Born: 1950 Ideology: White supremacism, anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, Holocaust denial Extremist Affiliations: • Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (founder, 1974); • National Association for the Advancement of White People (founder, 1980); • European-American Unity and Rights Organization (founder, 2003); • enjoys a following in Eastern Europe and Russia, where he lived and toured as a speaker in 2001 and 2002. Criminal record: Imprisoned for 13 months in 2003-2004 on mail fraud and tax evasion charges relating to contributions to his political campaigns. Political campaigns: In 1989, Duke won a seat representing Metairie, Louisiana, in the Louisiana State Legislature. Five unsuccessful political campaigns followed: a 1990 bid for the U.S. Senate, a 1991 campaign for the governorship of Louisiana, a bid for the Presidency in 1992, another senatorial race in 1996, and a 1998 attempt to win a Congressional seat in Louisiana. In both the 1990 and 1991 races, he attracted a majority of Louisiana's white voters. Works: • African Atto (1973, as Mohammad X), a street-fighting manual avowedly written to help the Klan identify "radical" African-Americans, who would buy the book; • Finders Keepers (1976, as Dorothy Vanderbilt), a self-help sex manual for women; • My Awakening (1998); • Jewish Supremacism (2002), an updated version of the section, "The Jewish Question," in My Awakening. Significance: Highest profile white supremacist of the last two decades.

David Duke’s preoccupation with racist ideology dates back to his youth. At 17, he became active in right-wing extremist groups. While attending Louisiana State University in the early 1970s, he founded the White Youth Alliance, a group affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Socialist White People’s Party in Arlington, Virginia. To protest a speech by attorney William Kunstler at Tulane University, Duke picketed wearing a Nazi brown shirt and a swastika armband and carried a placard that said “Kunstler is a Communist-Jew” and “Gas the Chicago 7” (referring to the well-known leftist activists). Duke now describes the event as a folly of youth.

Shortly after graduating in 1974, Duke covered his swastika with a Klan robe and founded the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He first came to broad public attention during this time: the young Imperial Wizard successfully marketed himself in the mid-1970s as a new brand of Klansman – well-groomed, engaged, professional: the Klan leader as a corporate manager. And as a progressive: for the first time in the group’s history, women were accepted as equal members and Catholics were encouraged to apply for membership.

Duke’s efforts not only boosted membership, they also, to a significant degree, made traditional Klan ritual obsolete. He urged an overhaul of the organization at the grass-roots level, encouraging his colleagues to “get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms.” In media appearances and political venues, he skillfully exploited issues like illegal immigration, affirmative action and court-ordered busing, and sanitized Klan vocabulary, titling himself “national director” and referring to cross burnings as “illuminations.” He also professed nonviolence and encouraged members to become politically active; following his own advice, he made an unsuccessful bid for the Louisiana State Senate in 1975, receiving one-third of the votes cast. His already evident skill at sublimating his bigotry led journalists to describe his style as “rhinestone racism” and “button-down terror.”

Meanwhile, the Klan enjoyed a resurgence under his leadership. In 1976, he organized the largest Klan rally the nation had witnessed since the 1960s in Walker, Louisiana, with an estimated attendance of 2,700. In addition, he built up local organizations in other states, including California, Florida and Texas. Although he publicly shunned violence, he was convicted in 1979 of inciting a riot in connection with a Klan rally in suburban New Orleans.

In 1980, Duke’s days as a Klan leader ended abruptly. Bill Wilkinson, who had left Duke’s organization five years earlier to organize the Invisible Empire Knights of the KKK in Louisiana, told the press he had forced Duke’s resignation from the Knights of the KKK by secretly videotaping a meeting during which Duke offered to sell Wilkinson his membership lists for $35,000. Duke denied the allegation but nonetheless left the Klan and established the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP), which he described as “primarily a white rights lobby organization, a racialist movement, mainly middle class people.”

