Colour clashes.

It's been more than 30 years since the U.S. Congress, prodded by President Lyndon Johnson, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to end legislated discrimination against blacks, but the battle against racism continues

When 38-year-old Cindy Burgess learned that her grandfather had been a member of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s she was disgusted. "I really didn't want to know that," she said. Her grandfather's name was on a list of Klan members found in an old trunk by a building contractor in her hometown of Noblesville, Indiana in 1995.

A local historian said "there was a new wave of Klan activity in the North after 1915, focussing largely on Catholics, Jews, and anyone foreign-born." The rise of the Klan reflected U.S. anxieties about the new immigrants. In answer to those fears, in 1924, the U.S. Congress passed the National Origins Act, establishing a quota plan in which only 2% of the nationality that was in the United States in 1890 would be admitted. The quotas, which sharply restricted the number of Roman Catholic and Jewish immigrants, were abolished in 1965.

According to a spokesman for Klanwatch, an Alabama-based group that monitors hate groups: "The white-supremacy movement is pretty much in disarray (now). What's hurting the movement -- but could ultimately save it -- is the militia phenomenon that's sweeping the country. It's soaking up a lot of potential Klan members."

The strength of the Klan has faded but there still are about 5,500 KKK members across the United States. While this is half of the estimate a decade ago, and a fraction of the 42,000 members in the 1960s, the Klan's angry racist message is still alive.

According to a study done by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), there were 7,600 hate-crime incidents reported by police departments around the United States in 1993. Racial bias was behind 62% of the incidents, which involved intimidation, vandalism, and assaults. According to the study, blacks were the most common racial targets; they were victims in 2,476 incidents. Whites were targets in 1,299 incidents. The FBI said the figures they gathered are conservative because only a small number of the nation's police forces, responsible for 56% of the U.S. population, reported hate crimes.

And, the picture grows grimmer. During 1995, and the first half of 1996 a rash of racially motivated attacks left at least 30 black churches burned to the ground. President Bill Clinton described the fires as "a dark era in our nation's history."

While such torchings are the work of hate-filled individuals, the U.S. government itself has been taken to task over racism. In 1995, the human-rights group Amnesty International accused the United States of repeated violations of human rights, pinpointing its treatment of racial minorities and the execution of juvenile offenders.

Amnesty reported that more than 40% of death-row prisoners are black, although they represent only 12% of the population. In addition, 84% of the 266 prisoners executed between 1977 and 1995 were convicted of murdering white victims -- despite the fact that black and white people are murdered in roughly equal numbers. Blacks make up 74% of prisoners serving jail terms on drug offences.

In the courtroom, evidence should matter more than skin colour. But, a lot of observers believe that race alters jury verdicts more than many in the justice system care to acknowledge. Based on their personal experience, black jurors may be quicker than whites to suspect racism on the part of police and prosecutors and thus more likely than whites to distrust the evidence they present. And some may take it a step further and ignore the evidence as a protest against racial injustice.

The Wall Street Journal pointed out several cases where race clearly influenced the outcomes of recent trials:

Davon Neverdon -- Four witnesses testified that they saw him kill a man in a robbery attempt. Two others said he told them he committed the crime. Even Mr. Neverdon was expecting to be convicted: he had offered to plead guilty in exchange for a 40-year sentence, but the prosecutor rejected the deal at the request of the victim's family. Nevertheless, the Baltimore jury, which included 11 blacks, acquitted the defendant, who is black, and one juror admitted that race may have played some part in the July 1995 decision.

Darryl Smith -- After an all-black jury in Washington acquitted Mr. Smith of murder in March 1990, a letter from an anonymous juror arrived at the superior court there. The letter said that while most jurors in the case believed Mr. Smith was guilty, the majority bowed to holdouts who odidnaet want to send any more Young Black Men to Jail."

Four Los Angeles police officers charged in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a black man, were acquitted in Simi Valley, Calif., in 1992; many observers attributed the verdict to the fact that 10 of the jurors were white and none was black.

The most celebrated case was O.J. Simpson's trial in 1995 for the murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. As an article in Time Magazine pointed out the ordeal became a question of who was guilty, Simpson for murder, or the Los Angeles police for tainting the evidence against him. The jury included nine African Americans, and an NBC poll at the time showed just 2% of blacks would have convicted Simpson of first-degree murder; only 15% would have supported even a second-degree verdict; 59% thought he should be acquitted. "It would be complicated enough if Simpson were just a wealthy and charming athlete accused of murdering his wife," wrote Richard Lacayo. "But from the start there was more to it: he was black, his wife was white and the police department was the same one that brought the world the beating of Rodney King in 1991."

More examples of cases in which urban juries acquitted black defendants, despite what many observers saw as strong evidence for conviction, include: the 1990 case of Washington Mayor Marion Barry, who was acquitted on all but one of 14 counts against him despite videotape showing him smoking crack cocaine; the string of acquittals of defendants charged with beating Reginald Denny during the Los Angeles riots in 1992; and the November, 1988, Bronx acquittal of Larry Davis on charges of attempting to murder nine police officers.

But, in the past, it was all-white juries, particularly in the South, who often convicted blacks accused of crimes against whites, regardless of the evidence--while whites who raped or lynched blacks went free.

Jack E. White, recently wrote in Time Magazine that, "In heavily black jurisdictions such as Washington, mostly black juries routinely send African-American defendants to prison when the evidence merits it. History shows that from Mississippi during the civil rights era to Simi Valley in the ae90s it is all-white juries that tend to exonerate defendants of their own race despite the evidence."

Writing on the O.J. Simpson trial, Mr. White said he thought the evidence pointed to Simpson's guilt, as well as to police corruption, adding that, "The cops may have tried to frame a guilty man...it is the persistence of racism itself that makes it possible for suspects like Simpson to play the race card."

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES

1. Read The Ruby Bridges Story, by Robert Coles a Harvard University psychiatrist. Dr. Coles was caught in a traffic jam in New Orleans caused by Ruby's first day at William Frantz School in 1960. He later studied Ruby Bridges and many other children in crisis.

2. Many Americans oppose affirmative action programs because they give special treatment to blacks. As one columnist points out, "The question remains whether such special treatment is necessary, given all that blacks have suffered for almost four centuries in American life." Discuss the pros and cons of affirmative action.

FACT FILE

38.5% of the people executed in the United States between 1976 and 1996 were black.