Burden
Page 5
It was hardly the end of the United Klans, but the HUAC hearings took a massive toll on Shelton’s hooded order. Hundreds of Klansmen were unmasked, the existence and locations of “secret” klaverns were revealed, and the months of unflattering front-page coverage sparked a fair bit of infighting. Shelton, who vowed to continue running the Klan from the confines of a federal jail cell, banished scores of members he deemed disruptive or viewed as competition (and a few who turned out to be longtime FBI informants). Thousands more resigned of their own accord.
One can only speculate why John Howard didn’t hang up his robe, too. Perhaps the waning membership and sudden shortage of rallies left him restless. More likely is that belonging to the Klan gave him a sense of purpose. After traveling the country for three months, interviewing and interacting with hundreds of Klansmen for her book, Sims speculated that many had joined for reasons beyond racism: a need to belong, to feel important, to brighten drab lives, to be accepted.
In any case, after a brief tenure with the UKA, Howard readily switched allegiances to Robert Scoggin, who’d founded a group of his own after his release from prison in 1969. “United Klans wasn’t doin anything,” Howard explained to Sims. “They were interested in one thing—money. So I entered in with Mr. Scoggin.”
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Few groups occupy such an outsized, almost mythical place in America’s collective consciousness as the Ku Klux Klan. The eerie alliterative quality of the name, the conical white hat and flowing robe, and the fiery cross have all become potent symbols of domestic terrorism and virulent hate. While many associate the KKK with pro-segregationist vigilantism in the rural South, however, the Klan has actually had three distinct movements; its third and current iteration—which sprang up in the 1950s and ’60s—is not a singular entity at all, but rather dozens and dozens of splinter cells and rival factions operating under endless variations on the name: the United Klans; the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; the Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; et cetera. Each new fracture or faction adds yet another layer to a long and complicated history, already rife with legend, myth, and propaganda.
Talk to any Klansman today, and he’ll likely tell you the group was originally formed in order to protect defenseless white southerners from marauding bands of “scalawags” and “carpetbaggers” in the wake of the Civil War. In the twisted version of history that John Howard preached to prospective recruits, Confederate veterans had been so vilified and debased they “could not walk on the sidewalk…they walked in the road, and they had to bow their heads in reverence to the blacks,” thousands of whom were “left in the South to rule and dictate the southern white people.” According to a report from the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, however, it was boredom—rather than any purported sense of honor—that inspired six Confederate veterans to form a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, in the winter of 1865.*1 A secret club, to “heighten the amusement of the thing,” with a range of titles and offices, from the Grand Wizard to the Grand Cyclops to the Grand Dragon, outrageous names chosen for a clear purpose: to be as “preposterous-sounding as possible.” They called themselves the Ku Klux Klan, a play on the Greek word kuklos, meaning circle, and the Scottish clan, representing a kinship or brotherhood.
The robes—sheets and pillowcases at first, likely donned on impulse for a spur-of-the-moment ride through town—were likewise part of the silliness and “fun.” But then the original six began to initiate new members, and what may well have started out as a postwar diversion morphed into something much more sinister.
The Klan was less than a year old, and Andrew Johnson barely a year into his presidency, when in 1866 the Radical Republicans won supermajorities in both houses of Congress. As a statesman, Johnson had proved a mass of contradictions. An avowed racist and slave-owner, he was nevertheless a rabid supporter of the Union—the only southern congressman, in fact, who remained loyal to the North even in the throes of war. Upon ascending to the presidency, however, Johnson seemingly reversed course, adopting a wildly lenient policy toward the southern states. He advocated zero protections for newly freed slaves and proposed virtually no repercussions for ex-Confederate rebels. Most provocative were the so-called black codes, newly enacted state laws that severely restricted the rights of African Americans to own property, to vote, to carry weapons, to travel freely. For the slightest infraction—loitering, vagrancy, the “crime” of not having a job—blacks were arrested and forced into unpaid labor, work that largely resembled the “unpaid labor” they had performed before the war. With Johnson’s tacit approval, the southern states were, in effect, reinstituting slavery.
