Burden

by Courtney Hargrave

  Ninety percent of what he had heard about the Klan, Howard assured Burden, was not the truth. He peddled a version of history—lifted almost verbatim from The Birth of a Nation—that painted the Reconstruction-era Klan as a necessity, a force for good in the otherwise devastated southern states. Burden eagerly lapped up the tenets of Lost Cause mythology: the belief that the Civil War was not about slavery; that northerners, intent on punishing the rebels for secession, had set out to destroy their way of life. Howard even offered proof that the Klan “wasn’t racist,” in the form of an old photograph of black Confederate soldiers in full battle dress, muskets at their sides, ready to march on behalf of the South.

  When it came to the legacy of William Joseph Simmons and his “fraternal” Klan, Howard’s lectures took on a practically evangelical pitch. “He seen a vision in the sky when he was a young man,” Howard said matter-of-factly. (Simmons long claimed to have been inspired by a late-night vision of men on horseback, galloping across the horizon.) “God gave him a vision to create the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” How else could he have built a million-man movement from nothing? Howard regularly ticked off the names of great men—presidents, senators, governors—who had been members, and lamented that history was being “cleaned up” to erase their legacy. He made the Klan sound like a noble cause. It wasn’t long before Burden wanted to join—indeed, developed a kind of obsession. “I ate, slept, drank, and studied the Klan,” he told The State, a Columbia newspaper.

  Under Howard’s tutelage, Burden became something of an expert in the Klan’s culture and history, or what’s referred to as “Klancraft.” He learned the pledges and oaths, as well as the ranks and titles of the various officers, from the Exalted Cyclops (the head of a klavern) to the Klaliff (vice president of a klavern) and the Kludd (or chaplain), who presides over weddings and funerals. He was taught how to light the cross, a ceremony that Klansmen insist is not in any way meant to be sacrilegious but is rather a symbol of their devotion and Christian faith. Burden also learned the significance of the Mystic Insignia of a Klansman (MIOAK), the red-and-white patch worn over the left breast on their traditional robes. “It looks like a cross from a distance, but if you look real close, you’ll see a little square in the middle of it,” Burden says. Place a piece of paper or your thumb over that square, and the “cross” becomes four K’s, representing the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. In the center of the patch is a red swirl, which Klansmen refer to as a blood drop, meant to represent the blood of Christ, the “purity” of Christ, or the blood to be shed in defense of the white race.

  What Burden did not know, not for a long time, is that virtually every rite and ritual he learned was a contemporary reinterpretation, a cynical attempt to make the modern Klan seem more legitimate and more palatable. The MIOAK, for example, is a relic of the Simmons era, but the “blood drop” was not originally intended to represent blood, and certainly not Christ’s. It was one half of a yin-yang symbol featuring the dates 1866 and 1915 (representing the first and second Klans, respectively). Since the white half of the symbol didn’t show up well against the white background of the patch, however, it was eventually dropped, leaving a lone red swirl. Klansmen didn’t start calling the swirl a blood drop until the 1960s and ’70s, after the HUAC hearings had decimated their membership.

  The cross burning, meanwhile, was merely a case of life imitating art: The Birth of a Nation depicted Klansmen setting crosses ablaze because director D. W. Griffith liked the visual. William Joseph Simmons then borrowed the visual when he revived the Klan at Stone Mountain. Perhaps the most famous of the Klan’s rites and ceremonies was no more than an invention of Hollywood.

  As for Howard’s Civil War–era photograph depicting black Confederate soldiers—his “proof” that the Klan wasn’t racist—it was fake. The photo, a doctored image of black Union soldiers, has circulated among neo-Confederates and members of the far right for decades.

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  —

  Despite John Howard's influence and tutelage, Burden’s first real brush with the hooded order at large, beyond the relatively limited interactions he’d had at Plantation Concrete, did not go the way he’d imagined. Upon arriving at an inter-Klan rally on Stone Mountain sometime in 1990 or 1991, he was surprised to find the place overrun by neo-Nazis.

