From the start, Burden had been on board with Howard’s plan to open a Klan museum and some sort of gift shop, and the two spoke often about their shared vision for the space. Exhibits curated from Howard’s extensive personal collection would include the very items Burden had found so fascinating as a lost and lonely nineteen-year-old: old photographs, charters, and publications from the Simmons-era Klan, mainly. Somewhere in the rear of the building, out of view from prying eyes and passersby, they would set up a working Klan lodge, turning the old theater into a headquarters for the Keystone Knights. They talked idly about the stir such a store would cause in Laurens, and fantasized about how much money they might make. Beyond that, a shop in the middle of the town square would give them a huge leg up when it came to recruitment.
Renovations began sometime in late 1992 or early 1993 in what had been the lobby and concessions area, a modest-sized room facing West Laurens Street. The rear of the building, or what had once been the actual screening room—a cavernous space, with thirty-foot ceilings, a sagging floor, and a leaking roof—would require months of labor. The repairs were tedious and slow-going, however, as Howard had neither the money nor the inclination to hire a general contractor; the project was funded in fits and starts, largely from incoming membership dues.
While progress at the store may have been slow, Burden’s status within the Klan continued to rise: sometime in 1993 or 1994, he was promoted again, this time to the position of Exalted Cyclops. Burden relished his position as head of the klavern, the sense of power and control it gave him. “If you were in my lodge and I didn’t prefer a thing that you said or done,” he once explained to a reporter from The State, “I’d say, ‘Sit down, Klansman. You out of order.’ ” He loved the ceremony of Klan rituals: gaveling weekly meetings to order, reciting the sacred language of the Klan’s 1920s-era rulebook, written by Simmons himself. One of his favorite activities was the initiation of new recruits.
The process, referred to as “naturalization,” is considered a sacred ritual, though in truth it bears more resemblance to college fraternity hazing. There are variations from klavern to klavern, but the ceremony centers on proving one’s loyalty and trust. To do that, new recruits are typically blindfolded, then they might be placed in a row—each Klansman’s hand positioned on the shoulder of the man in front of him—and led through a wooded area or over a patch of rough terrain while being intimidated by sudden shouts and sounds, like the not-so-far-off report of a rifle. Alternatively, they might be ordered to stand stock-still and refrain from flinching while someone pokes or prods them, or startles them with the whirring of a revolver wheel.
“During our initiation,” Burden says, “one of the things that we always told ’em was, ‘Never tell anybody what the blood drop means’—the blood drop means purity. So during the initiation we’re constantly bombardin ’em with the word purity. And how significant it is.” Burden and his fellow officers would shout rapid-fire questions at their initiates: Will you be loyal to your oath? Do you pledge to stand up for the white race? After a while, someone would suddenly ask: What does the blood drop mean? And invariably, some poor recruit would call out, “Purity!” When that happened, Burden was there to administer a little shock—a kind of negative-reinforcement therapy, the way one might train a dog with an electric anti-bark collar. Burden, however, used a cattle prod.
“One of the best ones I had—the guy was every bit of 250 pounds. He had twenty-something-inch arms. I mean, this guy was huge. He looked like John Cena. He’s standing there with his back to me, and I got this cattle prod, and he shouts ‘purity’ and as soon as he did I come up between his legs, barely caught him in the middle section between his groin and his butt, and that guy goes ‘Yeowwww!’ I couldn’t handle it. I just busted out laughing. I was rollin on the floor.”
If his new recruits had a problem with the prodding, they didn’t say much. “Afterwards we’d all get together and we’d cut up and joke and stuff like that. And they’d get to do it next time.” Initiation also marked the beginning of a series of payments: the initiation fee itself, plus the procurement of a hood and robe and monthly dues of fifteen or twenty bucks. In a blighted town like Laurens, that kind of financial commitment was no small thing.
* * *
—
A year or so into renovations at the Echo, Burden and his team had made enough progress that a portion of the old screening room in the back of the theater could be converted into a makeshift lodge. A temporary wall was erected to split the space in half, and the ceiling above the still-unfinished section was covered with a tarp (repairs on the roof would stretch on for many more months). Howard, meanwhile, signed a lease with his Imperial Wizard, Barry Black—on Keystone Knights letterhead—granting him “full authority” of the lodge for a period of ninety-nine years. Howard would retain exclusive rights to the museum, which would be housed, at first, in the corridor behind the lobby.
With the museum and meeting hall slowly coming together, Howard and Burden decided to focus on the shop at the front of the building, as they would need the proceeds to pay for additional repairs—and there was good reason to think they’d find a market for the sale of Klan memorabilia. Back in 1992, the owners of a 130-year-old farmhouse in Freemont, Michigan, discovered a treasure trove of 1920s-era Klan artifacts. They didn’t know what to do with the hoods and robes and letters and faded documents, so they held an auction. They had no way of knowing the event would attract hundreds of curious neighbors as well as serious collectors, or that the total haul from the sale of roughly 250 items would approach $30,000.