That changed after the 1866 election. The Radicals, having amassed enough votes in Congress to override Johnson’s vetoes, rammed through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (granting citizenship and voting rights to former slaves), dismantled the newly formed southern state governments, and organized fair elections, which resulted in a number of black citizens assuming local and even national office. By 1868, Johnson would become the first-ever president to be impeached.
Meanwhile, many white southerners, perhaps most, abhorred the policies that came to be known as Radical Reconstruction. Duly elected black legislators were dismissed as illiterate, ignorant, venal. In South Carolina, conservatives lamented the “Africanization” of their state. And the Klan, which by then had attracted hundreds if not thousands of members, began its transition from social club to political terrorist group. In April or May 1867, representatives from the various chapters gathered in Nashville and reportedly elected the respected Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest to be their first Grand Wizard, or national leader.*2 It’s widely believed that Forrest himself disbanded the Klan just two years later, when the violence had so escalated that klaverns began to war with one another. It’s also thought that Forrest may have only pretended to dissolve the order as a way of avoiding responsibility or personal retribution. Regardless, whatever commands Forrest may or may not have issued to his “troops” did nothing to quell the growing violence.
In towns across the South, masked and hooded vigilantes whipped, beat, shot, stabbed, and lynched not only African Americans but also Union sympathizers, Republicans, and northern teachers who’d relocated to southern states. In Laurens, long considered a hotbed of Klan activity, tensions devolved into a full-scale riot on the courthouse square, leaving anywhere from seven to fifteen people dead. Only after congressional intervention and passage of the Enforcement Acts—informally known as the Ku Klux Klan Acts, which outlawed mask-wearing and night-riding—did things begin to calm down. In 1871, Laurens became one of nine South Carolina counties to be placed under martial law by President Grant. Thousands of Klansmen were indicted, hundreds were found guilty (though only about sixty-five were imprisoned). By the mid-1870s, the Klan as an organization was more or less dead.
Its legacy, however, was anything but dead. In fact, as the southern states emerged from Reconstruction, much of the Klan’s political agenda was enshrined in law. African Americans were stripped of the vote with the advent of poll taxes, property requirements, and literacy tests. Jim Crow laws cemented their status as second-class citizens. Spectacle or “terror” lynchings—attended by thousands, photographed and viewed by thousands more—peaked in the decades immediately before and after the turn of the century. It was in this context that the KKK reemerged, this time as a sprawling national movement. In the 1920s, the Klan’s second iteration adopted a much more wholesome public image by organizing parades and picnics, sponsoring sports teams and beauty pageants, forming ladies’ auxiliaries, even performing a fair amount of charitable work. It was still a white supremacist organization, to be sure, just one dressed up in a prettier, more “patriotic” package.
It was also by far the most popular. At its height, the second Klan swelled to anywhere between fou
r million and six million members, roughly fifty thousand of whom proudly paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1925. Whereas the old Klan had done much of its work in secret, this new Klan—made up of doctors and lawyers, ministers and business owners, and scores of elected officials, from city councilmen to U.S. senators—didn’t have to hide. They wore their hoods, but not their masks. In a mainstream movement, after all, there’s no reason to conceal one’s identity.
