Down Home In Georgia.(white supremacists)(Brief Article)

When she talks about her two young daughters, Amy's whole tone changes. "They're just so beautiful," she says with a gentle Southern twang. "They got curly blond hair and blue eyes." Suddenly I see. The glow on her face is not just maternal pride; it's racial pride.

"This whole town is Klan," Amy explains. This accounts for the trio of lawn gnomes with white hoods standing guard inside the entrance of the Last Chance Pawn Shop. For the third year in a row, the shop's owner has offered up his backfield to Hammerfest, one of the biggest White Power music festivals in the nation. Standing in rural Georgia in a field ringed with trees turning red, orange and golden, I'm banking on my Irish-German features and blue-collar upbringing to get me through this adventure. No one knows I'm not in "the movement." Just an undercover journalist curious about this hidden, hate-filled face of America.

Not many people have made the pilgrimage--perhaps 150 from around the country, plus a handful from Europe. Certainly fewer than last year, all agree, when roughly 250 showed up. They come to hang out, drink beer and share White Power anthems. They are racists of every stripe; insignia, tattoos, patches and T shirts proclaim membership in White Aryan Resistance, the National Alliance and, of course, Hammerskin Nation, the group organizing the fest, described by the Anti-Defamation League as the "most violent and best-organized neo-Nazi skinhead group in the United States." Hammerskins require prospective members to first prove their commitment with action, so I know enough to steer clear of large men with patches showing two crossed hammers.

Amy's a skinhead, though she belongs to no one group. Offering me a beer, she emphasizes that she never drinks in front of the kids. But today the kids are with her mother, and Amy plans on having a good time. She's the only mom in the PTA with tattoos, she says with a laugh. "I let them show, too."

The concert's about to begin down where the field dips into a valley. People cluster in front of a hand-built stage with Hammerfest painted in red. They're mostly men in their 20s, with shaved heads, blue jeans, steel-toed black boots and flight jackets. Many of the women wear their hair in that skinhead-girl "fringe": heads shaved to an inch, with strands left long around the hairline, framing their faces and covering the backs of their necks. Off to the side is the unofficial "family section," with lawn chairs, blankets and ...