Excerpt from "Our Life in the Ku Klux Klan"

Published in Good Housekeeping, June 1992

"'What if,' she began one lesson, 'a little [black] child was hit by a car and lay dying in the road? What if the only way to save that child was mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Would you put your lily-white mouth on his black lips?' 'No,' the group answered. 'Never.'"

Terrorism often seems remote, an activity carried out by anonymous people far away. But some forms of terrorism take place in neighborhoods in the United States, in the midst of ordinary people carrying out ordinary activities. Such is the case with the Ku Klux Klan.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a white couple from Georgia, Gary and Jan Ralston of Stone Mountain, belonged to a chapter of the white supremacist group. According to the Ralstons, they regularly engaged in activities designed to terrify people of whom they...