The rebirth had come a decade earlier, in 1915, when a traveling Methodist minister, William Joseph Simmons, decided to resurrect the old order at Stone Mountain, a large geological rock formation (later the site of an enormous bas-relief carving, a paean to the Confederate “heroes” Lee, Jackson, and Davis) on Thanksgiving night. History regards Simmons as something of a “compulsive joiner,” a member of more than a dozen clubs and societies and churches, but a man who nonetheless dreamed of one day founding his own fraternal order. Inspiration struck with the debut of D. W. Griffith’s epic three-hour silent film The Birth of a Nation. Widely regarded as Hollywood’s first official blockbuster, Birth, which dramatized the end of the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era, was both a stunning technical achievement and an alarming work of revisionist history. In Griffith’s hands, Klansmen were romanticized as noble and heroic. African Americans, largely portrayed by white men in blackface, were depicted as heathens who preyed on white women. The film’s glorification of the antebellum era—a dreamscape of Spanish moss and sprawling plantations—sparked a powerful nostalgia. And for Simmons, the phenomenal success of the film—the “greatest picture ever made,” according to a Los Angeles Times review—presented an opportunity. He began taking out advertisements in various Atlanta newspapers, urging Georgians to join his new Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a “high class order for men of intelligence and character.” He brought a small group of followers to the Atlanta premiere of Birth, dressed in full robes and pointy white hoods, and brought the Klan back to life by staging a grand tableau: atop Stone Mountain, he constructed an altar (upon which he placed an American flag, an unsheathed sword, and a copy of the Bible) and set fire to an enormous wooden cross.
Despite the theatrics, the second Klan didn’t attract a whole lot of members in its first five years. In the spring of 1920, however, Simmons teamed up with a pair of publicists—Edward Young Clarke and Mary Elizabeth “Bessie” Tyler—who launched a massive nationwide recruiting drive. They marketed the Klan as a “100-percent American” organization, pocketing the bulk of each new member’s $10 initiation fee. It worked. Membership swelled to more than a hundred thousand within months.
If the fuel for the first Klan had been the tumult and turmoil of Reconstruction, the second Klan found purchase by exploiting white native-born Americans’ fears and anxieties in the wake of the First World War, when a global recession, expanding rights for women, the migration of African Americans out of the South, and a flood of European immigrants seemed no less than existential threats to the nation. Second-wave Klansmen longed for a return to “traditional” values and thus rejected anything “foreign”—they were viciously anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant. They also co-opted quite a bit of Christian iconography. The ceremonial lighting of the cross dates back to this period, and members were expected (paradoxically) to attend church regularly and to exhibit superior moral character by abstaining from alcohol, premarital sex, adultery, and liberal politics.
Of course, the rise of the second Klan was not without violence. In Alabama, a divorcée was beaten for the “crime” of remarrying. In Oklahoma, “immoral” young women were lashed for riding around in cars with boys. In Louisiana, two white men—detractors of the Klan—were kidnapped, tortured, and decapitated. The breadth and severity of the violence were obscured, however, by the Klan’s rebranding of itself as a group of civic-minded cultural warriors. Bigotry became synonymous with patriotism. Harassment and intimidation were normalized. In fact, when the New York World ran a lengthy exposé in the fall of 1921—unveiling the Klan’s secret rites and rituals, the massive fortunes being amassed by imperial leaders, and less-than-virtuous behavior from its highest-ranking members (Clarke and Tyler, it turned out, had once been arrested at a “house of ill repute”)—the publicity only served to make the Klan more popular.
Almost as quickly as it had risen to power, however, the Invisible Empire began to fall apart. Members who’d been drawn to the Klan for civic and social reasons started to flee as increasingly gruesome acts of violence were uncovered. After Simmons was ousted from his role as Imperial Wizard and replaced by a dentist named Hiram Evans, the two went to war in the press. By the early 1920s, there was plenty to fight over: the Klan’s moneymaking dues apparatus and its real estate portfolio (including an elaborate headquarters in Atlanta, dubbed the Imperial Palace) were by then worth millions. Amid the legal wrangling, a group of Klansmen from Pennsylvania broke away from the national leadership but continued to use the name Ku Klux Klan. Evans promptly sued them for $100,000. Each new lawsuit or court battle exposed still more hypocrisy, corruption, and misdeeds. And it was those two things—money and infighting—that would become staples of the modern Ku Klux Klan’s culture.
