During the spring of 1959, a number of posters appeared on trees and utility poles in certain sections of Little Rock and at least eight other Arkansas towns, and along major highways in southeast and southwest parts of the state: “Be a Real Citizen!” “Pay Your Poll Tax,” “Join the U. S. Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Incorporated (a chartered organization).” Some of these signs gave a Little Rock post-office box number as the sole address; others were traced to a real estate salesman in Texas.
When word of the Klan’s reappearance, after an absence from Arkansas for a quarter of a century, reached Governor Faubus, he said he was against secret organizations, but promptly shifted the burden of responsibility from local shoulders. “If it is true that the Klan is reorganizing, then it’s a direct result of the improper use of Federal power.”
By the summer of 1959 there were three Klans in Arkansas: the “U. S. Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” headed by a barber named A. C. Hightower; the “Association of Arkansas Klans,” whose posters said it stood for white supremacy, segregation, protection of pure womanhood and the Christian religion; and the “Original Ku Klux Klan,” led by a resident of Dallas, Texas. Each group claimed that the other two were mere offshoots of the one “true” organization.
Hightower, Grand Dragon of the best known group, said his “members are strictly law-abiding citizens. The Klan will not be involved in any violence whatever.” On the dark, damp evening of Labor Day 1959, however, following a relatively peaceful reopening of Little Rock’s schools, now integrated, the quiet of the city was shattered by three dynamite explosions. They were aimed at three public officials. Within seventeen hours, J. D. Sims, a truck driver, was arrested. Police said he was a member of the KKK.
This sequence of events was not unique to Little Rock. Elsewhere in the South since 1954, the Klan has geared its slightly renovated hood and sheet amidst protestations of non-violence, only to have assaults and explosions erupt in its wake.
“The Ku Klux Klan is a dying body,” a Southern social scientist said not long ago. “But note that I said dying and not dead. There’s an important difference. A mad dog may be meanest just before it dies.”
This would seem to be a fairly accurate summary of the present state of the Ku Klux Klan, that illegitimate offspring of boredom and war’s dislocations, conceived in ignorance and isolation and nourished on fear. We live in a time when economic boycott and character assassination and other penalties of such sophisticated nature render the tar and feather frontier methods of the Klan unstylish. And yet, with the South caught in the throes of an emotional experience more intense than any similar upheaval since the Civil War, it was probably inevitable that such anachronisms as the Klan should be revived.
Actually, there have been two Klans in the history of the United States. The first flourished following the Civil War, when Reconstruction had dispossessed the white leaders of the South. The second was organized during the years of social upheaval following World War I and became a national, rather than merely a regional, movement.
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In the long bleak December of 1865, a half-dozen young men in the village of Pulaski, Tennessee, gathered in the ruins of a deserted mansion on the edge of town, and formed a new club for entertainment and adventure. With a true Southern affinity for rhetoric, they turned to the Greek for their group’s title—“Kuklos” meaning circle—and with a flair for drama they swore each other to secrecy concerning their rites and their nocturnal rides through the countryside.
Winter wore on, spring and summer passed, rumors of lights and activities in the deserted house and tales of mysterious horsemen filtered through the rural back country. Stories of ghosts of Confederate dead became more frequent, and fear began to accompany any mention of the secret band. Those who had looked on the club as a prank grew increasingly aware of its possibilities as a weapon for control of the groping, uneducated freedmen. Other clubs, called Dens, were formed, and the KKK began its transformation from a social club to a vigilante band.
By the spring of 1867 there were enough Dens of the Klan in Tennessee and other Southern states to call a secret meeting of delegates in Nashville, in which the KKK elected as its first leader the immensely popular cavalryman, General Nathan Bedford Forrest. The Wizard of the Saddle became the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
The hierarchy of the Klan—the Dragons, the Furies, the Goblins, and Night-Hawks—were planters and politicians and businessmen who had been temporarily toppled from leadership by the combined power of the Negro Unions and the Loyal Leagues of Reconstruction. The rank and file of the Klan, called Ghouls, were the lower-income whites who had always been in keenest and closest competition with the Negroes. Now they had found their secret weapon—behind the anonymity of hoods and robes; with the tacit approval of the majority of their communities, they rode the highways and lonely country lanes, through cities and county seats, intimidating at first by suggestion, then terrorizing by open violence. They brought the Negro vote under their control, expelled carpetbaggers, and finally in effect nullified the laws of Congress.
