Lakin ? After years of fighting the perception, Lakin will soon be removed from a list of places across the country that are homes to hate groups.

The idea that Lakin, a Kearny County town of 2,500 in southwest Kansas, was home to a chapter of the Imperial Klans of America began in 2000, when the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Ala., listed Lakin on its Hate Groups Map.

The map is part of the law center’s Intelligence Project, which tracks hate groups across the nation.

In 2000, a Lakin Post Office box was listed on an Imperial Klans of America Web site, inviting those who wanted more information about the organization to write to that address. The Intelligence Report used that address to associate the Klan with Lakin.

That was news to Kearny County Sheriff Jim Jarboe, who’s been fighting the perception since then.

A short time after the 2000 map was released, the Klan Web site was changed to include a post office box in Kentucky, the home state of the Imperial Klans of America, instead of the Lakin address, Jarboe said.

Investigators found no evidence that the Klan had set up shop in the county with less than 5,000 residents, Jarboe said.

“Every time we’d go to a seminar about hate groups, they’d show that the KKK was in Kearny County,” Jarboe said. “I’d have to get up and talk to the instructor and tell them that there was no KKK cell in Lakin and explain what we’d been through.”

Lakin will be removed from the map when it comes out in a few weeks.

Seven groups will be listed on the updated Kansas map, including four National Socialist Movement organizations in Topeka, Wichita, Hutchinson and Scandia; a Hammerskin Nation white supremacist group in Wichita; the Rev. Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka and a generic listing for the Imperial Klans of America.