Robert Shelton

Robert Marvin Shelton (1929-2003) emerged in the late 1950s as the most prominent Alabama leader of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1961, he founded and became the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, the largest White supremacist group in the United States during the 1960s. Shelton’s followers perpetrated acts of violence across Alabama, including the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, the murder of Viola Liuzzo, and the lynching of Michael Donald.

Shelton was born on June 12, 1929, in Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County. He was the only child of Hoyt Marvin Shelton and Carrie Jane Montgomery Shelton. Hoyt served in World War I, before returning to Tuscaloosa, where he worked various maintenance jobs over the years; Carrie was a homemaker. The Sheltons also ran a small grocery store next door to their house in east Tuscaloosa that continued operation into the late 1950s. Hoyt was a member of the Ku Klux Klan for most of his adult life, and it was through his influence that his son Robert eventually joined and rose through the ranks.

Shelton graduated from Holt High School, in Tuscaloosa County, in 1945. He briefly attended the University of Alabama, but he dropped out in 1947 because of poor grades. After leaving college, Shelton enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served from June 1948 to July 1951. Upon his discharge from the service, he began working at the tire company B. F. Goodrich. Shelton married Betty Lou McDaniels on August 19, 1952; the couple would have three children. The family lived next door to Shelton’s parents through the 1950s. In the mid-1960s, the family moved to a new home in the Sherwood Lake subdivision, where Shelton lived for the rest of his life.

Outside of his extremist activities, Shelton lived a quiet life. The FBI kept Shelton under surveillance for many years and compiled a thorough report on his habits and personality. According to the report, Shelton did not drink and disliked people who did. He was uninterested in sports, fished occasionally, and sometimes attended Alberta City Methodist Church. The FBI described Shelton as a domineering man who got along well with anyone who would obey him or seek out his opinion. Informants believed that his chief motivations were a love of publicity and feeling important.

By the mid-1950s, Robert Shelton was a prominent member of the Alabama Realm of the U.S. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and, in June 1957, he rose to the rank of Grand Dragon, the leader of the Klan at the state level. He openly and frequently traveled throughout Alabama hosting Klan rallies and speaking to crowds numbering in the hundreds. During the 1958 Democratic gubernatorial primary, Shelton received national attention for the first time when he endorsed Atty. Gen. John Patterson, the hardline segregationist candidate, over then-racial moderate George Wallace. The endorsement was controversial, but Patterson defeated Wallace in a landslide and went on to an easy victory in the general election.

Shelton took advantage of his newfound prominence. He regularly spoke to reporters, opposing everything from integration to water fluoridation to increased mental health funding. He engaged in frequent publicity stunts, such as erecting a sign welcoming visitors to Tuscaloosa on behalf of the Klan and reacting with outrage in the press each time it was vandalized. Shelton also leveraged his political power for financial gain. After promising his bosses at Goodrich that he could help the company get all the state’s tire business, Shelton was promoted to sales manager for all of Goodrich’s Alabama stores. In October 1959, Goodrich was awarded a $1.6 million contract from the state. The FBI reported that Shelton received a cut from truck drivers hauling cargoes of whiskey in the state, and he was on the payroll of a Mobile engineering firm in the guise of a public relations consultant. Shelton was fired by Goodrich in November 1959 for refusing to renounce his views, and after a brief period working at a gas station, the Klan became his full-time job, compensated by dues paid by Klan members.

A power struggle between Shelton and Eldon Lee Edwards, the Imperial Wizard (the head of the entire organization), had been brewing since at least November 1959, when Shelton was fired and then quickly reinstated. In April 1960, Shelton was permanently ousted from his position in the Georgia-based U.S. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The reasons for his firing are unclear, although in public statements Edwards cited Shelton’s incompetence and dishonesty. In May, Shelton, along with his father Hoyt Shelton and Tuscaloosa farmer James Elmore, founded the Alabama Knights, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The majority of Alabama Klansmen followed him to the new organization. When Edwards died suddenly in August, even more of his followers aligned themselves with Shelton. The next year, Shelton merged the Alabama Knights with a number of Klan groups in other states, forming the United Klans of America (UKA) and making Robert Shelton the leader of the largest hate group in the United States at the time.