In a letter to his followers, he wrote that the NAAWP “avoids the Hollywood stereotypes and misconceptions about the Klan” and maintained that the messages of the two groups were “essentially the same.” Indeed, the NAAWP was housed in the former headquarters of the Knights of the KKK, and Duke used the facilities to produce the NAAWP newsletter. From that office, he also produced the Louisiana edition of The White Patriot, a periodical of the Knights of the KKK, while Don Black, his successor as the Klan’s leader (and later founder of the pioneering racist Web site Stormfront.org), served a three-year federal prison term for conspiring to overthrow the government of the Caribbean island of Dominica. Although he no longer has an official role in the NAAWP, Duke maintains close ties with many in the group, and its agenda closely parallels his. Furthermore, he has often been a guest speaker at NAAWP events, such as a 1996 rally in Baton Rouge.

By the late 1980s, Duke had become “America’s most renowned ‘white rights’ advocate,” according to The Spotlight, the nation’s leading far-right publication

In 1988, he ran for the Presidency, first as a Democrat, and then as a third-party candidate on the ticket of the Populist Party, founded four years earlier by Willis Carto to provide far-right radicals with a platform for political office.

Duke eventually appeared on the ballot in 11 states and received 47,047 votes – one-twentieth of one percent of those cast. Undaunted by the low totals, in January 1989 he joined a field of seven Republicans contesting a seat in the Louisiana State Legislature in Metairie. Despite the opposition to Duke expressed by national Republican leaders, including then-President Bush, voters elected him by a narrow margin. Until the middle of that year, when the practice was publicly exposed, Duke sold extremist literature (including Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries) from his Metairie legislative office.

The following year, Duke aimed significantly higher, running against Democratic incumbent J. Bennett Johnston for a United States Senate seat. In a state wracked by the depressed oil and gas industries, Duke’s politics of resentment achieved some resonance. Decrying “welfare systems that encourage illegitimate births” and “set-asides to promote the incompetent,” Duke’s chances appeared sufficiently favorable to prompt eight Republican United States senators to endorse Johnston and to urge the repudiation of Duke, who was running as a Republican. Johnston won with 53.9 percent of the vote to Duke’s 43.5 percent, but Duke gained a surprising 60 percent of the white vote.

On March 13, 1991, Duke launched a campaign for the governorship of Louisiana. Because of his more-than-respectable finish in the previous year’s Senate race, his bid attracted enormous publicity, and his long record of bigotry came under heightened scrutiny. In response, Duke claimed to have discarded his racist beliefs and to have undergone a religious rebirth. His claim was belied, however, by a number of recent statements. During his senatorial campaign, for instance, he had said, “Jews are trying to destroy all other cultures…as a survival mechanism.” Moreover, during the last week of the race his state campaign coordinator, Bob Hawkes, resigned, saying that the candidate’s recent professions of faith were a political ploy. Hawkes subsequently noted that an adjoining room in Duke’s campaign office remained the headquarters of the NAAWP. Duke lost the election but again won nearly 700,000 votes. The following day, Duke, by now something of a professional campaigner, formed a presidential exploratory committee and eventually mounted an uninspired and short-lived campaign; in this fourth campaign in four years, both his supporters and the media had probably begun to suffer from “Duke fatigue.”

Consequently, his surprisingly candid January 17, 1992, interview with The Dallas Morning News may have been more of a public relations stunt than a scoop — among other things, he told the paper that, with regard to his Klan career, “the things that I accomplished under that motif were pretty substantial,” and that “fundamentally, yes, I haven’t changed.”

By mid-1992, with his gubernatorial loss and collapsed presidential campaign starting to erode his support base, Duke began to retreat from the political arena. He concentrated instead on raising money, with a brief stint as a co-owner of an Irish pub in Metairie and a failed attempt at securing a job as an insurance agent. He also tried to raise money by starting up a new publication, the David Duke Report, and, in 1993 and 1994, he hosted a radio talk show – “David Duke Conservative hotline” – on WASO AM 730 in Covington, near New Orleans.

Clearly happiest in the spotlight, in September 1996, Duke again competed in Louisiana’s United States Senate “open” primary, placing fourth among 15 candidates, with 140,910 votes, and carrying several rural parishes.

