Apartheid. USA 1988

September 26, 1987:

The State of Pennsylvania has decided to revoke the liquor licence of a large Altoona social club that denied membership to a man, because he is black. Mr Charles Ditcher had repeatedly bowled at the club with friends, but when he sought membership, he was rebuffed. The vote for revocation by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board marked the first time the board has ever taken such action as a result of racial discrimination, said Robert Ford, a spokesman for the panel. The Club is a 2 300-member Bavarian Aid Society, whose attorney calls it ‘the biggest and probably the finest’ in Altoona, an industrial city 75 miles east of Pittsburgh. It has a 100-year old by-law which restricts its membership to whites only.^147.

Since more than 60 years ago, when large numbers of immigrants and Catholics became targets of violence, to residents of Rumford, Maine, the Ku Klux Klan has been nothing more than a memory. But, today, stirred by concern that the Klan was trying to capitalize on bitter feelings left by a strike at the Boise Cascade paper mill in Rumford, hundreds of people across the state rallied to denounce the Klan and say it was not welcome here.

The Klan itself gathered on a farm about 15 miles from Rumford. Members, many dressed in white hoods and military fatigues, held a picnic and burned a cross in what they called a family gathering. ‘I don't know why the Ku Klux Klan has come to Maine,’ said Attorney-General James E Tierney. ‘I do know they have come twisted by some hatred I don't understand.’ The Klan is normally not active

147. The New York Times, a special report

[p. 118]

in Maine, a Northern State, where blacks make up less than one percent of the state's population of 1.1 million.^148.

148. The New York Times, a special report