For seven years, Richard Wilson Preston Jr. was on a national mission to rebrand and expand the Ku Klux Klan. As the founder and imperial wizard of the Confederate White Knights of the KKK, the Baltimore man appeared regularly in public and the media to insist that the Klan, notorious for terrorizing and lynching African-Americans, wasn’t a violent racist hate group. It was a Christian organization, he said, dedicated to service, fraternity and community.

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