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K.k.k. Leader Admits Subsidizing Call for Boycott of Kosher Products

February 17, 1966
See Original Daily Bulletin From This Date
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A member of the Ku Klux Klan told the House Committee on un-American Activities yesterday that he had financed a campaign designed to “expose the kosher food racket.”

Committee members expressed annoyance at references in one of the items in the “literature” which Imperial Wizard James R. Venable, 61, had subsidized. The item was a list of hundreds of American firms making kosher products, which were identified as “Jew kosher outfits” and “one world outfits.”

The KKK leader, an attorney from Stone Mountain, Ga., was asked whether he would retract a letter he had written urging boycott of those firms to destroy what Venable called in the letter “the most diabolical plot ever conceived by these leeches of mankind;” Venable replied: “I’d like to retract it. I apologize.”

He had previously testified that he had paid for the “literature” and the list of firms by financing the Defensive Legion of Registered Americans, Inc. and the Christian Voters and Buyers League. He said the League had published the “literature.” He was identified as the Imperial Wizard of the National Association of Klan Organizations for Klan units in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas and Louisiana.

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