Known hate groups on rise

• By BOB ANDERSON AND DAVID J. MITCHELL
• Advocate Florida parishes bureau
• Published: Nov 30, 2008 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

The number of identified hate groups in the United States has risen nearly 48 percent since 2000, according to an organization that tracks such groups.

The hate groups include neo-Nazis, skinheads, black supremacists and white supremacists. Small hate groups are scattered across Louisiana as in other states, said officials with the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

The number of hate groups the center has identified across the nation has risen from 602 in 2000 to 888 in 2007, said Mark Potok, director of the center’s Intelligence Project.

The groups tend to recruit people who have “problems at home and are looking for an alternative family,” Potok said, adding that the people recruited are often mentally unstable.

The killing of a woman during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual Nov. 9 in St. Tammany Parish illustrates the kind of people drawn to these groups, Potok said.

St. Tammany Parish sheriff’s investigators have described the woman, Cynthia C. Lynch, 43, of Tulsa, Okla., as a loner.

Her attorney, Fred H. DeMier, of Tulsa, said he never heard her say a word that would make him think she was racist. He said she was a kind and gentle person who was very lonesome and did not have a lot of friends.

DeMier said Lynch suffered from bipolar disorder and had been declared incompetent in the late 1970s, but got along all right while she remained on her medication.

“She really had no idea what she was getting into,” DeMier said of her recruitment into the  Sons of Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Lynch was shot and killed after she traveled to a remote campsite in northeast St. Tammany Parish for an initiation ceremony and then tried to back out once the process had gotten under way.

Raymond “Chuck” Foster, 44, of Bogalusa, the reputed head of the Sons of Dixie and the former founder of a defunct Livingston Parish branch of the Klan, shot Lynch, investigators have said.

Possible Internet connections between the Oklahoma woman and the Louisiana group have been investigated.

The Internet has become a tool for hate groups, officials with the Southern Poverty Law Center said.