HOODING MEASURE ELUSIVE; HANNIBAL HAS NO SPECIFIC ORDINANCE

If Cape Girardeau officials want to draft a "de-hooding" ordinance to restrict Ku Klux Klan activities here, they'll need to look to a city other than Hannibal as a standard.

At a city council meeting this week, local NAACP president Michael Sterling said Hannibal the site of a Klan rally in 1982 has such an ordinance. He said he was told the law prohibited participants in rallies and parades from concealing their identity by wearing hoods or masks.

But Hannibal officials said Thursday they have no such ordinance.

The issue surfaced earlier this month when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People drafted several resolutions the group hoped the city could adopt to prevent possible Klan activity here.

Leaflets circulated earlier this year announced the white-supremacist group was planning a June 13 rally at City Hall. Police have said a single man, who has since moved out of the area, was responsible for the leaflets, and they doubt there will be a rally here.

Peter Danielsons, Hannibal's city attorney, said that city has a parades law very similar to the one the Cape Girardeau City Council will consider next month.

Although he wasn't city attorney at the time, Danielsons said that in 1982, the city allowed the Klan to hold a rally provided they comply with certain guidelines: no firearms and no hoods over their faces.

But he said there is nothing in the city code that specifically prohibited the hoods.

"It was all done by sort of executive fiat by the mayor," Danielsons said. "He said, `You can have the rally, but these are the conditions with which you must comply: there will be no weaponry of any kind, and you must have your face showing.

"`We are not going to allow hooded people to stand there and make speeches.'"

The city attorney said the Klan didn't challenge the mayor's order and the event was held sans hoods.

Prior to the rally, the Hannibal NAACP also protested. But Danielson said there's little a city can do to prevent such activity.

"The local NAACP insisted the city deny them a permit to use city property," he said. "But the mayor said, `we can't deny them that, so we'll give them a city permit, but tell them where they were going to have it and set up some guidelines.'

"Nobody really questioned the mayor or attempted to force the mayor's hand. Of course, it made the NAACP up here very mad that he allowed it in the first place."

The former mayor, John Lyng, is now a Hannibal attorney. He said Thursday there is no way legally to prohibit the Klan from holding a rally. Lyng said the ban on hoods was a police department recommendation.

"That was the way we handled it, and the wizard or dragon or whoever it was I talked to agreed with that," he said.

"As far as the legal question goes, I knew they had the right to parade, assemble and make speeches. But whether having a masked parade is protected speech or assembly, I would question."

Lyng said the NAACP wasn't the only group that protested the Klan's 1982 rally there. He was sued by a homosexual group when he wouldn't allow members to hold a counter-demonstration adjacent to the Klan rally.

Before the homosexual group could march to the park where the Klan was, a local communist group broke through a police barricade and engaged the Klansmen, who were whisked away in Missouri Highway Patrol squad cars.

"Fortunately, the communists and Klan got in a fight and the Klan were headed south on Highway 61 before the gays got there," Lyng said.

Danielsons said the whole "rally" lasted "three or four" minutes. Although the seven or eight Klansmen who participated heeded Lyng's order and didn't conceal their faces, Danielsons said he knew of no city in Missouri that has a law that specifically prohibits hoods or masks in parades or rallies.

Gary Markenson, director of the Missouri Municipal League, said he also knew of no city in the state that has such an ordinance.

Still, Sterling and other NAACP officials have said they want a local law to regulate Klan activity.

But Cape Girardeau City Attorney Warren Wells said he would prefer if constitutional to have a specific "de-hooding" law, rather than extend the reach of the parades ordinance, such as was done at Hannibal in 1982.

The paragraph Lyng used to justify the hood prohibition also is included in the parades ordinance before the Cape Girardeau City Council.

It says permits can be denied is the parade is likely to "cause injury to persons or property, to provoke disorderly conduct or to create a disturbance beyond the capacity of the police department to protect the general public or those participating in the parade."

Wells said that if the city is going to tell the citizens that a particular activity is banned, it ought to be clear in the city code.

"I think you need to know that it's valid, enforceable and explicit," he said. "In order to meet the request of the NAACP, we need to know whether we can prevent people from wearing masks under these types of conditions, and if we can, then we should have it spelled out."

The city attorney said he would continue to research the matter and report his findings to the council when it meets again June 1.