Hundreds of people attended a peace vigil in Anaheim the other night. It was in response to a Ku Klux Klan rally over the weekend, one that turned bloody after anti-Klan protesters started throwing punches.
The Klan rally was a provocative move from a once-powerful white supremacist group -- long ago the KKK was the dominant political force in Anaheim, holding multiple City Council seats until their ouster in 1924.
The KKK tends to stay well below the radar these days, and certainly doesn’t wield as much influence as it once did nationally.
“And frankly, there is not a great Klan presence at all in California,” says Cal State San Bernardino criminology professor Brian Levin. Levin also heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino.
“There are only a few Klan chapters, they are very small and generally they just resort to leafletting, but they’ve had significant growth nationwide," he says.