Over the coming months, Howard and Burden traveled up and down the East Coast, searching for relics and tokens from that same era: rings, watch fobs, official Klan charters, membership cards. If they couldn’t find a particular item, they made it themselves: white bedsheets, for example, could be stitched into an “official” Klan robe—manufactured for next to nothing and sold for more than $100. The rest of the shop’s floor space would be filled out with generic “southern pride” knickknacks: Confederate-flag license plates, decals, flip-flops, bathing suits. Then there were the other items: silk-screened T-shirts with the likeness of Martin Luther King Jr. in the crosshairs of a rifle scope, pickaninny figurines. “I think probably the worst thing we actually had in there…,” Burden said, thinking. “We made a doorknocker. I had seen an image of it, and I’ve always done woodwork, so I made a black gingerbread man that screwed to your door. And he was painted with his overalls, painted black. Then you had a Klansman standing there, and I painted the robe and everything. You pull the string at the bottom of it, he’d swing a bat, crack the black guy in the head knockin on the door. That was probably the meanest thing we actually had in there.”
The further along they got in the process, the more Howard must have started to sense the potential of his new asset—and perhaps the chaos and controversy he was about to unleash in his own hometown. No doubt he was familiar with a string of recent lawsuits then plaguing Klan groups across the country. (Farrands’s Invisible Empire had just been sued into bankruptcy by the Southern Poverty Law Center for pelting protesters with bottles and rocks during a civil rights march; the faction lost the deed to its headquarters as part of the settlement.) So he decided that keeping the shop safe would require a somewhat counterintuitive approach: He’d need to sell it. Or sell part of it, at least.
“Life estates” are deeds that split ownership of real property between two (or more) parties: the life tenant, who retains exclusive rights to the property during his or her lifetime, and the remainderman, who takes possession of the property upon the life tenant’s death. Life estates are most often used in estate planning—a parent can “give” his or her child the family home, for example, without giving up the right to live in it. In the case of the Redneck Shop, however, Howard had something else in mind. He figured a dual-ownership situation would make it harder for an outside party t
o somehow wrest control of the shop away from him. “It was his way of protecting it,” said Burden. “He wanted to make sure that if something came up, nobody could sue for the shop. He would be able to use it forever.”
Howard could have chosen his son Dwayne to be the beneficiary—Dwayne was, after all, a fellow Klansman. But instead he chose Michael Burden.
Signing on to the deed was, for Burden, a total no-brainer: now, no matter what happened in the future, he’d always have the shop to fall back on. It was the first time he’d ever owned what might be described as an asset—it was the first time he’d ever owned anything, really. And as the shop’s grand opening drew near, Burden realized that he was the most content he had ever been in his life. He’d been plucked from abject poverty and given a sense of purpose, a leadership role in what he thought of as a storied organization. He’d found for himself a new family. There just wasn’t much more that he needed—that is, until one afternoon in the winter of 1995, when he encountered something it hadn’t even occurred to him to want.
He was up in the rafters at the Echo, repairing some rotted ceiling joists, when he noticed the petite brunette standing some forty feet below. “She had on a pair of little white Daisy Duke shorts,” he said later. “Hair down past her shoulders, and this little pink tank top. I just sat there, transfixed. I forgot what I was doin.”
Her name—Burden already knew—was Judy.
four
BURN IT DOWN
On a February afternoon not long after his clandestine meeting outside the Beasley Mortuary, Rev. Kennedy steered his car into the crumbling parking lot of Foggie’s Barber Shop, housed in a squat white building on a back alley just north of the courthouse square.
“ ’Bout time you walked in the door, Rev!”
Willie Foggie, the shop’s fifty-eight-year-old proprietor, a large man with kind eyes and a shock of white hair, was standing behind one of four salon chairs, clippers in hand, gesturing toward the packed waiting area. “Everybody talkin ’bout the KKK.”
Secrets don’t stay secret long in a town as tiny as Laurens, and word about a Klan-backed business had already started to trickle out into the community. The barbershop, a thirty-year fixture of the black community, was busier than usual, though perhaps only a third of the patrons were actually there for haircuts. The rest had arrived merely to talk. Foggie’s was as much a social club as it was a barbershop. Some of the old-timers could reliably be found there every day, the same time of day, holding court from one of the folding chairs along the back wall. The shop itself was small, made smaller still by piles of clutter: stacks of paperwork, cardboard boxes, two televisions, a coffee machine, razors and clippers and shaving cream canisters and Styrofoam takeout containers. What it lacked in tidiness, however, it made up for in warmth: lining the walls were hundreds of photos of Foggie’s friends and family, thumbtacked one atop the other, fighting for space with yellowed newspaper clippings and football pennants and a framed jersey. Foggie’s youngest son, Rickey, was something of a hometown hero; he’d led the Laurens Raiders to their first-ever state championship back in 1983.
Foggie, too, was something of an institution, as much therapist as barber. Time seemed to slow down inside his shop. Customers waited patiently even as the clippers stopped clipping and Foggie got swept up in conversation. But that day in mid-February, the vibe was tense.
“You believe this, Rev?” one of the younger patrons called out. “The Klan gonna open a store across from the courthouse?”
