KKK-Recruiting Union Official Booted from Federally-Funded Job Site

An officer with a local union has been booted from a federally-funded work site -- for passing out KKK propaganda on the job.

The man, an officer with the Local 53 chapter of the Laborers International Union of North America, has not been named. But Adolphus Pruitt, vice president of legal redress for the Missouri State Conference of the NAACP, says that his group identified him to the project's managers -- and that, upon confirming the information, they removed him from the job Wednesday.

Daily RFT first reported on the allegations Tuesday.

"The individual in question was not a Shaw employee," Gentry Brann, director of corporate communications and marketing, explained in an email. "However, we immediately contacted the subcontractor for whom he worked, and the individual was released from the project by that company. Shaw does not tolerate any form of discrimination in our company, and we hold our subcontractors to that same standard."

The site, an area just north of the Lambert-St. Louis Airport, is part of a remediation project authorized by Congress under the FUSRAP initiative -- which seeks to remove radioactive materials from contaminated sites. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is supervising the work.

A Corps spokesman declined comment.

The union official member had been passing out business cards claiming that "your white children are quickly becoming America's new minority."

The card asked recipients to check out www.kkk.com,which sells white supremacist T-shirts and recruits members for the "Knights Party" -- an Arkansas-based group calling itself "the legitimate Klan association in the U.S." -- and encourages people to send $3 to the group for more information.

In a statement Tuesday, the Laborers International Union told the Daily RFT that "Local 53 will not stand for any racist thoughts or actions being espoused by any member, much less a union official of Local 53."

The man's status with the union is still unclear. Reached for comment yesterday, the union's general counsel said he would be issuing a statement soon. Stay tuned...