The KKK is looking for a few new members, and they’re turning to an old fashioned recruiting tool — candy.
Folks living around Seneca, South Carolina, have been getting KKK pamphlets dropped on their lawns with the words, “Save our land, join the Klan.” Wrapped around the letter is a bag filled with candy .
Robert Jones, whose official title with the Loyal White Knights is (no joke) Imperial Klaliff, said the candy bags are part of a recruitment drive the KKK holds three times a year. Jones also claims that a KKK hotline set up for interested members gets about 20,000 phone calls a day.
Jones claims that the recruitment drive is random. Anything else, he claims, would be racist.
“I mean, we can’t tell who lives in a house, whether they’re black, white, Mexican, gay, we can’t tell that,” said Jones. “And if you were to look at somebody’s house like that, that means you’d be pretty much a racist.”
But people in the Seneca neighborhood say they’re upset that the hate group is actively looking for new members.
“[I] talked to several neighbors. They were very angry, very upset, very ashamed at the same time – that this exists,” the woman said. “Ashamed to face our neighbors that do not have the same color skin that we do.”
The neighbor, who preferred to remain anonymous, said she and others don’t want the KKK anywhere near them.
“You shouldn’t have to wake up and fear that somebody might burn a cross in your yard or throw something like this out in your driveway with nothing but hurt in their intention,” said the Seneca woman.
The KKK recruitment drive also visited nearby Manhattan, South Carolina, and found the same results .
“A lot of disgust really, because there are so many different families out here – nationalities and races,” said Rachel Ritter, who got one of the recruitment flyers on her lawn.
The KKK recruitment flyers called on interested people to join the Klan at a rally on August 9. The main event will be a cross burning, the flyer claims.