Step forward, and steps back

The FBI has no hate-crime statistics yet for 2008.

But based on local media reports, some experts are calling the rise in hate incidents surprising and unprecedented.

"The rhetoric right now is just about out of control," said Brian Levin, director of Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. "When you get this depth of hatred, it usually is the smoke before the fire."

In the small Louisiana town of Angie, 58-year-old Judy Robinson put an Obama sign outside her home a few weeks before the Nov. 4 presidential election. The morning after Halloween, she awoke to find the words "KKK" and "white power" spray-painted around her yard.

"I thought all that KKK stuff was in the past," said Robinson, who is black. "But now I look at people and think, 'Could he be Klan?' Suddenly I'm feeling like my town is hostile territory."

Experts say modern Klan chapters remain isolated and small, with perhaps 6,000 members nationwide -- a shadow of the group's membership of 4 million in the early 1900s.

Bogalusa, a lumber and paper mill town of about 13,000, is just down the road from Angie.

In the 1960s, historians say, the Ku Klux Klan so dominated Bogalusa's commerce, politics and law enforcement that the group once held a public meeting to debate which black church to burn down next.

Several Bogalusa Klan members were long suspected of shooting two black sheriff's deputies in a 1965 ambush, killing one. No one was ever brought to trial.

"To this day, most white people in Bogalusa know who the killers were, and they were never brought to justice," said Lance Hill, a Tulane University law professor and Klan expert.

That past now seems less distant.

On Nov. 10, local law enforcement authorities arrested Raymond "Chuck" Foster, 44, the leader of a Bogalusa Klan chapter called the Sons of Dixie, and seven other Klan members in connection with the shooting death of a Tulsa, Okla., woman who went to the group's remote campsite in St. Tammany Parish for an initiation ceremony.

Authorities say Foster shot the woman when she tried to change her mind about joining the group. He has been charged with second-degree murder; the other Klan members, including Foster's 20-year-old son, have been charged with obstruction of justice.

City officials say they had no idea that Bogalusa has Klan cells.

"I've been here 13 years, and this was a complete surprise to me that there was Klan here," said Police Chief Jerry Agnew.

Yet members of the town's black community say they have been reporting Klan sightings to the police for more than a year. About 40% of residents are black.

In October 2007, residents of one black neighborhood reported white-hooded Klan members riding horses through the streets.

And in March, Klan members openly handed out fliers advertising the second annual Sons of Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Craw Fish Boil -- held at the house on Louisiana Avenue that Foster was renting from a Bogalusa deputy sheriff.

"The city leaders want to make it look like this is just some small fringe group," said former City Councilman Marvin Austin, 61, who once belonged to the Deacons for Defense, a black group that formed in the 1960s to defend black residents from the Klan.

"But the Klan still has a lot of sympathizers here."