Much was said. Little blood was spilled.

But is unlikely any minds were changed or hearts moved by the rhetoric.

"White power!" shouted the Klansmen, whose leaders had dressed on this occasion in black suits with SS flashes rather than robes.

"Black power!" shouted many of the protesters, who outnumbered Klan supporters five to one in the crowd of over a 1000.

And then a passionate white anti-Klan protester breaks the febrile monotony.

"Which one of you cracker motherf---ers owns an above ground pool?" he screams through the thin ranks of reporters and police that divide him from the Klan. "I'm gonna find it. I'm gonna take a s--- in it."

Later a young man leads a chant of "F--- racists! F--- racists!" but is scolded by an older onlooker, who tells him that this is no place for profanity.

A week earlier here at the Statehouse a mixed crowd sang and wept with joy when the Confederate flag was removed from a memorial on the grounds.

Led by the Republican state governor, Nikki Haley, the legislature had voted overwhelmingly that the flag, to many a symbol of white oppression, should be moved to a nearby museum.

Today's Klan response was inevitable.

The Klan was born in the South after the Confederacy was defeated.

At the height of the Klan's powers in the 1920s there were an estimated 5 million members on its rolls. Today the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which tracks hate groups in the United States, estimates there are only around 8000 left, divided among up to a dozen different organisations.

Those groups appear to hate one another as much as their traditional foes; blacks, Jews, Catholics and gays.

Before the rally I had tried to contact the organisers and in the process tracked down a man called Frank Ancona, former Imperial Wizard of the American Traditionalist Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, but he can't help.

The rally, he tells me, is being organised by the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and he has nothing to do with them, he says, because they are a bunch of racists.

"Aren't the American Traditionalist Knights racist?" I ask.

"No," he says firmly. "We are fraternal organisation."

Later I find a gravel-voiced man from a Loyal White Knights klavern (or chapter) in California who tells me on the phone he will meet me to talk before the rally, but he does not show up.

As I wait for him I come across, Dan Ramsey, 48, and David Smith, 60, who are here to show their support for the flag and the Klan.

Ramsey was never a Klan member, though his father was. Smith was in the Klan most of his life, leaving the group a little over a decade ago.

Both insist the Klan is not a hate group, though Ramsey says he never joined because he did not want to raise a child with the same hate that filled his father.

A conversation about the Klan with these two friendly men is like that: full of abrupt turns and contradictions that are hard to make sense of.

Smith says his father had five wives, a girlfriend and 36 kids. He wasn't born until the old man was in his 60s. His grandfather fought in the Civil War, and the Confederate flag is his heritage.

Smith had no trouble fighting alongside African-Americans in the 3rd Marine division in Vietnam. "We all bleed red," he says.

Over the course of the rally I will see Ramsey greet several African-Americans like old friends. The way Smith tells it, a Klan meeting is just like a Baptist church day.

"It's family-oriented, there is no drugs or alcohol," he says. You meet, you hear some Christian music and pray, the kids run around, you have a barbecue, and later on perhaps you burn a cross, symbolising Jesus's guiding light.

And then he adds this: "If God wanted us all to be the same colour, he would have made us that way."

After midday a black unity rally begins with speakers from various groups, some with links to the New Black Panthers.

They stand on the Statehouse steps and make speeches. When a couple of Klan sympathisers parade through their ranks with Confederate flags the speakers urge the crowd to leave them alone.

"They are only displaying the white supremacy in their heart."

A young woman reminds the crowd that Malcolm X urged them to obey the law, but only when it is possible: "If they lay a hand on you, put them in the cemetery," she says, paraphrasing the slain black leader.

The Klan rally starts later in the afternoon on the other side of the building. There, access to the steps is cut off with waist-high barricades and there is no public address system.

When the Klan finally arrives its 50-odd members are jeered and clapped from beyond the barricade. Baring their flags they make their way self-consciously from the barricades to the steps. They are young and old, a couple very old. They are men and women. There are even a few young children. But most are young men.

Once on the steps there is little for them to do but wave their flags and bait the crowd with Nazi salutes and slogans, most of which are lost in the din. They apparently hadn't thought to bring a megaphone, let alone a PA system like the Black Panthers.

It's hotter by now and the odd water bottle is thrown. A supporter in the crowd is knocked down, treated and carried away by police. Klansmen tear apart and spit on an Israeli flag.

Both Governor Haley and the Columbia mayor had called on locals to ignore the Klan event, and their advice appears to have been sound.

The rally opposing them had lent the day's proceedings far more significance than the thin presence of the Loyal White Knights could have on its own.

After two hours or so the police have had enough. They form ranks and escort the Klan members from the steps as the protesters follow, howling and yelling, some celebratory, some furious.

One of the Klansmen carries a boy maybe five years of age. He lolls conscious but barely responsive in his father's arms as the group flees with its moving police escort to a nearby car park.

It's impossible to tell what has struck him the most - the relentless blasting of the sun through the long afternoon, or all the anger and hatred spat back and forth over his head.