Even though Duke’s ability to win office seemed to have waned, he still found himself able to create political turmoil. For the second time in his career, he became embroiled in a scandal concerning the sale of a mailing list – this time to Louisiana Governor Mike Foster. Foster was found by the state Board of Ethics to have failed to report a $103,000 payment to Duke during the 1995 governor’s race, and again in 1997 when he paid $52,000 for the right to continue to use the list. Foster said that he tried to keep the purchase secret, because “it ain’t real cool to put out there that you’re buying something from David Duke.”

Although the political scandal left Duke twisting in the wind, uncertain as to whether any investigations would affect him personally, he soldiered on. He essentially ended his dalliance with “moderation” in late 1998 with the self-publication of a 700-page autobiography, My Awakening. In this magnum opus, Duke attempted to prove that blacks are genetically inferior to whites, while devoting almost 250 pages to anti-Jewish themes. Duke wrote that Jews “thoroughly dominate the news and entertainment media in almost every civilized nation; they control the international markets and stock exchanges; and no government can resist doing their bidding on any issue of importance,” and he noted that Jews and Gentiles are “in a state of ethnic war,” predicting that “the ultimate clash between these two diametrically opposed genotypes and cultures fast approaches with the new millenium.” In its unabashed racist animosity, the book seemed to represent a conscious decision by Duke to abandon his two-decade long attempts to obfuscate, repackage, intellectualize and dress up his opinions and ideas. The volume sold out a second edition and was republished in May 2000, while Duke allegedly began work on a second book, The Ultimate Supremacism: An Examination of the Jewish Question, to be followed by a third effort focusing on the “spiritual aspect of the struggle to preserve and protect our heritage,” entitled For the Love of My People. Duke also returned to speaking at white supremacist rallies and conferences.

Yet his reversion to overt, as opposed to veiled, racism did not douse his political hopes. In December 1998, Duke announced that he would run for the Congressional seat being vacated by Robert L. Livingston, in Louisiana’s First Congressional District. Achieving this goal was not wholly implausible; Duke had carried this district in his campaigns for United States Senate and governor in 1990 and 1991. Once again, he positioned himself as an anti-government conservative who stood up for the little man against programs such as affirmative action, minority set-asides and welfare. And once again, Duke’s message seemed to hit a nerve among some frustrated white voters who were willing to overlook his past. He received one out of every five ballots cast in the district and placed third in the election. These results apparently validated his assertion that he would fly under the radar of public opinion research, which projected him winning a far smaller percentage of the vote. Indeed, despite the pre-election polling numbers, both mainstream G.O.P. and local business leaders feared a potential Duke victory. “We were sweating bullets,” said Ken Johnson, an aide to Representative W.J. Tauzin, the Republican dean of Louisiana’s Congressional delegation. On the other hand, Duke’s showing seemed to indicate that, while he could still stir contention and anxiety and had a reliable constituency, this constituency was modest and unlikely ever to expand. Moreover, Duke had increasingly come to be seen as both enamored with the publicity and money of campaigns and disinclined actually to win and serve.

Following his defeat, Duke stated that while he had no immediate plans to stage another political candidacy, he was “absolutely committed to spending the rest of my life as a spokesman for the rights of European Americans.” He turned to a strategy that several other racist organizations have also adopted, focusing on ethnic themes designed to appeal to alienated whites, especially minority crime rates, immigration and so-called “Confederate heritage” issues such as flying the Confederate flag on state property.

Now a self-styled “civil rights activist,” in January 2000, Duke announced the formation of a new organization, the National Organization for European American Rights. Aping contemporary civil rights groups, NOFEAR addressed “European American” concerns. “Just as African Americans have the NAACP and Mexican Americans have La Raza,” Duke said, “European-Americans now have the National Organization for European American Rights, to actively defend their rights and heritage in the United States.”

NOFEAR was intended to be an antidote to the alleged “massive discrimination” faced by whites from the nation’s growing population of minorities. According to Duke, “European Americans face a situation where we’re going to be outnumbered and outvoted in our own country.” Low birthrates, interracial marriages and immigration rates were cited by Duke as key factors reducing the white share of the population. The NOFEAR home pages on the davidduke.com Web site maintain that “the civil rights of European Americans are being violated by affirmative action, forced integration and anti-European immigration policies.…We face cultural discrimination in the media and education.…An example is the media hate crime hysteria that highlights and publicizes any white crime against minorities.”

