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.

Aside from ideology, some of these organizations are started by charismatic people who don’t want to work for a living, but would rather live off the dues of those they can entice into joining, he said.

Infighting among many of the groups is brutal and is often over money and mailing lists, officials with the center said.

The vast majority of the hate groups currently operating are advocates of white supremacy. Other hate organizations, including some black groups,  have a different agenda, Potok said.

The groups usually target people by race, religion and sexual orientation, he said. Many of the groups also have taken strong anti-immigration stands, Potok said.

Halting immigration was one of the issues mentioned on the back of a calling card authorities confiscated in their investigation of
The Sons of Dixie after Lynch’s killing.

Heidi Beirich, director of research and special projects for the center, said the number of groups of neo-Nazis, who are anti-Semites, is on the rise; as is the number of skinheads, who have a similar ideology but are generally younger and more involved in racist music and street violence.

The KKK, the best known of the hate groups in this country,  was formed in the 1860s and was “all about black people,” Potok said.
In the 1920s, it shifted a lot of its focus to Catholics and some to Jews, he said.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Klan refocused on black people as it tried to resurrect white supremacy, he said. In the 1970s and 1980s, David Duke “tried to make the Klan more respectable,” Potok said. Since that time, the splintered Klan organizations have targeted blacks, gays, Latinos and Jews, he said.

In recent years, the KKK has splintered into several groups that each claim to be the true Klan, he said. While the number of hate groups is rising, the influence of the Klan has diminished in recent decades, and it now has only 5,000 to 6,000 members nationwide, Potok said.

A lot of the new groups focus on Hispanics and on anti-immigration, Beirich said. Though there have been racially related incidents since the election of Barack Obama, the latest count of hate groups was done before the Nov. 4 presidential election, officials at the center said.

New information being compiled now may give an indication as to whether the election caused an increase in the number of hate groups, she said.

“We’re doing a hate group count now,” Beirich said, “and will have to wait and see if it has had an effect.”

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