Attack on Freedom Riders in Anniston

Shelton spent much of 1962 and 1963 recruiting new members. He seldom appeared publicly in his Klan robes, opting instead to don a black suit and thin black tie, in an attempt to give the Klan an air of respectability. He frequently denounced the use of violence to the press, even as his followers grew more dangerous. Shelton never directly participated in highly publicized instances of racial violence and always denied having any knowledge of it. In Anniston and Birmingham, he watched the attacks on the Freedom Riders from his car. Police intercepted a car full of heavily armed Jefferson County Klansmen on the road to Tuscaloosa ahead of George Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door.” Shelton claimed to have no knowledge of their plans, but he bailed them out of jail and ensured their weapons were returned.

On August 26, 1963, Shelton was injured in a plane crash en route to Washington, D.C., with two of his fellow Klansmen. The pilot, Alvin Sisk, died of his injuries, Shelton suffered a broken arm, and Frederick G. Smith escaped with only cuts and bruises. Though Shelton did not divulge the reason for his trip, it coincided with Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington.

In September 1963, Eastview Klavern #13, a notoriously violent chapter of the UKA, carried out the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four young Black girls. In the days following the bombing, several members of Eastview Klavern were arrested for possessing a large cache of dynamite. Robert Shelton bailed them out. He had been in Birmingham for much of the month of September, protesting the integration of the city’s public schools, but he denied having any prior knowledge of the bombing. Over several decades, four men with ties to the Klan, Thomas E. Blanton, Herman Frank Cash, Robert E. Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry, were eventually tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for the murders. Blanton and Cherry were brought to justice by future U.S. senator Doug Jones, then U.S. Attorney, in the early 2000s.

When violence erupted during the Tuscaloosa Campaign for civil rights, launched by Martin Luther King Jr., in the summer of 1964, Shelton again stayed on the fringes, observing the actions of his followers. On June 9, 1964, on what became known as Bloody Tuesday, Shelton looked on from a yard across the street as law enforcement and deputized Klansmen brutalized around 600 protestors outside First African Baptist Church in one of the most violent events of the civil rights movement. In July, White mobs, including Klansmen in plain clothes, attacked Black patrons attempting to integrate businesses in downtown Tuscaloosa; Shelton watched the unrest from his fourth-floor offices in the Alston Building, for which the Klan paid the rent.

Morris Dees, Michael Figures, and Beulah Mae Donald

Shelton was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in October 1965 as part of their investigation into Klan violence. Shelton was an uncooperative witness and refused to answer almost every question. When the committee subpoenaed a number of Klan documents, Shelton refused to provide them. He was sentenced to one year in federal prison for contempt of Congress. In 1969, after exhausting his appeals, Shelton served nine months at a minimum-security prison in Texarkana, Texas. Although he was optimistic about the future of the Klan upon his release from prison, Shelton never again saw the same level of prominence and notoriety he had received in the early 1960s. Although the UKA remained solvent, and Robert Shelton remained a true believer in his cause, the Klan fell into obscurity in the 1970s.

In March 1981, Michael Donald, a Black college student in Mobile, was kidnapped and lynched by several members of the UKA. Three men were found guilty of the crime. In 1984, Beulah Mae Donald, with the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center, sued the UKA in civil court for her son’s murder. An all-White jury found the organization guilty of wrongful death in 1987 and awarded her $7 million in damages. The Klan was forced to sell its headquarters on Lake Tuscaloosa and pay Donald $51,875, which was the extent of their assets.

Left bankrupt by the Donald case, the United Klans of America was officially dissolved in February 1992. Although he continued to describe the Klan’s beliefs as his religion, Shelton told a New York Times reporter in 1994 that he considered the Klan to be dead. Shelton lived out his final years in obscurity. He died of a heart attack on March 17, 2003, at the age of 73.