Klan “Imperial Wizard” Calls LBJ a “Damn Liar”

Mar. 27, 1965 - The Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., called the President of the United States a “damn liar” yesterday. 

Robert Shelton (pictured), the most prominent of several Imperial Wizards in the South, blurted out the accusation when informed that President Johnson had publicly denounced the Klan.

The President’s remarks were made on national television to announce the arrest of four Klansmen from Alabama in connection with the slaying Thursday night of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo near Selma, Ala. Johnson called the Klan “a society of hooded bigots” who used “the rope and the gun and the tar and the feathers” to terrorize people.

“He’s a damn liar,” Shelton said in his office in Tuscaloosa, Ala. “This organization has never used tar and feathers and a rope. I think he’s got it reversed. He’s got the shoe on the other foot.

“From all indications of what the people of Alabama have been through in the last week, it is he that is using the gun and the rope — his tanks and ammunition against the Southerner instead of the Klan against the Nigra.”

Shelton made the statement by telephone to radio station WNEW New York, which recorded and broadcast it. Later, Shelton told reporters he wanted to study the President’s remarks before commenting. But he readily discussed other aspects of the case.

“If this woman was at home with the children where she belonged, she would not have been in jeopardy,” he said, referring to Mrs. Liuzzo.

“I notice they are using pictures of the children crying,” he went on. “I wonder if the children were crying when she left them three weeks ago or if they just started crying today.”

Shelton, a 36-year-old former businessman who now devotes full time to the Klan, has been a supporter of Alabama’s previous Governor, John Patterson, and of Governor George Wallace. He has asserted that Klan support gave both their margins of victory. At a rally in Atlanta last year, Shelton called Wallace “the greatest leader of the white man’s cause.”Like Wallace, Shelton was critical of the march from Selma to Montgomery.

“The people of Alabama ought to be congratulated for restraining themselves,” he said. “It was an assembly of degenerates, nuts, and beatniks.”

Governor Wallace, in a televised address last night, declared that the murder of Mrs. Liuzzo was an “outrageous and cowardly” act. However, he made no mention of the four Klansmen arrested by the FBI earlier in the day.

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