Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, avoided publicity and retained the old concept of the Klan as a clandestine order. During the 1960s and 1970s the UKA remained the largest Klan faction. In the spring of 1979, however, 20 members of the UKA were indicted by a Birmingham Federal grand jury in connection with violent racial episodes in Talladega County, Alabama. Three of Shelton's members pleaded guilty and 10 others were found guilty and sentenced to terms in Federal prison. The days of UKA dominance in the hate movement were numbered.

The beginning of the end for the UKA followed a $7 million damage award in 1987 in an Alabama civil suit against the organization. Included as defendants in that case were six past and then current UKA members involved in the 1981 lynching of a Black teenager, Michael Donald, whose body was left hanging on a tree. As a result of that verdict, the teenager's family, whose legal representation was provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), took possession of the United Klans' 7,200­ square foot national headquarters on 6.5 acres in Tuscaloosa. The property had an estimated market value of $ 225,000 at the time.

James Knowles, a member of the UKA's Klavern 900 in Mobile and one of the two men convicted for the 1981 murder of Michael Donald, testified at his 1984 trial that he and Henry Hays, who was executed for the act, had killed Donald "in order to show Klan strength in Alabama." At the civil trial, Knowles testified that he was "carrying out the orders" of UKA "Titan" (regional leader) Bennie Jack Hays, Henry Hays's father and a long time Shelton lieutenant. Bennie Jack Hays died in August 1993 before his second criminal trial could take place. His first, in 1988, ended in a mistrial

At a Klavern meeting at the Hays home two days before the murder of Donald, Henry Hays, who served as the chapter's "Exalted Cyclops" (presiding officer), said that "a nigger ought to be hanged by the neck until dead to put them in their place." The Anti-Defamation League provided the SPLC's Morris Dees, counsel to Michael Donald's mother (who has since died) and the NAACP, a grisly cartoon from The Fiery Cross which proved to be a key piece of evidence in the $7 million judgement ulti­mately rendered against the UKA. The illustration showed a Black man about to be lynched, with the caption "White people should give Blacks what they deserve."

Today, Shelton, 71, is a survivor of triple bypass surgery. Talking to a reporter in 1994 he provided the Klan's potential epitaph: "The Klan will never return. Not with the robes and the rallies and the cross lightings and parades, everything that made the Klan the Klan, the mysticism, what we called Klankraft. I'm still a Klansman, always will be. The Klan is my belief, my religion. But it won't work anymore. The Klan is gone. Forever."

Indeed, today's Ku Klux Klan is the weakest and the most fragmented it has been since World War II. Clearly the Klan has fallen on hard times. Nonetheless, it remains a dangerous force in American life. Vigilance remains the appropriate watchword for all who oppose the Ku Klux Klan and its hateful message.