General Forrest, in 1868, claimed the Klan had more than half a million members throughout the South, that it was “a protective, political, military organization.” The Klan’s threat without example was like war without ammunition, however, and so the game of pretending to be Confederate ghosts soon gave way to leather and hemp and kerosene. In disgust and despair at the degradation of its professed ideals, General Forrest formally disbanded the Klan about 1869. Unfortunately, he and his fellows had created a force they could neither control nor recall. Cursed with secrecy and lawlessness and masked in its beginnings with all the romance of the Crusades, there were too few Southerners who could see the Klan as clearly as the North Carolina judge who wrote that at best it “is committing one crime to prevent or punish another.” In 1871—72, Congress passed anti-Klan legislation which halted some of the terrorism and brought it into public disrepute.
Although its growth was stunted, its roots remained deep and green, however, as the birth of the second Ku Klux Klan demonstrated in 1915. Something of the difference in spirit between the two Klans may be got by scanning their literature. During the 1860’s their calls to meeting included such a verse as this:
Thrice hath the lone owl hooted,
And thrice the panther cried;
And swifter through the darkness,
The Pale Brigade shall ride.
No trumpet sounds its coming,
And no drum-beat stirs the air;
But noiseless in their vengeance,
They wreak it everywhere.
The Klan of 1915 and later vintage circulated such jingles as:
I’d rather be a Klansman robed in pure
white
Than a Catholic priest black as night,
Loyal to the United States my home,
Rather than the dago Pope in Rome.
The Klan revived on Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, Georgia, in 1915, had widened its embrace to include not only all-white supremacists but anti-Catholics and anti-Semites as well. It had strong overtones of of the old pre-Civil War Know-Nothing movement, with its rabid suspicion and denunciation of all “alien influences.” Its new mentor was a former revivalist and traveling salesman, one William J. Simmons, who, along with an able promoter named Clarke, realized the commercial possibilities of such a ready-made organization. While its attack in the South centered on the rising ambitions of the Negroes, in other parts of the nation the Klan kindled resentments against Jews, Catholics, and immigrant groups.
By 1921 an investigation revealed a national membership of some one hundred thousand. The Chief of Staff, or Imperial Kleagle, to the Imperial Wizard, asserted that the Klan was actively operating in forty-five states and had a King Kleagle or state manager in forty-one states. The nation was divided into nine Domains with a Grand Goblin directing activities in each group. The Imperial Wizard himself denied any prejudice on the part of the Klan. “We are not anti-Jewish,” he told one reporter. “Any Jew who can subscribe to the tenets of the Christian religion can get in.”
Politically, Klan influence grew by leaps and bounds. It was effective in national and state elections of 1922 and 1924, and in Indiana the Kluxers took control of the Republican party to hand-pick the governor. Corruption in the upper echelons and violence in the lower soon became so blatant, however, that public revulsion once more caused the Klan to fade.
Following World War II, with its new crop of tensions and rumors, an effort to revive the Klan began with another ceremony at Stone Mountain. This time an estimated five thousand hooded Klansmen initiated one thousand new members into their brotherhood, announced that if an attempt was made to practice President Truman’s civil rights program “blood will run in the streets,” and pinned their hopes on the Dixiecrat party. As the Dixiecrats faded and the fury of the Klan began to vent itself with increasing frequency on white persons rather than Negroes, some of its Dragons were jailed, state anti-masking laws were passed, and the Klan was put on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations.
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Although the Klan seemed by 1954 to be thoroughly discredited and discouraged, it was inevitable that the Supreme Court s school desegregation decision of that year would provide it with new fuel for its fires. In the years since, burning crosses have lit up many a lawn from Richmond to Houston, from the Gulf Coast to the Blue Ridge.
Nineteen fifty-six especially saw a renewed outburst of Klan activity in many states. In North Alabama, Asa (“Ace”) Carter headed a group he called the “Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy.” One of the most violent of the groups, it involved blood-rite initiations, the carrying of weapons, and vicious diatribes against Jews and Catholics as well as Negroes, especially Negro entertainers. Georgia, Florida, Texas, North and South Carolina, and even Louisiana, which had been relatively free of Klan activity for over twenty-five years, saw new Klaverns formed under a variety of names, with initiation fees ranging from three to ten dollars. But when a fellow klansman asked Ace Carter what was happening to all the initiation money and a free-for-all fight and shooting ensued, with Carter’s subsequent arrest, and when it was discovered that one of the Grand Dragons had married a teenage girl some thirty years his junior, even the Klan’s public became fed up.
