VIRGINIA
WUSA
Bruce Leshan, WUSA August 25, 2017
WASHINGTON (WUSA9) – More evidence on Friday that the College Park KKK leader turned Arlington priest failed to put his Confederate sympathies behind him, even after he changed his attire from white sheets to clerical robes.
Years after becoming a priest, William Aitcheson was charged with assault and battery and convicted of trespassing.
The priest claimed the racist violence in Charlottesville prompted him to confess to his own old membership in the KKK, but that’s far from the whole truth. But Maria Santos Bier is just out with a story in the Washington Post; “How I discovered my childhood priest was in the Ku Klux Klan,” which suggest Aitcheson only wrote his confessional column in the Arlington Catholic Herald after she started questioning the diocese about his past.
As a history teacher, Bier says Aitchson was “A fervent advocate of the Confederacy.” and used to joke about “Saint Robert E Lee.” After Charlottesville, she Googled him, and found a 1977 story about the then 23 year old University of Maryland student. He was an “exalted Cyclops,” in the local Robert E Lee Klavern.
Another freelancer, Nate Thayer, found Aitcheson had been charged in three Maryland counties with manufacturing explosives, threatening to lynch Corretta Scott King, burning crosses in front of Jewish organizations, and in Phillip and Barbara Butler’s front yard
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