Burden

by Courtney Hargrave

—

  Seven years later, in October 1986, Rev. Kennedy was in the middle of his Wednesday-night Bible study when he noticed something strange. Midweek meetings were usually small gatherings, and with the Laurens County Fair in town that week he hadn’t expected a particularly large turnout. Midway through his study, however—a discussion of slavery as metaphor in the book of Galatians—he looked up and realized he was suddenly preaching to a heck of a lot of people. “I thought, ‘Wow! Look at all these people coming in to Bible study. That’s really great.’ ” Feeling pleased with himself, he continued on with the lesson, but when dozens more people continued to stream in the door, nodding to one another and quietly finding seats near the back of the room, he knew something was definitely up. None of the church’s events had ever approached anything close to standing room only.

  “You know,” he said to the crowd, cracking a smile, “I’m beginning to think you’re not all here just for Bible study. What can I do for you?”

  After a bit of prodding, one of the newcomers stepped forward. “We got some drug problems here, Rev, and we’re worried about our community.” The man went on to describe the proliferation of crack houses and front businesses in town, interrupted every so often by murmurs and shouts of “Amen” and “That’s right!”

  David knew the man was right. The Laurens he and his wife had come home to was not in great shape. As far back as the early 1970s, rural towns across South Carolina had reported sharp upticks in crime, much of it drug-related. By the mid-1980s, things had gone from bad to worse. In the neighboring town of Abbeville, cops had just completed their first-ever large-scale drug bust, serving forty-seven warrants for possession and distribution of marijuana and cocaine. About thirty miles to the west, rumors were flying that the Anderson County sheriff himself had been arrested on trafficking charges (a claim the sheriff vehemently denied, going so far as to offer a $1,000 reward for information regarding the source of the rumors). And in Laurens thirteen months prior, cops had made one of the biggest busts in the history of the state: twelve thousand pounds of marijuana, with a value estimated at $5 million, had been raided from a rural farm just fifteen miles south of the square. By September 1985, the State Law Enforcement Division’s narcotics units had seized more than twice as many marijuana plants (forty-four thousand) as the previous year’s total.

  After returning to South Carolina in the late 1970s, Kennedy had bounced from rural church to rural church, each one seemingly poorer than the next. (A small congregation in Abbeville, he was dismayed to discover, had paid its previous pastor little more than $100 a week.) In the fall of 1984, he founded his own church, New Beginning Missionary Baptist, but to support his family he took whatever paying job he could find: working at Walmart for a while, then at various check-cashing companies. More recently, he’d become a corrections officer at Dutchman Correctional Institution, a brand-new 528-bed minimum-security facility in nearby Cross Anchor. The prison population in the state—and across the country—was exploding; President Reagan had just signed the Anti–Drug Abuse Act, establishing lengthy mandatory minimums for drug-related offenses. But the longer Rev. Kennedy worked in the jails, the more convinced he became that cops were too focused on small-time dealers and that many of the arrests were racially motivated.

  It wasn’t a secret why so many folks from the community had shown up at his doorstep. Despite his time away at college and the three years spent in Nashville, everyone still knew Kennedy as a rabble-rouser, the kid who’d challenged his principal and organized walkouts during the days of integration. So rather than fight against his reputation, Kennedy decided to put it to work. At Sunday services, in City Council meetings—any place he could be assured an audience—he started speaking out about rising crime and local drug use, while insisting that black men were disproportionately targeted and arrested. As he had anticipated, this generated immediate pushback. Local reporters pointed out that of the forty-four drug-related arrests in Laurens in 1985, twenty-three of those arrested were white and twenty-one were black, and the mayor of Laurens, Bob Dominick, personally attended a meeting at New Beginning in order to refute the claim. But Kennedy had a point. In addition to draconian mandatory minimums, Reagan’s Anti-Drug Act had introduced the 100:1 crack-to-powder disparity. (Under new laws, possession of five grams of crack cocaine, a cheaper variant favored by impoverished African Americans, would carry the same sentence as five hundred grams of powder cocaine.) It would take decades for policy experts to acknowledge how crippling such laws were to the black community, and for lawmakers to reduce the disparity by passing the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act.