At the launching of NOFEAR, Duke told reporters at the National Press Club that the alleged ongoing destruction of white people was a “genocide.” In a January 26, 2000, letter to the Shreveport Times rebutting a critical editorial, Duke described European Americans as “internally displaced people” entitled to the same consideration as refugees. In June 2001, threatened by a trademark lawsuit, Duke renamed his group the European-American Rights Organization.

Duke repeatedly stresses the need for white Southerners and European Americans generally to organize to preserve their rights and heritage. “These minority activists are not only after Southern heritage,” he warns, “Eventually they plan to erase the heritage and history of European Americans in the United States and ... [we plan] to stop them.” As evidence, Duke has cited black school board members in New Orleans who called George Washington an “immoral example” for children and voted to remove his name from a public school, as well as the Richmond, Virginia, City Council that removed a mural of General Robert E. Lee from a flood wall in 1999.

Another major focus for Duke has been nonwhite immigration to the United States, both legal and illegal. In a well-known episode, Duke was invited to Siler City, North Carolina, in February 2000, by residents who claimed that their town was being overrun by illegal immigrants from Mexico, thereby lowering wages, increasing crime and destroying the quality of life. Hundreds of white parents, and some blacks, packed school board meetings to protest the new immigrant children’s effect on classrooms (there were also unpleasant racist incidents, including the vandalism of a Hispanic church). “Why should the people of Siler City, whose families established the town and who have lived there for generations, now have to live in a town that looks more like Mexico than America?” asked Duke. He spoke at a rally and met with local residents and community officials. Purportedly taking action on behalf of residents, he castigated the local poultry plants for hiring illegal immigrant labor at a huge cost to community services and wrote to the North Carolina Immigration and Naturalization Service requesting a full-scale investigation. He also campaigned against local politicians who allegedly supported the illegal immigrants, arguing for the removal of “politicians who have sold out the heritage and interests of European Americans in favor of illegal aliens.”

Duke has also focused on alleged hate crimes against whites. Although hate crimes against whites actually do form a substantial percentage of the country’s overall total, Duke’s twist was to label all black-on-white crime as falling into the “hate” category. Though initially Duke and his associates stated that they were opposed to hate crime laws and to the very concept of hate crimes, which they considered discriminatory to whites, the advantages of claiming victimhood led them to shift their position. Thus, in May 2000, Duke attempted to call attention “to an epidemic of hate crimes committed against white Americans…and to expose the lack of coverage that exists on this issue.”

“I don’t call myself a white supremacist,” said Duke. “I’m a civil rights activist concerned about European-American rights.”

The most recent and interesting development in Duke’s career as a professional racist has been his growing infatuation with Russia. In September 2000 Duke traveled to the country at the invitation of Alexander Prokhanov, the editor in chief of Zavtra, an ultranationalist newspaper, and Konstantin Kasimovsky, the head of an anti-Semitic organization called Russian Action. Duke reportedly made an impassioned speech in Moscow, telling a crowd that they should take action against “the Aryan race’s main enemy — world Zionism” and calling for all “dark-skinned people to be forced out of Moscow.” The crowd responded with cries of “glory to Russia” and “white power.”

After spending three months in Russia in 2000, he returned again in 2001, ostensibly to build further connections with right-wing nationalists. He held a rally at a respected literary museum; signed autographs at the Russian Writers Union; and met with members of Parliament, including a retired Soviet general, Albert Makashov, who is known for anti-Semitic remarks. While thoroughgoing anti-Semites apparently constitute only three or four percent of the Russian population, the history of Jew-hatred in the country is centuries old, violent and deeply rooted, and there appears to be increasing cooperation between Russian extremists and their ideological counterparts abroad. Duke seeks to promote that relationship even if, as some observers speculate, his visits have been related to the ongoing investigation of his activities in the United States, where his home was searched in November 2000 by federal agents looking for evidence of tax fraud, tax evasion and money laundering.

• David Duke Updated Information
• David Duke In His Own Words