  In the world of white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and skinheads represent three distinct movements, each with its own dogma and doctrine. After the HUAC hearings and COINTELPRO investigations, however, these groups began to merge and coalesce, sharing a suspicion of centralized government and a mutual sense of victimization and persecution. By the time Mike Burden joined up, it wasn’t unusual to find Third Reich symbolism—swastikas, the double-sig rune of Hitler’s SS—at a Klan event, nor was it unheard-of to see robed Klansmen chatting it up with kids in Dr. Martens and suspenders. Yet Burden was prepared for none of that. He’d been reared on the gospel of William Joseph Simmons, but the skinheads cavorting around Stone Mountain were “all about ‘Sieg Heil’ and all that stuff,” he says, “and I was like hell no. That ain’t even American!”

  Feeling out of his depth and on edge, Burden proceeded to get into an argument with a Grand Dragon from the UKA, an exceedingly short man—no more than five foot four—with an outsized ego Burden found profoundly irritating. He wound up getting kicked out of the rally.

  Next up was an event in North Carolina, this one organized by James Farrands of the Invisible Empire (yet another splinter group, not to be confused with Simmons’s or Scoggin’s earlier movements). Something about that rally made Burden feel more at home. Farrands had taken to calling himself a “new breed” of Klansman. He insisted that he wasn’t violent and didn’t “hate” anybody. Within a few years’ time he would banish neo-Nazis and skinheads in an attempt to rehabilitate the Klan’s image.

  Of course, even in those days Burden could acknowledge the Klan’s legacy of violence. “There’s not a lot of good history,” he admits. “For every positive thing I found, ten negatives took its place. I mean, you got the massacre in Greensboro….”

  The Greensboro Massacre was the November 1979 climax of long-simmering tension between the Klan and members of the Communist Workers Party, which had been organizing black textile workers in small towns across the state. On November 3, the CWP staged a “Death to the Klan” rally at Morningside Homes, a predominantly black housing project. Shortly before 11:30 a.m., a half hour before the rally was set to begin, a nine-car caravan of Klansmen and members of the American Nazi Party drove past the throngs of assembling protesters. Some of the demonstrators began to beat on the vehicles, and within seconds the confrontation devolved into a shootout. Five members of the CWP were left dead.

  In the aftermath, a number of Klan factions across the Carolinas went dark. Howard watched as membership in his group plummeted to just forty. Starting in the summer of 1985, however, the hooded order began to make a very public resurgence, in part by requesting parade permits from city councils in the South Carolina towns of Blacksburg, Clinton, and Laurens. In interviews with the press, Howard’s longtime friend Charles Murphy announced plans to march in still more cities, attributing the sudden increase in visibility to new and “better” leadership. He was referring to a man named Horace King, Grand Dragon of the newly formed Christian Knights, who reported to a man named Virgil Griffin—one of the architects of the massacre in Greensboro.

  Public authorities had by then grown skeptical of the Klan’s actual reach and influence. The chief of the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division insisted to the Greenville News that folks were “getting too smart” to join. “People are just not going to support [the Klan]. This is 1985,” he said. And for a time it seemed as though he might have been right. Only a handful of marchers showed up in Blacksburg, and officials in Clinton chose to deny the Klan a permit after receiving a slew of irate and threatening phone calls. The city of Laurens quick
ly followed suit, denying a permit on the grounds that violence and lawlessness were likely. “We had Greensboro on our minds,” Mayor Dominick said, explaining the decision to reporters.

  The denials, however, had an unintended consequence: they triggered a wave of First Amendment lawsuits, all of which the Klan won. After that, the Christian Knights organized marches in Gaffney, Spartanburg, Fountain Inn, Mauldin, Woodruff, Greer, Greenville, and Anderson. In 1987, they hit Summerville and Charleston. In 1988, they rallied in Greenwood and Newberry. In the summer of 1990—the same week that Rev. Kennedy got into a public spat with the mayor in the wake of Bobo Cook’s death—the Klan obtained a permit to counterprotest.

