Robert Shelton (klan member)

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For other persons named Robert Shelton, see Robert Shelton (disambiguation).

Robert M. Shelton (1930-2003) was a former car-tire salesman who became nationally famous as the Grand Wizard of United Klans of America (UKA), a Ku Klux Klan group.

Shelton served as the UKA leader starting in 1961, which peaked with an estimated 30,000.^[1] In 1966 Shelton received a year in prison and $1,000 fine for contempt of the United States Congress, "for refusing to turn over membership lists to the House Committee on Un-American Activities."^[1]

Four UKA members in 1963 firebombed the 16th Street Baptist Church killing four young black girls in Birmingham, Alabama.^[2] The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing became one of the most notorious events in the civil rights struggle.

Then in 1984 James Knowles, a UKA member of the UKA's Klavern 900 in Mobile, was convicted for the 1981 murder of Michael Donald.^[3] At trial Knowles said he and Henry Hays killed Donald "in order to show Klan strength in Alabama."^[3] In 1987 the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) brought a civil case, on behalf of the victims family, against the United Klans of America for being responsible in the lynching of Donald, a nineteen year old black man.^[4] Unable to come up the $7 million dollars awarded by a jury, the UKA were forced to turn over its national headquarters to Donald's mother who then sold it.^[5] During the civil trial Knowles said he was "carrying out the orders" of Bennie Jack Hays, Henry Hays's father and a long time Shelton lieutenant.^[3]

In 1994, he said "The Klan is my belief, my religion. But it won't work anymore. The Klan is gone. Forever."^[1] In the late sixties, Shelton ran for Police Commissioner in Tuscaloosa Alabama. He finished in fifth place, right behind a University of Alabama graduate student named John Gary Simpson.