sacred ritual is donning a pointed hood and setting huge wooden crosses ablaze.
Loy is the international imperial wizard of a Ku Klux Klan faction he calls the Church of the National Knights. And he has this little town in the Indiana cornfields up in arms.
For Loy and his fellow Klansmen--a dozen, maybe more--like to practice their faith at their headquarters here in a rundown ranch house. This faith they practice does not call for quiet prayer. Rather, it demands hoods, burning crosses, gunfire and shouting devotion to the precepts they hold dear: Blacks have no souls. Jews are spawns of the devil. There will one day be a racial holy war that will leave only pure white Christians standing.
The Klan views such rituals as sacred. Neighbors call them scary.
So while the Klansmen trumpet their rights to freedom of speech and religion, their neighbors are fighting every way they can to get around the 1st Amendment.
"Yes, they have their rights. But so do I," said one man who, like many, was afraid to give his name. "Where do you draw the line? Tell me, where would you draw the line?"
He knows where he would draw it. He wants the Klan out of Osceola. The Constitution may protect them when they yell their hateful chants, but he does not see where there is a 1st Amendment right to set a friendly little town of 2,000 so on edge that some residents have taken to carrying guns at all times, even when they go jogging.
Property Value Burns With Crosses
The Klan's property is five acres, with a barn out back and a rusted-out van and old pickup in the frontyard. But it is hardly remote. The neighbors on each side are say-hello-from-the-front-porch close, and there's a new subdivision maybe half a mile away. Residents there can hear the gunshots, the shouts and the screech of the public-address system the Klan has used at some ceremonies. When the corn is low, several can see the cross burnings from their backyards.
Property values in this modest neighborhood are shot. "Our homes aren't worth a plug nickel now," one resident said bitterly.
Worse still is the fear.
