The long read: In the 1970s, David Duke was grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. In the 80s, he was elected to Louisiana’s house of representatives – and the kinds of ideas he stood for have not gone away
In the 1970s, David Duke was grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. In the 80s, he was elected to Louisiana’s house of representatives – and the kinds of ideas he stood for have not gone away
In 1964, at age 14, he became interested in a network of organisations, the Citizens’ Councils, which were formed across the US south in the 1950s to oppose school integration and voter registration. Duke began to hang out at the Citizens’ Council office in New Orleans and make himself a nuisance to the staff, who took pity on him when they learned of his unhappy home life.
Equally embarrassing were the pseudonymous books he wrote and attempted to sell. The first, African Atto, was a fake martial arts guide for Black Power militants, written by one “Mohammed X”, that diagrammed various fighting moves to use against white opponents. Although he later offered different explanations, it seems like the book was part of a misbegotten moneymaking scheme. Duke’s other volume, Finders Keepers, was a guide to sex and dating for the modern single woman.
There were reasons why District 81 might be a particularly soft target for Duke. First of all, the district, plumped by white flight from New Orleans, was 99.6% white, petrified by the spectre of Black crime in the neighbouring metropolis. In addition, the state’s economic situation had significantly deteriorated during the Reagan years.
In the first round of voting, Duke came in first with 33% of the vote; Treen came in second with 19%. New Orleans archbishop Philip Hannan issued a statement to his parish priests to read at services before the runoff: “The election will determine the convictions of the voters of the district about the basic dignity of persons, the recognition of human rights of every person, the equality of races made by Divine Providence.
Duke succeeded in continually getting mass media attention for himself. In November 1989, he appeared on ABC News’s Primetime Live with Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer. The usually formidable Donaldson had trouble with the soapy Duke. Donaldson read out some of Duke’s writing, and Duke denied having written it or finessed it into a more respectable-sounding opinion.
Though Duke never successfully passed a bill as a legislator, he scored a partial victory in the 1991 session. He had proposed a bill to offer mothers on welfare $100 a year to have a birth control implant. In the end, the measure was watered down to just provide information about birth control. There was very little ambiguity in what was meant by “welfare mothers”.
The massive onslaught yielded ambiguous results. Some polls showed Edwards ahead at just 46% to 42%; Duke was dominating the white vote with 58%. When pressed about Duke’s past, voters responded that Edwards, too, had an unsavoury past.
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