It seems unlikely that any organization as crude in its language and brutal in its actions as the Klan can flourish long in our present milieu. Even the most reactionary newspapers have opposed the rebirth of the KKK. When it reappeared in Virginia after an absence of many years, the Richmond Times-Dispatch said, “Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders of Virginia have issued a statement elsewhere in today’s paper calling on religiously motivated citizens and police officers to be on the alert for any manifestations on Virginia soil of ‘the Klan’s terrorist tactics and its appeals to the evil passions of hatred and bigotry.’ The statement is appropriate and timely, To repeat, Virginia doesn’t want to be saved by these horn-swogglers and fervent seekers after boodle.” In Alabama, when crosses were burned near two churches, the Gadsden Times stated, “They are acts which should be outlawed, vigorously opposed by decent, law-abiding citizens. What right can the KKK possibly claim to flaunt itself before the Church? It does indeed burn the Cross.” In Chattanooga, the extreme right-wing and segregationist News-Free Press said that the KKK “is a skeleton in the South’s closet, a shame to be apologized for, a source of embarrassment, and of no benefit to the South. If the South relies upon bedsheets and burning crosses, if misguided individuals seek recourse through whip and gun, if violence becomes an accepted tool, then the South not only will lose in its efforts to maintain its traditions, but will deserve the defeat.”
The fact that the Klan receives a poor press is subordinate to a more fundamental fact: it is shunned like the plague, at least for all public purposes, by members of those really active segregation groups that have sprung up in most parts of the South since 1954. In certain places there was some intermingling with the Klan during the early days of the White Citizens’ Councils—now called just Citizens’ Councils, not indeed because they have begun to include members of other colors, but in keeping with their attempt to attract adherents of extreme right-wing “causes” other than racial segregation and thereby build a broader base for their propaganda and activities. The Councils realized the danger of weakening their assult against integration by attacking religious minorities or comporting themselves in such a way as to alienate the respectable classes of the community. Several months ago a newspaper man in South Carolina warned the Citizens’ Councils of his state to be on the alert against KKK infiltration: “The strength and influence of Councils, not only in South Carolina but throughout the South, is based fundamentally on the acceptance accorded them by the substantial elements of the communities in which they are active.” He pointed out that subversion from within, by Klansmen, could destroy the councils as surely as attacks from without.
The Klan’s unsavory reputation for violence provided the Councils an opportunity to denounce the sheet-and-dagger spookery of the Klan’s defiance and by contrast make their own grey-flannel-suited defiance of the Supreme Court appear calm and reasonable. In the effort (which has achieved some success) to establish themselves in the public mind as an organization representing Southern respectability and moderation, it was necessary for the Councils to discover extremists to either side of them on the desegregation issue. So the Councils said, “We do not believe in the KKK on one hand, nor in the NAACP on the other.” (In fact, some of the laws invoked by several Southern states in an effort to destroy the NAACP were laws originally adopted to get rid of the old Ku Klux Klan.) Arkansas Attorney General Bruce Bennett said he classified the KKK “with the NAACP as a foreign organization with unlawful designs on the peace and order of our state.” The irony of this, of course, lies precisely in the fact that the NAACP’s most powerful weapon has been the law, through which it has won its sanctions and victories.
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The Citizens’ Councils showed the more ambitious and sophisticated members of the Klan the need for a face-lifting. Indeed, “respectability” seems to have become the new watchword of some of the Klan leaders. Addressing a crowd of some one thousand people near Bradenton, Florida, in August 1958, Imperial Wizard (by day a paint sprayer) Eldon L. Edwards of College Park, Georgia, of the U. S. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, said his group “is not a lynching or whipping organization but a white man’s Christian, benevolent, fraternal order.” At a meeting of the Florida Klan in August 1959, a Baptist preacher from Dallas, Texas, said, “It was circumstances such as exist today that led to the times when klansmen marched, thousands strong, through Florida cities, and those times will be repeated before long.” He hastened to add that the present strategy was to fight through votes. The slogan was “ballots not bullets.”
