KKK leader who recruited in Elkton pleads no contest in Charlottesville charges
Adam DuvernayThe leader of a Baltimore chapter of the Ku Klux Klan on Tuesday pleaded no contest charges he fired his handgun within 1,000 feet of a school during the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer.
Richard Preston, imperial wizard of the Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was seen on a video taken during the Unite the Right rally firing his weapon in the direction of a counter-protester. He claimed it was an act of self-defense.
A plea of no contest means a defendant acknowledges there’s enough evidence to convict him but doesn’t admit he committed the crime. It has the same effect as a guilty plea and Preston, 53, faces up to 10 years in prison. He will be sentenced Wednesday.
Preston came to the attention of Delaware and northwest Maryland residents in December 2013 when he addressed nearly 50 people at the Cecil County Administration Building near Elkton, Maryland, during a KKK recruitment speech.
He promised a kinder, gentler Klan.
"We're not a bad group. We're a Christian organization," Preston said in 2013.
Preston was called a KKK leader in media reports following the reported gunfire incident at the Charlottesville rally, which drew national attention because it was centered on the removal of a Confederate monument and because Heather Heyer, a local paralegal, died when a car driven by James Alex Fields Jr. plowed into counterprotesters.
But the Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, founded by Preston, is only one of many splinter groups, and hailing him as a national KKK leader doesn't hold water, Carla Hill, an investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, told The News Journal last year.
"He's on the outskirts. He's not getting a bunch of members to join up. His newest two chapters are the ones in Missouri and Indiana, but those chapters were formed up by Klan members that left other groups," Hill said after his arrest. "Richard himself has been unable to get anything going around him through his own charisma."
The Associated Press contributed to this article
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