  In November, less than a month after the impromptu meeting at his church, Kennedy decided to ramp up the pressure. At a community meeting, he stood up and publicly accused law enforcement officers of taking payoffs—another allegation he’d caught wind of—though he refused to name any names. (Sheriff Billy Robertson was reportedly so incensed that he almost stormed out of the meeting.) Then, in December, he started drumming up publicity for a newer, bigger event: a protest march, which would convene at the courthouse steps and snake right through the center of town.

  Rev. Kennedy proved adept at courting the press. No fewer than three newspapers covered his plans, and though January 17 dawned dreary and bitter cold, he was ultimately pleased by the turnout: nearly a hundred people had gathered for the two-mile walk along West Main to the junior high school, including state senator Theo Mitchell and the Eighth Circuit Court solicitor Townes Jones. Even the mayor showed up. (The sheriff, not surprisingly, was a no-show.) At the rally afterward, Kennedy couldn’t help but feel pleased: this was the kind of street-level ministry he’d once dreamed about, walking among his parishioners rather than hiding behind the pulpit. “I think people felt more secure just by meeting,” he told reporters. “The people in the black community are filled with stories that you wouldn’t believe. They just don’t have the courage to come forth.”

  By the fall of 1988, Kennedy’s focus had shifted from drug abuse awareness to exposing the practices of local law enforcement, in particular after the arrest of a well-known African American radio announcer. William Robertson—his on-air name was Kevin St. John—had been taken into custody after officers mistook him for a suspect in a knifing incident. When rumors began swirling that Robertson had been cuffed, threatened, and perhaps even physically assaulted, Rev. Kennedy promptly organized a series of protests. He also intensified his rhetoric, pledging to “turn the city upside down” and calling for a boycott of downtown businesses.

  Over the coming months, each of Kennedy’s marches and protests focused on broader and broader themes: police brutality, unfair policing of the black community, unfair hiring practices. And yet racial tensions in Laurens seemingly got worse—which is to say more visible. The local NAACP filed a lawsuit against the Laurens Commission of Public Works, seeking equal representation on its all-white board. A Laurens County parent, meanwhile, sued the school board for $10 million in punitive damages, alleging racial harassment and discrimination. “The catalyst for the entire situation was a day during Black History Month when [my son] asked to hear about things black people had done to make America great,” she explained to the Greenville News. “His teacher told him they were already talking about it—slavery.”

  That merited a news conference from the courthouse steps. “We want to see justice done!” Kennedy thundered. “If we have to, we will encourage our children to boycott classes.”

  The ferocity of his message drew the ire of everyone from law enforcement officers to school officials, many of whom wondered if the outspoken reverend had finally gone too far. But then came the hanging.

  In the wee hours of the morning on April 1, 1990, Edward James Cook—“Bobo” to his friends and family—was pulled over and arrested on a drunk driving charge. He was taken to the city jail and served breakfast in his cell at 6:45 a.m. Less than an hour and a half later, at 8:10,
a prison guard found Cook with one end of a shirt wrapped around his neck, the other tied to an upper bunk. The coroner ruled Cook’s death a suicide, and tensions in Laurens exploded.

  One week after Cook’s death, five hundred people crowded into the courthouse square, demanding answers. It was an enormous turnout for such a tiny town. The boy’s own father made it clear to reporters that he didn’t believe his son had killed himself. For more than an hour, Rev. Kennedy led protesters in songs and chants and cheers for equality. Despite the public outcry amid months of racial unrest, however, the Laurens City Police accepted no responsibility and offered no apology. After all, the autopsy had confirmed that Cook died by hanging, and the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) maintained that there was no evidence of foul play. So Rev. Kennedy did the only thing he could do: he protested again. Three times in less than three months. In response, the mayor complained to a local newspaper that Kennedy and his minority rights group—now going by the name Project Awakening—got “too upset about small issues.”

