WEST PALM BEACH - Officially, the Republican Party of Palm Beach County rejected Derek Black's recent election as a committeeman because he failed to sign a loyalty oath.

But such technicalities hardly explain how a minuscule election -- Black won 167 of 287 votes -- has attracted the attention of hate groups nationwide, and opponents like the Anti-Defamation League. This, rather, seems to reflect heightened sensitivity to issues of race in the age of Obama, and the intrusive power of history.

Black is more than just a 19-year-old college student with a taste for politics. He is also the son of Don Black, a former national grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. At age 11, he contributed a "kids page" to his father's "white nationalist" Web site, Stormfront.org, where the message boards disparage nonwhites. The younger Black denies being a white supremacist.

"I am a white person who is concerned about discrimination against white people," he said in an interview at a local Starbucks. And yet, Black, speaking softly, wearing a hat, boots and a sport coat, could not identify a single ideological difference with his father or the KKK, nor could he bring himself to agree with the tenet that all men, regardless of race, are equal.

Last month, at a "Euro-American" conference in Tennessee organized by David Duke, one of the nation's best-known white supremacists, Black gave a speech comparing his campaign to George C. Wallace's resistance to desegregation in the 1960s. In an audio recording posted online, Black can be heard telling the crowd that he sees local Republican politics "especially with the election of Obama, as the way white people will have to respond."

"We can infiltrate," he said, adding, "We could politically take the country back."