David Duke - Youth and Early Adulthood

Youth and Early Adulthood

Duke was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma to David H. Duke and Alice Maxine Crick. As the son of an engineer for Shell Oil, Duke frequently moved with his family around the world. They lived a short time in the Netherlands, before settling in Louisiana. In the late 1960s, Duke met the leader of the white supremacist National Alliance, William Pierce, who would remain a lifelong influence. Duke joined the Ku Klux Klan in 1967.

Duke studied at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, and in 1970, he formed a white student group called the White Youth Alliance; it was affiliated with the National Socialist White People's Party. The same year, to protest William Kunstler's appearance at Tulane University, Duke appeared at a demonstration in Nazi uniform. Picketing and holding parties on the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth, he became notorious on the LSU campus for wearing a Nazi uniform.

Duke claimed to have spent nine months in Laos, calling that a "normal tour of duty". He actually went there to join his father, who was working there and had asked him to visit during the summer of 1971. His father got him a job teaching English to Laotian military officers, from which he was dismissed after six weeks when he drew a Molotov Cocktail on the blackboard. He also claimed to have gone behind enemy lines twenty times at night to drop rice to anti-Communist insurgents in planes flying ten feet off the ground, narrowly avoiding receiving a shrapnel wound. Two Air America pilots who were in Laos at that time said that flights were during the day and flew no less than 500 feet from the ground. One suggested that it might have been possible for Duke to have gone on a safe "milk run" once or twice but no more than that. Duke was also unable to recall the name of the airfield used.

He graduated from Louisiana State University in 1974 after enrolling in 1968. During this time he spent what would have been his senior year organizing the National Party.