NEW YORK: Residents in the Southern USA are infuriated by a series of recent developments which threaten to break down the South`s rigid racial segregation polity, writes Reuter`s special correspondent. ... President Truman, with his ten-point civil rights programme, struck at the South`s traditional Jim Crow transport policies, while recent Supreme Court decisions have been aimed at killing the segregation in Southern colleges and professional schools. ... The rising tide of anger has been useful to the Ku Klux Klan, [a] notorious hooded order which terrorized the South in the 1920s. ... Dr Samuel Green, of Atlanta, Georgia, the Klan`s Imperial Grand Dragon, has told reporters: `We are going to support the man who will put Georgia back in the white man`s column.` He made it clear, however, that the Ku Klux Klan`s aspirations were only regional.

... Negro leaders are frankly alarmed.

They fear that the President has touched off something which in the end will react against them. They have virtually no political power in the South ... nor any position from which they can combat a major drive by the Klan.