  “A black man died and this racist mayor calls it a small incident!” Kennedy shouted at his next demonstration.

  It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Rev. Kennedy’s relationship with the mayor went bad. Maybe it was when he’d called for a boycott of downtown businesses—Bob Dominick was himself a downtown business owner—or maybe the mayor’s patience had just been tested one too many times. But when Dominick approached Kennedy’s microphone and attempted to address the crowd, only to be drowned out by jeers and boos, something definitely changed. Now it was personal.

  The protest had taken place on a Monday. The next day, Mayor Dominick stood before members of the City Council and prodded them to go on the record with their support for local law enforcement. “We’ve got some joker standing up on the courthouse steps making ugly remarks about us!” he said. “Sitting back making no comment is giving credit to what he is saying. We’ve got to stop putting our heads between our knees and acting like he isn’t here.” The approach, if melodramatic, appeared at least somewhat successful. Councilman Johnnie Bolt went so far as to say he was “completely impressed” with how things had been handled in the wake of Cook’s death.

  On Friday morning, however, Dominick decided that he’d like to have a word with the “joker” himself. Just before nine, he pulled into a strip mall parking lot north of the square—by then, Rev. Kennedy had resigned his position at Dutchman and was working at Quick Credit, a payday loan company—and confronted the reverend about a past-due community development loan. It was an odd piece of business for a town mayor, and particularly odd timing, since Kennedy had taken out the loan back in 1983. Kennedy immediately accused Dominick of racism, and the confrontation quickly turned violent. “He was right in my face—our noses were touching,” Dominick later told reporters. According to witnesses, there was a fair amount of shoving and shouting and spitting on both sides. At some point, the mayor asked one of Kennedy’s coworkers to call the police, but he left before the cops arrived. Rev. Kennedy, on the other hand, was taken into custody on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

  As the dispute played out in the press and public opinion started to turn against the mayor, officers of the municipal court decided the best course of action would be to drop all charges. “We knew there would be racial overtones the city could do without,” city prosecutor Wyatt Saunders admitted to the Greenville News. Rev. Kennedy, however, was not about to sweep the incident under the rug. Instead, he opted for a jury trial.

  “There was a black poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar,” he said, reflecting on the incident and his legacy in Laurens. “And he wrote: ‘We wear the mask that grins and lies / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.’ In other words, we have a face for white people and a face for black folk. But I refuse to wear a face. I’m just me all the time. And that disturbs a lot of people, especially black people. We were raised never to challenge anybody white. We were just supposed to pray and let God handle it. But I can’t serve that kind of God.”

  two

  A KERNEL OF TRUTH

  A full ten years before Rev. Kennedy began questioning the suspicious circumstances of Bobo Cook’s death, another South Carolina man was busy protesting a jail cell suicide. The cases themselves had striking similarities, but the men behind the protests had altogether different purposes. The year was 1980, and in the small town of Williamston, thirty-five miles northwest of Laurens, John Howard—an imperial officer of the Federated Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—was preparing to address a crowd of reporters outside the home of twenty-year-old Bobby Scroggs.

  Like Cook, Scroggs had been arrested in early April on alcohol-related charges, in this case public intoxication and disorderly conduct. Like Cook, Scroggs had been found hanging by a shirt in his cell mere hours after he was taken into custody. And like Cook’s death, the Scroggs suicide had triggered an immediate public outcry. But unlike the Cook case, there were no apparent racial implications—Scroggs was white, as were the arresting officer and the bulk of the local police force. Once the Klan got involved, however, tensions in Williamston rapidly escalated.

  By Monday, April 7—two days after the boy’s death—two large wooden crosses had been set ablaze on the outskirts of town. On Tuesday, a rowdy group of protesters gathered outside the Williamston Police Department, set fire to a pile of boxes and tires in the parking lot, and lobbed bottles and rocks at the firemen who arrived to put out the flames. The following Saturday, 150 people showed up at a Klan rally, where it was announced that a “Klan Bureau of Investigation,” or KBI, would launch an official inquiry into the incident. Three more rallies took place over the next three weeks, leaving Williamston awash in racist propaganda and membership applications. Yet when it came time to reveal the findings of its “investigation,” it appeared the KBI hadn’t managed to uncover much of anything at all.

