This business on Strom Thurmond contains an unfounded slur. Regardless of his racism or past support for racial segregation, Thurmond was never a member of the Ku Klux Klan like Democratic icon Robert Byrd -- who was a kleagle, or Klan recruitment coordinator. He was a law-abiding racist, holding private beliefs to which he was entitled as an American citizen and which he recanted in later life, although he defended his support for segregation during the segregation era until the very end. In later life, the "incorrigible racist" Thurmond supported the Voting Rights Act of 1970 and the establishment of Martin Luther King's birthday as a Federal holiday. He also hired the first black man to work on a Senate staff in the modern era (there was another guy in the Depression, but none thereafter).
The slur that Thurmond "raped" a teenage black girl is just wrong. There was never any allegation of forcible sexual relations, merely that she was a young woman. And while she was young, the 15 year-old "rape victim" was over the age of consent (14) in South Carolina at the time of the supposed rape (and he was 22). Thurmond later supported his illegitimate half-black child, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, financially throughout her life -- sending her to college.
It's unfair to make Thurmond out to be a rapist as well as a racist when it's clear he was a decent man. His real crime seems to have been leaving the Democratic Party to become a Republican.
Oh, and the Klan? The Klan was spent as a force once Superman started to make fun of them. On the RADIO, in the late 1940s (when Byrd joined). By the time David Duke rolled around, he was an officer of a weird and pathetically impotent little club.