  It’s not clear if John Howard ever officially joined the Christian Knights, but by the early 1990s, his Keystone Klan and Horace King’s outfit had become the two largest factions in the state.

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  As the months and then years slipped by, Howard and Burden developed a bond that, to outsiders, seemed an awful lot like a father-son relationship. (Not that it didn’t produce complications. Howard’s son Dwayne was a fellow Klansman, and his relationship with Burden—a mere three years his junior—slowly evolved from a friendship into a rivalry, and finally into a sometimes volatile dynamic fraught with jealousy and tension.) Upon closer inspection, however, Burden’s role at the Lanford house, in the Klan, and within Howard’s inner circle might have been less like that of a son and more like that of a soldier. “He could ask me anything,” Burden said. “He could wake me up in the middle of the night. He could tell me, ‘Go out there, set down and wait on somebody to deliver a load of concrete at two o’clock in the morning.’ I’d get up, no questions asked. No arguments or nuthin. Just get up and go do it.”

  For his loyalty, Burden was rewarded. Sometime after John Howard and Barry Black merged their organizations in the early 1990s, Burden was made an Emperor’s Night-Hawk—in other words, head of Klan security. At rallies, he and a team of subordinates monitored the perimeter of the field or pasture, patrolled the parking lot, patted people down in search of contraband. “My unit actually had a wand,” he said. “We wanded you down for firearms or anything like that.” At the same time, he began to stockpile weapons—pistols, shotguns, an SKS semi-automatic rifle, a .30-.30 rifle with a two-hundred-yard scope—and acquire books on explosives: The Poor Man’s James Bond, The Anarchist Cookbook. When Howard met with other high-level leaders—Barry Black, Charles Murphy, Virgil Griffin, Horace King—Burden assumed the role of bodyguard.

  The Klan has always been performative in nature. The hoods and robes, the cross-burning, the secrecy of the order itself—the theatrical elements—are in many ways just as intimidating (and effective) as the commission of violence. But as much as they perform for their victims, Klansmen perform for each other, too. Back in the early 1960s, for example, when the Klan was perhaps more fractured than at any other time in its history, the heads of various splinter groups met in Indian Springs, Georgia, to discuss a merger. Robert Shelton, then heading up a small Alabama-based faction, arrived with an eight-man security detail dressed in paramilitary garb. It was a performance—a show of strength—and it worked. By meeting’s end, Shelton had been named Imperial Wizard of the new UKA.

  Performing—acting out the role of enforcer—made Burden feel powerful, too, as did his sudden proximity to so many leaders within the movement. He reveled in their stories of long-ago bombings and night rides. He emulated their tough talk and bravado.

  But nobody could spin a yarn quite like “Wild Bill” Hoff.

  A New York native, Hoff had arrived at a rally in North Carolina in the early 1990s, where he met and befriended John Howard. Several weeks later he turned up in Lanford, towing a U-Haul. “He came down supposedly to visit,” Burden says, “but he blew the engine in his car pullin his trailer.” Hoff’s “visit,” extended little by little relative to his car trouble, gradually evolved into a permanent trip. Nobody seemed to have the heart to tell him he’d perhaps overstayed his welcome. “It’s kinda hard to tell a sixty-year-old man, ‘You got to go.’ ”

  Indeed, there was a fragility about Wild Bill—he was of slight build, hardly 150 pounds, with a receding hairline and Coke-bottle glasses. The moniker, however, was completely in line with the stories he told about himself, elaborate fictions meant to cultivate the image of a larger-than-life persona. Hoff told his fellow Klansmen that he’d served as a mercenary in Angola and Rhodesia; that he’d once mounted a run for Senate in the state of New York (and garnered an astonishing seventy thousand write-in votes); that his parents had been sent to a detention camp during World War II for being Nazi sympathizers; that while he was growing up, his mother would read selections from Hitler’s Mein Kampf to the children each night.

  None of it was true. The real story of Hoff’s life, however, is just as wild—and far more tragic.