The Klan made other gestures toward respectability. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, on May 3, 1957, a newspaper ran this headline on its sport page, “Hourigan’s Homer Beats Woolens.” The home run was scored by a team new to the area’s fast-growing commercial league: the Knights. But behind the new softball uniforms of the Knights swished the old robes of the local Ku Klux Klan. Handbills distributed in the city and vicinity soon set forth the motive behind the Klan’s sponsorship of a team—a desire to emphasize the Klan’s “recreation side” and demonstrate their interest in “civic good.”
The Chattanooga Times did not allow the Klan to succeed in its efforts. “We know Chattanooga does not wish to be represented in the state and Southern softball championship tournaments by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. We suspect that the entire Chattanooga softball program will be damaged by this retreat from true sportsmanship.”
A week later the newspaper posed this blunt question: “Are the great national corporations of Du Pont and Combustion Engineering; Peerless Woolen Mills, part of the huge Burlington Mills; the Chattanooga Gas Company and the Ridgedale Merchants prepared to go on with their teams playing ball with the Ku Klux Klan? We do not believe so.” Three days later, Du Pont, Combustion Engineering, and Peerless Woolen Mills withdrew their teams and the Chattanooga Commercial AA Softball League was dissolved. This incident illustrates two basic facts about the present KKK: first, its malignant energy, though flagging in some places and dissipated in others, has far from disappeared; second, being essentially a rural folkway of physical violence, the Klan’s survival depends on the extent to which it can conceal its barbarism behind the mask of sober citizenship.
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The present status of the Klan is low indeed. Harold Fleming, executive director of the Southern Regional Council, a biracial research organization with headquarters in Atlanta, has said, “It is perhaps a measure of southern progress that the mummery and frontier methods of the Ku Klux Klan are no longer respectable. Ineptly led, unmasked by state laws, and inhibited by the unfriendly attentions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it is a ‘fringe’ group in the full meaning of the term.”
However, as another young Southerner put it, “The Citizens’ Councils are the watchdogs of segregation in the Deep South—but when the going gets rough and they need bulldogs, with that instinct for the jugular, the Klan will be there to step in.”
In some places the Klan has already stepped in. During their ugly resurgence in 1956 and 1957, there were publicized individual atrocities: in South Carolina, for instance, the shooting of a white man who lived with a Negro woman; the attack On a respected high school band leader who was waylaid and brutally beaten, apparently the victim of a case of mistaken identity or simply random sadism. In yet another part of the state, a fifty-eight-year-old Negro man caring for the seven children of a white neighbor sharecropper who was sick, was chained and beaten with blackjacks and sticks. The Klan had decided to punish the Negro because he was “mixing with white folks.” In Alabama a feeble-minded black man was picked up off the street and emasculated.
The Klan protests that all these acts cannot be blamed on them, but Mayor Henry Savage, Jr., of Camden, South Carolina, said after his town’s band leader was beaten and hospitalized, “Whether it was the Klan or not, when they spread out a sheet they invited thugs to come under it and the responsibility is theirs.”
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Along with public revulsion at the Klan’s desecration of houses of worship and destruction of buildings of learning, there have been two other factors prominent in the Klan’s present decline. The first is factionalism among the various groups. The Charlotte Observer pointed out some months ago that so many different Klan groups were operating in South Carolina that “it is impossible to tell the Grand Dragons, Wizards, and Kleagles apart without a program.” A Florida KKK official said there are so many different Klans in his state that the old counter-signs and passwords won’t work any more. “We have too many chiefs and not enough Indians to stage a war dance.” Such anarchy leads inevitably to excesses and ridiculous incidents like the one that took place at Maxton, North Carolina, in January 1958, when a group of whooping, wild-firing Lumbee Indians forced a white-robed gathering to scatter in unceremonious haste.
A second major factor in the Klan’s present decline is the presence of the new Negro in the South. Those klansmen who see all Negroes in the old fearful, superstitious stereotypes, who can be frightened by a bed-sheet and a burning cross, are as out of date today as a mule on a Delta cotton plantation. When an imported handful of klansmen rode through the Negro section of Clinton, Tennessee, during its time of turmoil with John Kasper, they were laughed off their route and the demonstration was cut short. In Florida, during one well publicized Klan meeting, Negroes gathered at a public meeting where their minister instructed them as Christians to love everybody. Then he prayed, “Get the Holy Ghost to visit the Klan out there tonight.”
