About 50 members of the Ku Klux Klan and assorted other supremacist groups staged an hourlong rally Saturday, angering thousands of onlookers who screamed at them and occasionally threw stones from behind an enclosed viewing area.
In large measure, the rally was peaceful. Pittsburgh police Chief Robert McNeilly said that four officers were hurt, including one who was hit in the eye with a rock, and that three people in the crowd were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct.
For the Klan members and their colleagues, many wearing white robes and some hoisting flags with swastikas, the appearance on Saturday was an unqualified public relations coup even if their message was roundly repudiated: Rarely have such groups had such a backdrop as a major northern American city.
At the end, one Klan member, Brad Thompson of Auburn, Ind., thanked everybody, ``even the protesters.''
``You helped us exercise our First Amendment rights,'' Thompson said.
Despite the unusual setting, the ideas expressed by the Klansmen were as old as the Klan itself, as one speaker after another denigrated African-Americans, Jews and other minorities.
``The solution is white revolution,'' said a man introduced as National Wizard Jeff Barry.
Mayor Thomas Murphy, who watched the rally from a distant open terrace, said later: ``I never felt such revulsion for anything in my life as I saw today.''
Most of the Klan members obscured their faces, either with pointed hats or sunglasses. One who did not was the rally's chief organizer, C. Edward Foster of Walston, Pa., who is grand dragon of the Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Foster, who has been active in Klan activities throughout western Pennsylvania, is known to human rights groups as someone whose language has been so fiery that other Klan members have disassociated from him.