  William Hoff wasn’t raised to hate. He’d grown up in the heavily mixed ghettoes of South Brooklyn in the 1930s and ’40s, where he was exposed to—and appreciated—a variety of customs and cultures. He played basketball with black and Latino kids from the neighborhood, learned snippets of Italian from the wannabe mobsters and Yiddish from the Jewish immigrants. But then he dropped out of high school, enlisted in the navy, and got himself dishonorably discharged after a violent altercation with a black sailor. After that, things for Wild Bill fell apart. In the 1960s, during the same period when his brother Donald became a Methodist minister and a member of the NAACP, Bill turned to political extremism, joining up with the American Nazi Party, the States Rights Party, and the Ku Klux Klan. In 1968, he was arrested in New York City for plotting to blow up a roomful of “active leftists” and draft resistors. His family was baffled. “I never knew Billy to be anti-Negro, anti-Jew, or anti-anything until he came out of the Navy,” Donald explained to the Elmira Star-Gazette in a 1969 interview. “I think he found something that gave foundation to his fear and confusion, his sense of injustice.”

  Hoff ultimately served six years at Attica Correctional Facility. (The rare true detail in his otherwise outrageous stories was the fact that he’d been present for the 1971 Attica riots.) But he rejoined the Klan after his parole ended, rising as high as Grand Dragon in New York. Then, in a truly bizarre twist, he took a job as a receptionist at a black-owned employment agency, Third World Personnel Services, which specialized in helping minorities find jobs. Hoff’s coworkers had no knowledge of his criminal history or his ties to the white supremacist movement; on the contrary, they described him as mild-mannered, even avuncular. Hoff fled south only after being outed as a Klansman by the Jewish Defense Organization, a militant outfit with its own history of violence.

  Sociologists have long understood that ideology is not always the primary motivation among people who join white supremacist and organized hate movements. “It’s not the racist beliefs of groups like the Klan that are so appealing to men like Burden,” Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Social Conflict at Northeastern University, said in interviews with The State. “It’s the need to belong, the need to feel important. [Burden] sounds like the perfect recruit.” Kathleen Blee, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of three books on organized racism, explained to the University Times that most of the Klan members and neo-Nazis she has studied or interviewed over the years were not particularly racist when they joined. “If you met these people when they were getting involved, they wouldn’t really strike you as off the charts in their racism,” she said. “But once they are in it for a while, that worldview really deepens.”

  The more Burden slipped into his role of bodyguard, the more stories he absorbed about committing violence with impunity, the more he began to parrot Howard’s rhetoric and vitriol, the more committed he became to the cause. “I was led to believe that was family,” he later told reporters. “That was my life. That wa
s my destiny. And I done the best I could to live up to it.”

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  By the time John Howard purchased the old Echo theater, the crime and drug use that so troubled Rev. Kennedy in the mid-1980s had worsened. In the smallest towns, the collapse of the textile industry had proved devastating: the Riegel mill, an eighty-year-old plant in the nearby hamlet of Ware Shoals, laid off 850 workers back in 1982, a figure equivalent to more than one-third of the town’s entire population. Two years later, another 900 people were put out of work. As mill after mill across the Upstate shuttered—thirty-one of the region’s manufacturing plants closed in 1983 alone—the effects rippled outward. In Iva, roughly forty miles southwest of Laurens, the proprietor of a local restaurant estimated to reporters that nearly half his business had come from mill workers. For municipal governments, the collapse meant a significant loss of tax revenue. In the village of Lockhart, reporters predicted that the closing of the Milliken mill, in 1994, would wind up being a “death bell.”

  As the county seat, Laurens had fared a little better (Watts Mill was still operational), but not by much. Revenues at the downtown businesses had been dropping for the better part of a decade, amid competition from shopping centers and strip malls out by the highway and the offerings of more prosperous towns, especially Spartanburg and Greenville. Over time, the historic town square had grown more and more deserted. The Echo, in particular, was a shambles. “We walked in there and it was completely rotted,” Burden said. “I mean, we had to put in floors, ceilings, walls, everything. We basically rebuilt that thing from the ground up.”