Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310001
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JULES LOH ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: PULASKI, TENN. LENGTH: Long
Call it a final, belated triumph of the Civil Rights Movement. Or call it simply a long-delayed funeral notice:
The Ku Klux Klan is dead.
Twice before over the past century the Klan has seemed to have vanished from the national scene, missing and presumed dead. Both times its hooded head rose from the cold ashes of burnt crosses and returned to burn and flog and kill again.
This time, owing to changes in the national fabric now viewed as irrevocable, a Ku Klux Klan obituary seems beyond speculation.
There remain in America, of course, various racist groups, nativists, self-styled militias, neo-Nazis, enough independent bands of zealots to keep the Anti-Defamation League and other watchdogs of bigotry as busy as ever.
But certainly the most widespread agent of terror, easily the most recognizable, surely the most enduring and, according to uncounted thousands of its victims, by far the most frightening organization ever hatched on American soil, the Ku Klux Klan, is no longer.
``Yes, we have work to do,'' says Stuart Lowengrub, chief of the ADL's Atlanta office, ``but not because of the Klan. The Klan today has nothing left, no influence at all, political or economic. What's left of the Klan, if anything, is no more than a nuisance.''
``The Klan's gone,'' Robert Shelton acknowledged, lunching at a hamburger joint in his hometown of Tuscaloosa, Ala. If he seemed wistful, his message was as emphatic as if chiseled on a tombstone.
Shelton is now 65 and somewhat frail after a triple bypass a year ago. In his robust days he was Imperial Wizard, top dog, of the nation's largest and most notorious Klan organization, the United Klans of America, Inc., with 40,000 dues-paying members.
``The Klan will never return,'' he said softly. ``Not with the robes and the rallies and the cross lightings and parades, everything that made the Klan the Klan, the mysticism, what we called Klankraft.''
His thumb caressed a large gold ring on his finger. A tear-shaped red blood drop on its stone gave positive identification. A Klan ring.
``I'm still a Klansman, always will be,'' he said. ``The Klan is my belief, my religion. But it won't work anymore. The Klan is gone. Forever.''
With Shelton's organization and about a dozen other Klan groups during the 1950s and '60s, America's kluxers totaled about 100,000, with units, or klaverns, in every state, Canada and overseas military posts. Most klaverns had ladies' auxiliaries. Anonymous hordes cheered silently from the sidelines. Shelton's newspaper, the Fiery Cross, reportedly had a mailing list of 2 million.
It was in the American South, though, in its turmoil of desegregation that the Ku Klux Klan flourished.
So did its honchos. Shelton traveled Southern highways and byways in Cadillacs. He swooped to cow-pasture rallies in a twin-engine airplane. He presided at ``klonvocations'' of Klan bigshots at his lakeside auditorium in Tuscaloosa that seated 2,000, slept 50 and fed guests from its own kitchen.
But it was not parades and flummery that ``made the Klan the Klan.'' It was guns and whips and dynamite. ``Klankraft,'' to others in Dixie, meant not mysticism but mayhem and murder.
It meant a black section in Birmingham where churches and homes exploded and burned with such regularity the neighborhood, Fountain Heights, became known as ``Dynamite Hill.'' Headline writers named the city ``Bombingham.''
It meant, in 1957, Edward Aaron, 34, black, abducted at random in Birmingham where Klansmen castrated him with a razor blade, poured kerosene in his wounds and passed among them his testicles in a paper cup.
It meant, in 1963, four black schoolgirls killed in their choir robes one Sunday morning when Klansmen blew up their Birmingham church.
It meant, in 1981, Michael Donald, 19, black, kidnapped at random by two Mobile Klansmen who beat him to death with a tree limb, slit his throat and hanged him.
It meant, of course, the well-publicized Klan murders in 1964 of the three Freedom Summer workers in Mississippi, two white, one black, buried beneath an earthen farm dam. And the equally notorious Klan murder of Viola Liuzzo, the white Detroit volunteer shot in her car in Alabama while transporting a black youth during the 1965 Selma-Montgomery voting rights march.
Not so well remembered, perhaps, are other routine ``klankraft'' activities across the South during almost any period during the 17 years between the Supreme Court decision and the murder of Michael Donald. Such as, say, the six weeks preceding the murder of Liuzzo:
That January, Klansmen torched two black churches in Jonesboro, La., and dynamited a black funeral parlor in New Bern, N.C. In February, Klansmen shotgunned two black youths from a passing car in Mobile, Ala. In March, Klansmen burned to the ground a black school in Indianola, Miss., and clubbed to death a white Boston clergyman in Selma, Ala.
That's far from a complete list. Better to assess routine Klan handiwork is another perhaps forgotten fact:
During the FBI's 40-day search of the Mississippi outback for the bodies of the three Freedom Summer workers, agents happened upon the bodies of two other Klan victims, both black, neither connected with the summer project. They had been missing even longer. Hadn't anyone noticed?
``When you called the law,'' says Randall Williams, ``the people who are supposed to protect you, they're the same people who are out to get you. Well, could life be more terrifying?''
