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For the past three weeks residents of small towns across the US have woken to find race-hate Ku Klux Klan leaflets on their front lawns or car windscreens, reports the Sunday People.

They show a crudely drawn hooded Klansman and bear the words “The KKK Wants You” – a feeble imitation of a First World War recruiting poster

The vile flyers, tucked into ­plastic bags and weighed down with sand, have sent shivers down the spines of most citizens.

The last time the KKK – America’s first home-grown terror group – were so active was in the 1960s when churches were torched and civil rights activists murdered.

But in the past month leaflets have flooded Texas, Louisiana, Illinois, Maryland and Pennsylvania as part of a recruitment drive by the latest incarnation of the KKK.

They carry messages such as: “Neighborhood watch! The law abiding citizens of your ­community can sleep in peace knowing the Klan is awake!”

And they give local phone ­numbers so residents can join the secret society that once boasted five ­million members and terrorised black communities with lynchings and rituals with burning crosses.

The KKK was formed in the 1860s after the civil war between the North and slave-owning South.

Till recently it had survived mainly in the Deep South.

(Image: DAN CALLISTER)

But the 21st century incarnation – preying on concerns about the teetering economy, ­urban crime, immigration and gay ­marriage – appears hellbent on creating fresh trouble between the once warring states.

The towns of Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, and Hagerstown, Maryland, on the Mason-Dixon Line – the traditional divide between the North and South – were the first to be ­targeted with leaflets.

Albert Fike, leader of Maryland’s Traditional Rebel Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, spearheaded the week-long campaign there.

The 40-year-old engineer bragged: “We have been out for seven days and seven nights and we’ve had a great response.

“We usually get a lot of hate phone calls but I’ve been surprised by the people of Waynesboro and Hagerstown – they are happy to see us in their communities.

“They are small, mainly white towns but things are getting bad. There’s drugs and crime.

“Many people are afraid to speak out – but now they know the Klan can do it for them.

“We were going to have a march the other night but it rained.

“So we’re planning a rally in Cumberland, Maryland, next month. The mayor has called us domestic terrorists but we are out to prove we are good for the community.”

Fike added: “We’re the invisible empire. No one knows if you’re in the Klan because of the hoods.

(Image: Getty)

“But people get the wrong idea about us. We don’t want blacks enslaved. We’re not going out with nooses. We’re long past that.

“I have two children and they come on rallies with me. We have security because you never know what’s going to happen.

“But we’re a Christian ­organisation and I always feel God is watching over us.”

Fike refused to say how many klansmen attend regular meetings. and civil rights groups say it’s nearly impossible to estimate KKK’s membership nationally.

The five major klans of the US have hundreds of smaller chapters, making infiltration by cops hard.

Many are linked to neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre, a civil rights watchdog, estimates the number of hate groups have shot up from 149 in 2008 – the year Barack Obama became president and the economy crashed – to an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012.

It says members are fuelled by “fear and anger over the nation’s economy, an influx of non-white immigrants and the diminishing white majority, as symbolised by the election of the nation’s first African-American president”.

The KKK is not so subtle.

Posted on one website a mission ­statement reads: “We hate ­homosexuality, drugs, abortion, race-mixing.

“These things go against God’s law and they are destroying all white nations.”

A message on the Maryland ­recruiting hotline tells callers: “Have a great white day.”

Still, KKK national director Thom Robb, of Zinc, Arkansas, claims the new-look klan is “gentle, upbeat and friendly”.

(Image: Dan Callister)

Asked who he ­wanted as ­members he said: “The guy down the street who until now has had a plasma TV and a car in the garage but has just lost his job and won’t find a new one because some ­illegal already has it.”

Richard Preston, imperial wizard of the Baltimore-based Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, has been staging rallies at civil war battlefields such as Harper’s Ferry and Gettysburg.

And he vowed to continue to hold one every month until President Obama is ousted.

He said he had not been able to muster enough support for the past 12 weeks because of wintry ­weather “but we’re back later this month if I can get the FBI to answer my calls and issue us a permit”.

He went on: “My group isn’t ­involved in the leaflet campaign as I prefer to meet new members at a rally to see if they will be good.

“I don’t want people who just sit there. That’s no good to anyone. We want people to work hard for us, not hand over money.”

He claimed his klan had linked up with four others since October, when he led a march on Gettysburg, where President Abraham Lincoln memorably spoke of “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”.

Preston added sinisterly: “The word is now out.”

(Image: Dan Callister)

Get-up would be laughable if not for the poison spewed

Repellent Richard Preston walks across a police station car park in jeans and a tatty American flag T-shirt carrying a black binliner.

The bandy-legged hate-monger ducks into a corner, fishes his Ku Klux Klan robes and pointy hood out of the bag and transforms ­himself into an imperial wizard.

His get-up would be laughable if not for the poison he spews.

Yet this is the man who has vowed to clean up the Ku Klux Klan.

As he pulls on his hood, he gives a Nazi-style salute. The Klan use their left arms, claiming it distances them from real Nazis.

Such nuances are lost on ­baffled tourists walking through Gettysburg, a tiny town.

The visitors are here to pay tribute to the thousands killed and maimed fighting to end slavery, not to hear chants of “White power” ringing through the town.

In Alabama or Mississippi Preston would probably attract a crowd of like-minded folk.

But Gettysburg is in the ­cosmopolitan North, less than two hours’ drive from Washington and four hours from New York.

Ponytailed Preston, head of the KKK’s Confederate White Knights, stood by a poster ­saying “Hate-Free Zone” and spat venom for 40 minutes outside the police station.

The 48-year-old arrived with eight supporters, who included two men and a woman in pointy hats and robes, his tattooed fiancée and a salesman who mourned the passing of “lynching and cross-burning”.

Unusually for the secretive Klan, Preston is happy to reveal his identity.

(Image: Dan Callister)

He has posted his phone number on his barely literate website and has no qualms about his face being seen.

Yet he refused to reveal his job, only saying he was in the public sector, and would not admit how many people attend monthly meetings.

But he is adamant the KKK is now resurgent, telling supporters: “In the 1920s the KKK built orphanages in the South and ran soup kitchens.

“It was a united and dynamic – we can achieve that again.”

Preston, a klansman for 10 years, says he plans to clean up the KKK’s violent, bigoted image.

But first, he claims, he has to get Obama impeached and liberal ­immigration laws overturned.

He insisted the KKK were white separatists, not white supremacists, then said: “We don’t want black people breaking bread at our ­table, or Jews.”

Incredibly, he added: “But they are American citizens and we ask them to back what we’re ­trying to do.”

In what was an increasingly ­deranged rant, he said Obama was an Indonesian citizen and a terrorist.

And he called for US borders to be closed, adding: “If you are an American, a Christian and you pay taxes, the Klan has no problem.

“But if you are a piece of garbage selling drugs on one corner and your wife on the next corner, leave.”

Earlier a salesman stopped me and called the two world wars “white wars fought by white men”.

He went to insist women should stay at home, breed children and wear skirts not trousers and added: “We can’t lynch Negroes anymore or burn crosses.”

Boasting he was white Irish-German, he said Britain had to shut its own border because there were too many Muslims.

He predicted there would be more attacks like the murder of off-duty solider Lee Rugby in Woolwich, South East London, last year.