  Dressed in a satin hood and robe, John Howard hemmed and hawed and evaded questions from the very reporters he’d asked to assemble on the boy’s front lawn. He revealed no evidence, but hinted coyly that Scroggs might have been the victim of foul play, all before ending the press conference with a threat: if law enforcement failed to discover the “truth,” he said, the Klan would return to reveal “all of the truth, all of the facts” gleaned during its probe.

  Howard was a small man, no more than five foot six or five foot seven, with a round face and a flesh-colored mole on his forehead, right between his eyes. Friends and acolytes might describe him as calm, mild-mannered, even shy. But in front of a crowd, Howard came alive. Prone to long monologues about the origins of the Klan and the history of the South, he frequently—and effortlessly—whipped himself into a red-faced fervor. In a voice dripping with Carolina twang, he could talk a blue streak when his audience was receptive, thundering on about the dangers of “race mixing” and “mongrelization,” but he was savvy enough to change tack if he sensed that a listener had his doubts.

  Still, the Scroggs suicide was an odd cause célèbre for a white supremacist organization. In fact, most of the cops in Williamston viewed the Klan’s sudden involvement as nothing more than an elaborate recruiting drive, a cheap play for money and publicity. And it wouldn’t be the last time that Howard and his associates were accused of exploiting tragedy and ginning up intrigue for nothing more than their own personal gain.

  * * *

  —

  John Howard was born in Spartanburg in 1946 and raised in Laurens. He was the youngest of six children, just fifteen when his father, John Senior, died at the age of sixty-eight after a long illness. By eighteen he had married his first wife and fathered the first of three children. It should have been a happy time, but the young Howard was increasingly unsettled by the changes taking place in the world around him—by the sit-ins and bus boycotts, by the riots in Detroit and New York and Los Angeles, all of which played out nightly on his television. Years later, he wo
uld explain to the Clinton Chronicle that the civil unrest had “scared” him. But in interviews with journalist Patsy Sims, author of the 1978 book The Klan, he portrayed himself as having been a little more proactive: “I reached out and started searchin for an organization that could do somethin about the situation,” he said.

  The “situation” to which Howard referred was the sweeping social change at the heart of the civil rights movement. And the organization he found was the Ku Klux Klan. In the mid-1960s, the largest group operating in the South—boasting anywhere from 25,000 to 35,000 members—was the United Klans of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc. (UKA), headquartered in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and led by a young salesman named Robert Shelton.

  Shelton had joined a decade earlier, risen quickly through the ranks, and in just four short years as Imperial Wizard—or national leader—transformed the fledgling UKA into the largest white supremacist organization in the country, and also one of the deadliest. Between 1961 and 1965, members of the UKA and its affiliates were linked to, accused of, or indicted for a range of heinous crimes—assaulting Freedom Riders as they traveled through the segregated South, murdering a white civil rights worker during the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (resulting in the deaths of four African American children).

  It’s unlikely that John Howard was a party to any such violence. In its heyday, the UKA was most powerful in North Carolina, where Grand Dragon (or statewide leader) Bob Jones had amassed a veritable army—well over ten thousand Klansmen, by some estimates—divided into hundreds of individual chapters, called klaverns. South Carolina was a considerably smaller operation, and membership plummeted not long after John Howard took his oath. Beginning in the winter of 1965, a series of public hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee would reveal embarrassing evidence of fraud and mismanagement of Klan funds at the highest levels. Six of the most visible leaders were ultimately cited for contempt of Congress (for refusing to turn over membership rolls and financial documents). Shelton, Jones, and Robert Scoggin, Grand Dragon of South Carolina, were each sentenced to a year in prison.