Williams is an Alabama writer and publisher who knows the South and knows the Klan. He was director of the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery from 1979 through the mid-1980s, a period of resurgent Klan violence .
``The Klan,'' he says, ``could count on the silence if not the outright connivance of law enforcement. That is no longer so, not anywhere. That change is fundamental. Black officers are on police forces. The whole culture has changed. Black kids go to better schools. Black people vote. And law enforcement today, everywhere, is clearly against the Klan. Nobody can turn the clock back on that.''
Have attitudes changed?
``It may happen that people calling themselves kluxers show up here and there,'' Williams says. ``These are free lancers. They're isolated. They don't mean a thing. They have no organization. The back of the organized Klan is broken and it will never come back.
``If some people in law enforcement are not against racism in general they are at least against the expression of it through activities like the harassment of the Klan. If somebody burns a cross on my front lawn the cops will haul him to jail and he knows it. That's how it is now. It's impossible now for groups like the Klan to have what they used to have, which was power, influence, connections.''
Robert Shelton, the wizard-emeritus, nostalgically agrees.
``We delivered votes,'' he says. ``When John Patterson ran for governor we decided one Sunday night to put one of his streamers on every other telephone pole in the state of Alabama. By Monday morning it was done. What other organization could do that?''
That happened in 1958 when Patterson ran against George Wallace, then a liberal-leaning district judge. Wallace had a notion that identification with the Klan would work against his opponent. On campaign swings across Alabama he hauled a bed with him and spoke from the back of a truck.
``Hey John, where are you?'' Wallace would taunt, and then peek beneath the bedcovers. ``You down there under the sheets with the Klan?''
Wallace lost. He vowed never again to be ``outsegged'' and never was. And, with Klan support, he never again lost an election in Alabama.
The Ku Klux Klan was the creation of six Confederate veterans eight months after the end of the Civil War.
They met on Christmas Eve in 1865 in a one-story brick law office kitty-cornered from the courthouse in Pulaski. The building is still standing.
The war had left their homeland a smoking ruin, its economy in chaos, its society in turmoil. Time seemed out of joint as well. As a granddaughter of one of the six noted in a 1914 history: ``The negro considered freedom synonymous with equality.'' So there was that.
The six concocted a sort of fraternity. Their aim, they claimed, was to put a little scare into those presumptuous black folk, see what happens. No harm intended. They devised ghostlike costumes of hoods and bedsheets and composed a hierarchy of scary titles: Dragons, Cyclops, Titans and the like.
They named their circle of spooks for the Greek word for circle, kuklos, fiddled it into Ku-Klux and for poetic alliteration added Klan. Thus began a lasting affectation for K-words. Like Klankraft.
They devised ceremonies, passwords, codes, prayers - the Klan remained forever larded with religiosity - and wrote a fustian prescript which included, above all, a solemn oath of secrecy.
(A century later, Robert Shelton and other Klan wizards would go to prison rather than reveal membership lists. On the other hand, 6 percent of their oath-bound members were FBI informers. After that, Shelton required recruits not only to swear on a Bible but pass a lie detector test.)
However amusing the six fun-loving Klan founders may have found their antics, their targets did not. Within a year, reports filtered out of Tennessee of hooded nightriders breaking into cabins of blacks, confiscating guns.
The Klan virus spread into Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi. By 1869 a full-blown vigilante force rode throughout the South. White-robed Klansmen paraded brazenly. Terrified blacks slept in the woods - and stayed away from the polls. Within five years murders attributed to the Klan approached 1,000.
At length the U.S. Congress passed the 1871 anti-Klan law. This made violation of a citizen's civil rights under some conditions a federal offense. A century later, when all-white Southern juries in state courts would routinely acquit Klansmen, federal authorities dusted off the old law, tried them in federal courts and put them behind bars.
After 1871, then, the outlawed Ku Klux Klan faded away. It was not, it turned out, dead, just dormant, a poisonous baccilus awaiting another receptive body politic weakened by fear, frustration and anger.
It found it a half-century later and the plague spread to the entire nation.
It started with a 1915 best-seller, ``The Clansman,'' which romanticized the Reconstruction Klan folklore. The book in turn inspired a young Hollywood's first genuine spectacular, a cinematic triumph, ``The Birth of a Nation.'' The film stirred the promotional juices of a frock-coat preacher named William Simmons. On the night of the movie's Georgia premiere, Simmons disinterred the old Klan prescript, hired a bus, constructed a 16-foot cross and burned it in an elaborate ceremony atop Stone Mountain outside Atlanta.
America was ripe. Across the land a tide of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe with strange customs, languages and religions was threatening what Klan tracts called ``our traditional values.'' Among them were swarms of Catholics and Jews who now stood alongside blacks in the Klan's demonology.
Klan membership soared, this time more in the North and Midwest than the South.