“I know,” Kennedy said, shaking his head. “I’ve been looking into it for a while.”
“When you find out?”
“Someone mentioned something to me about it a while back,” Kennedy said.
“Who?”
“A friend.”
Kennedy wasn’t about to give up the source of his information, but it was true that he had been investigating, meandering past the storefront and trying to peer inside the windows, meeting privately with a few well-placed folks within the community. It hadn’t taken him long to verify the cop’s information—to confirm that the shop was owned by a Klansman named John Howard—nor to decide that the best way to fight the store would be to go after the business license. The atmosphere inside Foggie’s that afternoon was all the confirmation he needed that things would likely spin out of control. There was too much idle chatter about breaking the shop windows, too much tough talk about confronting the Klan in the streets. The younger generation, especially, seemed poised to take matters into their own hands. If Kennedy could convince city officials to deny the shop a license, the whole issue might be avoided. He had already stopped by City Hall, and in the coming days he would speak out on a local AM radio station. “He was trying to stop it,” said Clarence Simpson, then a deacon at Rev. Kennedy’s New Beginning Missionary Baptist. “But they went right ahead and did it anyway.” In late February, Michael Burden was granted a license for the shop in his name.
In the end, Kennedy wasn’t even that surprised, for the African American community was woefully underrepresented in Laurens. A mere three of the city’s twenty-eight police officers were black. Out of 187 county government jobs, only sixteen were held by black people. He’d seen the response from leadership back in 1994, when a small multiracial church in the hamlet of Ware Shoals—Full Gospel Tabernacle—experienced harassment and intimidation by the Klan after hiring a black associate pastor: “If Pastor Brown is saying that law enforcement is not dealing with this situation,” Laurens County sheriff Jim Moore had complained to the Greenwood Index-Journal, “then he’s either terribly misinformed or he’s trying to mislead the public.” Kennedy was used to denial and indifference in the face of prejudice. He wasn’t through fighting—not by a long shot. But despite his best efforts, the shop on the square was going to open right on schedule.
* * *
—
John Howard and Michael Burden had done their best to keep the true nature of the store a secret. As the grand opening approached, however, they began to realize that operating the Redneck Shop in full public view might prove trickier than they had imagined. “We’d already heard the scuttlebutt around town,” Burden said. He knew some kind of protest or demonstration was likely, and that the outspoken reverend would surely be the man behind it. So long as those demonstrations didn’t interfere with his business, he was inclined to live and let live. As for public opinion, he couldn’t have cared less if the residents of Laurens had a problem with the Klan. “I’d put on this shirt,” he said, referring to a stretched-out graphic tee emblazoned with a Confederate flag, a pickup truck, and a crass slogan printed along the bottom: IT’S A WHITE THING. YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND. “I’d walk in the middle of Walmart and dare somebody to say something to me. I didn’t give a shit.”
But for all his posturing, there was one thing about which he had definitely come to care about over the course of the previous few months. That was Judy.
They had technically met several years earlier, long before she’d shown up unannounced at the Echo theater, back when she was living in the Town and Country trailer park with her husband, Carl, and her two children. Burden had been on his way to visit a friend—Judy’s next-door neighbor—when he came upon the petite brunette in the middle of an epic rant, cussing up a storm and waving her cigarette in the air, all fire and fury. “She’d had issues with a bus driver or something,” Burden said later. “And she was madder than hell, raisin hell out in the front yard, and I come over there like, ‘Hey, what’s goin on?’ Ya know?”
Even then he liked her. She had a heart-shaped face, steely blue eyes, and—when she wasn’t on a profanity-laced tear—a wide smile. It didn’t take him long to invite her to a meeting. She was, after all, a prospective recruit.
It wasn’t the first time Judy had been propositioned by a Klansman. In fact, the Klan was relatively pervasive in Laurens, particularly in the trailer parks and
textile mills, and among people Judy refers to as “living the hustle-bustle, day-to-day life. Lower-class, like me.” Growing up, virtually all of her friends’ parents had been members, though at the time Judy had no knowledge of the Klan’s violent history, nor even a clear understanding of the group’s purpose. “I thought about it like a club that the older adults went to, like the Shriners,” she said. By the time she reached adolescence, many of her friends had followed in their parents’ footsteps, and they began pressuring Judy to join, too, explaining that it was everyone’s responsibility to ensure the safety and security of the white race.
To be sure, casual racism—even overt racism—was very much the norm in Judy’s social circle. She was a young woman before it dawned on her that the word “nigger,” tossed off with alarming frequency by virtually everyone she knew, was actually a pejorative. “I just thought it was normal to hear that word come out of everybody,” she says. “But as I started gettin up older, I realized people were sayin that over a color of the skin, and that’s just not right.”
Burden was different. He didn’t say much about race—not in that first meeting, at least—but talked instead about southern history and pride in one’s heritage. She still turned him down. She was married, for one thing, and even then it was clear that the tattooed stranger was interested in procuring more than her membership. But she couldn’t deny that he had made her curious. Burden was long and sinewy, full of bravado but oddly charming, and young—seven years her junior.
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