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It's hard to criticize giving school supplies to children. At least that's what the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP), a racist group started by former Klansman David Duke, seems to be betting on.

The NAAWP went to the Loudendale, W. Va., Church of the Nazarene in August to kick off its much-touted "Operation Appalachian," a program it said was designed to "deliver the basic staples of life to ... the deserving folks of Appalachia ... particularly among Whites of European extraction."

The racists gave away book bags, notebooks, calculators, pencils — and their own hateful propaganda.

Church members, who had advertised the event in the community, were caught unaware by the NAAWP's racism. They had thought that they were just the lucky beneficiaries of free school supplies from a charitable group.

"My son led me to believe it was like Habitat for Humanity [the nonprofit agency that builds housing for poor people]," said Muriel Dunlap, one of the church's leaders who accepted the NAAWP's offer of free goodies.

"What they gave out was good. What they stood for was not," Dunlap said after the event.

The 250 children who showed up with their parents were already receiving supplies by the time church leaders figured out what the NAAWP was really about, Dunlap told a reporter. By then, it was too late to stop the giveaway.

Church leaders say the NAAWP won't be invited back. In the case of the Lincoln County, W. Va., school system, the group never got its foot in the door. Superintendent William Grizell, saying the group "wanted access" to his students, refused the NAAWP up front.

The decision to target lower-income whites in the Appalachian region was made by NAAWP leaders in Florida and Louisiana. This "charity" is a new tactic by the NAAWP — a white supremacist group that focuses obsessively on black crime and, in particular, black rape of white women — in its effort to portray itself as a mainstream civil rights organization devoted to the welfare of whites.

The NAAWP doesn't sound so progressive, however, when it comes to civil rights for black people. For instance, the group's web site defends the American slave system and argues that the white southerners suffered during the Civil War as much as blacks did under slavery.

Civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the site adds, was a "beast," "a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people."