Members of the Ku Klux Klan rejected being labeled as “white supremacists” in a recent interview with the Associated Press conducted before a rally for President-elect Donald Trump.
“We’re not white supremacists. We believe in our race,” one of the Klansmen told the AP in an interview near the border of Virginia and North Carolina.
The AP interviewed the men ahead of their group’s “Trump victory celebration” — in which as many as 30 cars paraded through the town of Roxboro, N.C., the AP reported.
The members said Trump’s victory in the presidential election signals that white Americans are taking their country back from immigrants, African-Americans and Jewish people.
The Klan has been catapulted to the forefront of the news in recent months.
A report last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center found an uptick in incidents of harassment following Trump’s win.
The president-elect said in an interview with “60 Minutes” following his Nov. 8 victory that supporters attacking minorities should “stop it.”
The campaign also disavowed an endorsement from the KKK’s newspaper before the election. Trump denounced the KKK’s former leader, David Duke, during the Republican primary.
“We are white separatists, just as Yahweh in the Bible told us to be. Separate yourself from other nations. Do not intermix and mongrelize your seed,” another Klansmen told the AP.
The organization’s early beginnings date back to the 1860s, but the second incarnation of the organization was founded in 1915.