The third iteration of the KKK—again sparked by sweeping social change, in this case the emerging civil rights movement and the repeal of Jim Crow laws—was always a divided enterprise, a conglomeration of rival groups led by competing rulers. Despite the factionalism, the Klan had by the mid-1960s swelled to levels not seen since the Simmons era. To combat growing vigilante and mob violence, the government stepped in once again. The FBI expanded its notorious COINTELPRO surveillance program, infiltrated Klan factions, and facilitated the HUAC hearings. By the early 1970s, nationwide membership dropped to little more than fifteen hundred. Yet the counterintelligence operation, though in many ways successful, was not without consequence: the Klan turned suspicious, conspiracy-prone, and vehemently anti-government. To avoid toppling entire organizations, some high-ranking members began to advocate for “lone wolf” terrorism—acts of violence committed by “unaffiliated” individuals or small cells, which could not be traced back to the leadership.
Never again would the KKK enjoy mainstream appeal or widespread political support. But this smaller, more isolated, more marginalized Klan was in many ways less predictable than its predecessors, and potentially more dangerous.
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If it was more action he wanted, since the United Klans hadn’t been “doing anything,” John Howard didn’t have to wait long. Robert Scoggin, Grand Dragon of the newly formed Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Realm of South Carolina, was charismatic and gregarious and turned out to be a rabid organizer. “He can sit here an’ convince you that he’s got a million people in South Car’liner ready to overthrow the United States government, an’ you’d believe him,” Howard explained to Sims. “Somehow or ’nother the Lord’s blessed the man with a gold or silver tongue—either which way you wanta call it—and he can handle people.”
Indeed, by the grace of his silver tongue, Scoggin managed to win back some of his followers who’d defected after the HUAC hearings. Membership grew further after he organized a slew of rallies across the state. Over the decades, these gatherings had come to resemble a kind of dystopian county fair: Klansmen young and old would assemble in cornfields or cow pastures. Their wives and girlfriends doled out hamburgers and hot dogs from concession stands, while leaders unboxed T-shirts, hats, pins, KKK-branded Bibles, and white supremacist literature. (At a Klan rally, something is always for sale.) Scoggin and his colleagues would then take to the stage—usually a flatbed trailer—and deliver fiery speeches about the evils of welfare, the laziness of blacks, the glory of God, and the coming race war. The festivities concluded, always, with a ceremonial lighting of the cross.
Despite the tenor of the speeches, most rallies f
unctioned as recruiting events, often open to the public and to reporters; they were not typically held in order to plan or commit violence. In the fall of 1970, however, at a rally in Sumter, things went awry. Several members of the UKA (Scoggin’s former and now rival outfit) showed up uninvited, and one of the infiltrators was caught trying to sneak in a tape recorder. A scuffle broke out. When it was over, a fifty-year-old grocery store owner named Willie Odom was dead.
“All I knowed about it,” Howard told Sims in the fall of 1976, “a guy got killed up the road. A bullet went in up here”—Howard pointed to his head—“and come out here. Killed him instantly.”
However little he knew about it, Sims reported that Howard was arrested and indicted along with Scoggin and a half dozen other Klansmen. The charges included malicious mischief, conspiracy to commit robbery, and accessory before and after the fact of murder—but the case was later dropped for lack of evidence.
If Howard’s brush with the law rattled him, it certainly didn’t affect his membership in the Klan. On the contrary, he began to rise through the ranks. By the fall of 1971, he was calling himself a Grand Titan, Klan parlance for the head of a county or province. And he took his public-facing leadership role seriously. When a high school English teacher from Laurens, Anne Thomson Sheppard, wrote a guest editorial for the Greenville News lamenting her fear of the Klan, Howard responded publicly by writing a letter to the editor. He claimed that the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was a fraternal order rather than a “klandescinal” organization, and denied that Klansmen had ever made threats in Laurens or in any other county in the state. “I say this,” Howard wrote, “to tell some misinformed people that this is not the old Ku Klux Klan.”