Hate hides in dark places.

That is why we are grateful to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and organizations like it, for shining a light on hate groups.

We wrote a dozen years ago about a young man from Berne whose family did not know he belonged to a white supremacist group until he died in West Virginia at one of its compounds. “He wasn’t raised that way,” his mother told us. “I don’t know how he became involved in this blind, destroy-your-heart movement.”

His mother asked us to look for answers, and, after our story ran, she wrote a letter to the editor that said, in part, “We give thanks for the wide-eyed innocence of the child and ask that each one of all of our children be blessed with kindness, knowledge, a sharing nature, forgiveness, and love.”

We kept those words in mind this week as we looked into the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual report, mapping hate groups. The way to contain hate is to be aware of it and to redouble our efforts to teach tolerance.

The center’s report — “The Year in Hate and Extremism,” published in its quarterly “Intelligence Report” — drew our attention this year because it listed Altamont as the only place in the state with an active cell of the Ku Klux Klan. “It brings up concerns about the safety and well being of our families,” one villager wrote us in an email; a member of a “racial/ethnic minority,” he asked that he not be named.

The Altamont mayor, James Gaughan, cautioned us about writing a story that would further incite fear. “The last thing I want to see happen,” the mayor told our village reporter, Elizabeth Floyd Mair, “is that the village’s reputation as a wonderful, safe, and welcoming community is destroyed in the process of seeking to assess the validity of these claims.”

Like the mayor, we believe Altamont is a good place to live. Because we want to keep it that way, we were compelled to investigate the claim and report what we could, and last week devoted our entire front page and an inside page, too, to the issue.

What we found was a responsive police chief, Todd Pucci, who assembled representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the New York State Police, the Albany County Sheriff’s Office, and the Guilderland Police Department. Pucci told us after the meeting, “None of us have any substantiation of any chapter of the KKK here....The most recent activity in this area was back in the 1920s.”

Heidi L. Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, said the information about the “small cell of Klansmen active in that area” came from a “law enforcement source” who “did not want to talk.” She also said the Altamont listing on the website of the Loyal White Knights of the KKK was new in 2014; it hadn’t been there the year before.

Floyd Mair called a long list of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, all of which said they were not the source and knew nothing about the situation.

The Loyal White Knights — one of many splintered Klan factions — is based in North Carolina; “the Grand Dragon of North Carolina” said he’d have a New York State leader call Floyd Mair; he did. A man who called himself an “Exalted Cyclops,” Douglas Baker, claimed there were 400 to 500 members in Syracuse and more throughout upstate New York.

“Let me say simply that he’s lying,” responded Michael Potok, a senior fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center. “That is completely false. It’s very typical of these groups to claim 40 members when they have four, and 4,000 when they have 40.”

Across the United States, the number of Klan chapters, called “klaverns” by members, fell by more than half, from 163 in 2013 to just 72 last year; several Klan groups disappeared completely, according to the center report. Its Hate Map for the KKK lists only Altamont in New York State, while the website for the Loyal White Knights of the KKK lists both Altamont and Buffalo.

This may be part of an encouraging trend. For the second year in a row, there has been a significant decline in hate groups across the country. In 2008, America’s radical right swelled with the election of its first black president and, soon after, the collapse of the economy, reaching a peak of 2,018 in 2012. In 2013, that number declined to 939, and in 2014 — the subject of this year’s report — the number declined to 784.

Why the decline? The center cites a combination of reasons: a stronger economy; crackdowns by law enforcement; the advance of same-sex marriage, racial and religious diversity, and intolerance toward those with openly racist views; and the movement of radicals out of groups and into the anonymity, safety, and far-reaching communicative power of the Internet.

That last reason gives us pause. The Internet offers a new kind of anonymity, different than a white hood and perhaps more insidious.

We blushed with shame last week as we leafed through crumbling copies of our newspaper to illustrate our article on the KKK. In the 1920s — during the second surge of the Klan after its founding in the South during Reconstruction — the organization reached across the nation and at its height enrolled an estimated tenth of white males in this country.

The pages of our newspaper carried notices and reports of the KKK meetings. One item, headlined “Organizes Women of  ‘Invisible Empire,’” pictured one Mrs. R. H. Davis, presumably a society woman, wearing a bonnet with flowers on its brim. But was this news of aid for the poor, a temperance rally, or a strawberry social she was organizing?

No. She was organizing 1,000 women to be initiated into the Ku Klux Klan Auxiliary. Imagine how socially acceptable racism must have been to have produced an autocaster image like that. The phrase that haunts us — enveloping rapes, and lynchings, and cross-burnings — is this: “Invisible Empire.”

The Internet is invisible with far-reaching tentacles, linking people from around the globe. It can be used for great good or great evil.

The center’s report maintains that “the high social cost of being known to affiliate” with hate groups has cut down on their number. The report also concludes that attacks planned in groups — as they commonly were during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s — have been largely abandoned because they are “just too easy to infiltrate and disrupt, and so terrorists are increasingly acting alone.”

These “lone wolf” attacks can be inspired by rhetoric on the Internet. Stormfront, the largest and most active web forum in America, which swelled with Barack Obama’s election, now has nearly 300,000 registered users — “a fairly astounding number for a site run by an ex-felon and former Alabama Klan leader,” says the report.

The center did a study last year, which found that, in the prior five years, registered users of Stormfront had murdered close to 100 people. “In their cases,” the report states, “the forum seems to have helped cultivate their thirst for violence or at least nurtured and rationalized their ideological hatreds. Almost all of the killers had been posting regularly on Stormfront and other racist sites in the 18 months prior to picking up the gun....”

So where does that leave us with the Ku Klux Klan? Some Klan groups have stopped making their chapter lists public.  “As with other groups,” said the center’s report, “exposure of membership in the Klan has cost at least some members their jobs, families or friends.”

We would like to believe membership is declining in hate groups because, as a whole, our society is becoming more enlightened, more accepting of the wealth to be found in diversity. But, at the same time, we must be wary of the insidious and hidden forms prejudice and hate can take. We put the center’s report on our front page last week and are devoting our second page to it this week because we believe our readers here in Altamont as well as people across the country and around the world have to pay attention.

The fear we heard from residents who knew Altamont was on the Hate Map is precisely how hatemongers function — they victimize targeted groups, letting fear spread like shadows at dusk, covering a familiar landscape in utter darkness. They separate us as a people by focusing on our differences.

We are a diverse nation, a nation where wealthy, white, straight males are no longer the dominant force. We need to stand together, arm in arm — men and women, white and black and yellow and brown and red, Jewish and Christian and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist and atheist, straight and gay and lesbian and transgendered and bisexual — to beat back the fear.

Not here, not now. You won’t frighten us in Altamont. You won’t frighten us as Americans. We are shining lights in the darkness. We can see our neighbors clearly, and recognize them for who they are — different than us, surely, for each one of us is unique. We may not be the same but we are equal, and none of us need be afraid if each of us stands firmly against hate groups and hate speech. The shadows won’t envelop us if we carry the torch as one.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer