“It was unnerving,” said Hollie Pich, 21, a white college student from Sydney, Australia.
“Shocking,” said Pat Chambers of Atlanta, a 62-year-old African-American woman.
“Is that real?” asked Kierra Hutchins, 14, one of a group of students from Smith Middle School here, who clustered around the exhibit — a Ku Klux Klan robe and a cross.
The white, hooded robe was donated to the institute anonymously by someone who found it in a trunk in a house. The crude, partly burned wooden cross planted behind it was given to the museum by the local F.B.I. office. Together they stood in a plexiglass case, illuminated by a ghostly ceiling light, at the head of the museum’s aptly named Confrontation Gallery.