While the Klan of the 1960s would attract about 100,000 members, the Klan of the 1920s counted that many in Pennsylvania alone. In Ohio, 400,000 signed up. Indiana had 300,000 Klansmen and, along with New Jersey, a klavern in every county. In Texas, 75,000 showed up for Klan Day at the state fair. From Maine to Oregon, Klan membership reached 4 million to 5 million.
In many places membership was seen as good business, like joining the Rotary Club. In others it was a ticket to public office, often almost a requisite.
The Klan of the 1920s helped elect 16 men to the U.S. Senate, 11 governors, no telling how many congressmen, mayors, sheriffs and city councilmen, and claimed credit for passage of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act which just about dried up the inflow of Mediterranean and Slavic people.
The Klan was so politically powerful in Arkansas it held its own primaries to decide which Klansmen to support in the regular ones. In Alabama, 18,000 of Birmingham's 32,000 registered voters in 1924 were Klansmen. They elected two city judges, a sheriff and an entire slate to the city commission.
Anti-Catholicism was virulent everywhere, its manifestations often bizarre.
In Indiana, a rumor that the pope was on his way to the small town of North Manchester drew a mob of 1,500 Klansmen to the train station to lynch him. In Oregon, the Klan captured the governorship and enough of the legislature to outlaw all parochial schools. An Alabaman, so distraught that his daughter had married a Puerto Rican, shot and killed the priest who performed the ceremony. A Klan jury found him not guilty.
For about a dozen years in America it seemed the whole country was on a regular Ku Klux Klan spree. In the nation's capital, 40,000 merry Klansmen paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in full regalia. In Chicago, 1,500 college students made Klan robes and hoods their prom costume. In New York, a brisk-selling piano roll was titled: ``Daddy Swiped the Last Clean Sheet.''
Almost as abruptly, the orgy was over.
By 1930, under the Depression's dour dictates, Klan membership fell to fewer than 30,000. ``No other American movement,'' wrote historian Wyn Craig Wade, ``has ever risen so high and fallen so low in such a short period of time.''
Once again, however, the Ku Klux Klan was not dead.
Its last and, we are now told, final resurrection followed the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation. No social earthquake since Reconstruction had so shaken the South, and there was nothing remotely jocular about the Klan's reappearance.
In the 10 years after the court decision the Justice Department blamed the Klan for at least a dozen killings, 70 bombings, 30 church burnings by arson, many others by ``causes unknown.''
When the Klan was in full howl in Dixie, beatings were so frequent most were unreported. Bombings were routine. While the mayor of Natchez, Miss., was out pleading with the Klan for peace, his house exploded. At Klan picnics in Louisiana a faction called the Silver Dollar Group kept sharp by dynamiting stumps while the women cooked catfish.
The Louisiana Klan took on a less-coarse look, even slick, when David Duke of New Orleans took over as wizard in the mid-'70s. Duke was a college graduate who targeted ``other intellectuals'' as recruits. He shunned hoods and sheets, wore a suit and tie and called himself national director rather than wizard. He was twice elected as a Republican to the state Legislature.
Willingly wooed by network talk shows, Duke came across as articulate, charming, persuasive on such issues as welfare, crime, affirmative action, illegal immigration, and staged an alien watch at the California border.
During the recent election campaign, Duke said in an interview, ``See, they're all saying the same things I was saying 20 years ago.''
Duke's Klan wound up in the hands of a former underling, Bill Wilkinson, who went broke settling Klanwatch lawsuits. Duke still has a long mailing list and his own creation, the National Association for the Advancement of White People. He plans to run for public office ``at the right time.''
Few were as close to the Klan's last renascence, start to finish, as Will Campbell of Mississippi. Campbell is a 70-year-old author and minister. As a white minister he took the hands of the black children and escorted them to school on the first day of integration in Little Rock. Ark. Also as a minister he visited Klan leaders in the penitentiary. He's rubbed close against both sides.
``Well, both were victims,'' he says. ``The Klan was a victim of fear, poverty, ignorance. They believed God was the original segregationist. They really believed that. There have been a lot of victims, a lot of changes.''
He discussed the recent conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the murder 31 years ago in Mississippi of the NAACP's Medgar Evers.
``I knew he would be convicted,'' Campbell says. ``Not because he was guilty, although I have no doubt he was. He was convicted for the same reason he was acquitted twice back then: because that was the result society wanted. There's a sadness in that, too.''
A lot of changes. Here in Pulaski, birthplace of the original Klan, some are noteworthy.
After the Klan was reborn on Stone Mountain, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, not to be overlooked, proudly installed a 2-foot-square bronze memorial plaque in Pulaski next to the front door of the place of its original birth, officially designated as a historic site.
A few years ago a new owner of the building quietly, without announcement, unbolted and reversed the plaque so it faces the wall. That's one change.
Still, for old times' sake, remnant diehard members of what's left of the Klan come to Pulaski once a year for a march around the square. Last year every storekeeper on the square closed, shut down the town in silent protest. That's another.
One more:
Last January Pulaski started its own annual observance. It was held again Jan. 21, Martin Luther King Day. The direction of the march is reversed.
by CNB