In only one Southern state is the Klan in any sort of flourishing condition today. Alabama has seen a flagrant revival of KKK activities. There has been an increase in parades of cars, sometimes decorated with lighted crosses, carrying robed klansmen through various towns. Highway signs of welcome by the Klan have appeared alongside other civic signs on the outskirts of several cities. Its increasing influence is noted in such instances as that in Tuscaloosa when the administrator of the Hale Memorial Hospital and two of his staff members resigned their positions after receiving numerous threats from the KKK. The Klan objected to white nurses serving Negro patients in the tuberculosis hospital.
Law enforcement officials have admitted that at least a dozen floggings of Negroes in rural western Alabama have taken place, and there has been alarm in some areas over the possibility of growing Klan power in community and even state government. It is well known that the Grand Dragon of the KKK in Alabama, Robert Shelton of Tuscaloosa, worked in 1958 for the election of the present Governor, John Patterson; Governor Patterson has never repudiated his support. In September, when the Alabama legislature seemed in a mood to advance more help to the mentally ill in the state, Governor Patterson opposed the proposed added tax on liquor and beer. Grand Dragon Shelton said he and the Klan strongly oppose any help for the mentally ill so long as the present setup exists.
“I am against giving any more money to the insane hospitals or to the University of Alabama Medical College, which is the rottenest place in Alabama,” Shelton said. “I am not opposed to helping the Alabama folks who are mentally ill, but I want the program to be completely separate from the National Mental Health Association, which has been linked with the Communists. As long they have those alien psychiatrists at the mental hospitals and at the University Medical College, as long as they have those doctors who talk in broken English with an alien accent, then I do not favor giving them any more money at all.” When Governor Patterson last summer endorsed Senator John F. Kennedy as his personal candidate for President, he was visited by a thirty-two-man delegation headed by the Imperial Kladd of Prattville, Alabama. Two of the questions submitted to the Governor were: “Did it ever occur to you that you are being used as a guinea pig by the Communist-Jewish integrators to sample the political sentiment of the South for a most distinguished candidate, John Kennedy?” and “How much money will the Jewish firm of the arch integrationist and avowed enemy of the South, Herbert Lehman, make out of the twenty million dollars (in road bonds bought by Lehman Brothers) you arranged for Lehman Brothers to undertake?”
The growing arrogance of the Alabama Klan was recently displayed and challenged when a young restaurant owner in Montgomery shot and killed an alleged member of the group after the Klan had repeatedly warned him to fire the Negro waiters he employed at his restaurant. The Klan said that an establishment which fired white waitresses to hire Negro men should not display the Confederate flag. “I’ve been living in Montgomery all my life,” the restaurant owner said, “and if any group of Klansmen have got guts enough to come in my place and remove the Confederate flags, they are welcome to try it.”
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Although Alabama is the only state with any really significant Klan organization at the moment, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, a few sections of Texas, part of piedmont North Carolina, and the area in Tennessee centered around Chattanooga (near the Georgia border), have all seen sporadic outbursts of activity. A while back, five KKK members who had plotted to bomb a Negro elementary school in Charlotte, North Carolina, were arrested. Dr. Leon H. Feldman, chairman of the North Carolina advisory board of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, pointed out that this was the third bombing attempt in as many months in that area. The two previous efforts had centered on Jewish temples. Then he said, “The Klan has shown a growing tendency of violence recently. The problem it poses does not stem from numbers of widespread public acceptance. It lies in its capacity to cause the lighting of a fuse. The existence of a known group of troublemakers operating around the state presents a menacing situation to which public officials, mass communication media, and the community must give thought.”
Dr. Feldman is correct in saying that the present power of the Klan does not lie in numbers. It is doubtful if its size has ever been its most important feature. The group has been traditionally reluctant to reveal the extent of its membership and there is better reason than ever for its present reticence. Widespread public acceptance of the Klan simply does not exist and hasn’t for a number of years. What does exist, in all parts of the South, is fear of “trouble,” which may include anything from a snub at the Junior League Ball to a bombed school building. To have a cross burned at one’s front door is embarrassing; to be bombarded with anonymous phone calls or hate-sheets is wearisome; to be a guinea-pig community in a strong segregation area may be a costly experience.
This is the Klan’s role in the South today: as a hard core of haters it casts the shadow of its small but very real potential for violence over any affirmative steps in the direction of desegregation. Where the Klan does not act overtly for negative ends, it can deter others from carrying out positive programs. As D. J. Brittain, Jr., principal of the Clinton High School in the tumultuous first year of its desegregation, noted during his ordeal: “It doesn’t take many people to make a lot of trouble.”
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