Burden

by Courtney Hargrave

  At the council meeting, McDaniel had warned that the media was already portraying Laurens as a backward town, the “last bastion of the Southern tolerance for white supremacy.” But no amount of impassioned speeches or unity ribbons could hide the fact that Laurens had a serious race problem.

  On assignment for a Sacramento-based alternative weekly, journalist Mike Pulley traveled to Laurens for an up-close-and-personal look at the old Echo theater. After chatting with John Howard—hearing more about his attempts to “educate” folks about the history of the Klan—the reporter stopped in to a local gas station. Moments later, a young black man popped his head in the door and asked the cashier for a book of matches. The cashier, whom Pulley described as a “codger,” responded tersely, before turning back to his white patron, “They gettin independent as a devil, ain’t they?”

  Then he reached into the till and pulled out a small handgun. “I tell you what, if he messes with me too much, I’ll give him some of that.”

  * * *

  —

  While McDaniel was busy urging the County Council to condemn racism, Rev. Kennedy watched, somewhat awestruck, as press coverage of the Redneck Shop went national. In between ringing up patrons at the register and monitoring the sidewalk for signs of trouble, Mike Burden was busy fielding media inquiries from NBC News, the Today show, a slew of regional and national newspapers, and about a dozen different radio stations. Producers from Jerry Springer had called seven separate times. John Howard, meanwhile, had started telling reporters that he knew just “how a black person felt in the ’40s and ’50s” because he, too, was being discriminated against (a claim he made while wearing—without a trace of irony—a T-shirt printed with the words AIN’T RACIST, JUST NEVER MET A NIGGER I LIKED). He also told the local paper that he’d been threatened by “a local black minister” whose congregation, according to Howard, had used foul language and prejudiced talk against the white race.

  Howard didn’t bother using Kennedy’s name, because he didn’t have to. “You can’t live in Laurens and not know Reverend Kennedy,” Burden explained. “He’s like your Al Sharpton. I don’t say that in a bad way—I mean, that’s how popular he is. I mean, he slapped the mayor in the middle of town.”

  As soon as he’d gotten word about the license, Kennedy started planning how best to respond to the birth of the Redneck Shop. There was no question that he would organize protests and rallies and marches—and not just as a matter of principle. “The Klan has always been a deceptive organization,” he said. If this was how Klansmen were behaving in public, he could only imagine what might be going on behind closed doors.

  At the same time, he wasn’t quite sure what to expect from leaders within the black community. Not everyone was a fan of Kennedy’s aggressive, in-your-face style. Back in 1990, when he’d led the protests against discrimination in the schools and police brutality and Bobo Cook’s death, an African American City Council member, Marian Miller, had publicly admonished him. “Project Awakening wants to get people stirred up,” she told the Greenville News, stressing that patience and dialogue were the more appropriate ways to solve such problems.

  Rev. Kennedy was not about to be patient. But he’d also spoken with many members of his congregation, and while virtually everyone was angry and disgusted and deeply upset, quite a few were just plain scared. His first order of business, then, was hosting a community meeting at the church in order to address those fears, as well as to organize the official response to the shop. Kennedy was surprised—but pleased—to see Councilwoman Miller among the crowd.

  Like McDaniel, Miller had been a student at South Carolina State during the Orangeburg Massacre. She still had scars on her knees from crawling her way to safety that night. So she urged those planning to rally against the Redneck Shop to be both careful and cautious. “It is time for us to open our eyes,” she said. “But we don’t know who will be there, and it might be someone who wants us to act up. They might be looking for a confrontation. We aren’t going to give them that.”

  Rev. Kennedy echoed that sentiment at his first official protest rally the following Saturday. “If somebody rides by and starts calling names,” he shouted into the mic, “let the cops handle it. If any of you have violence in you, we’re asking you to leave. We’re not about that.”

  Nearly four hundred demonstrators, young and old, black and white, had gathered in defiance of racism. They came wearing their unity ribbons and bearing signs that read KKK IS NOT WELCOME IN THIS COUNTY and NO TOLERANCE FOR HATE. Five dozen cops, meanwhile, from at least four separate state and local agencies, were stationed around the square. Kennedy led the crowd in prayer and call-and-response chants and his famous “pump it up” song (“Everybody got to pump / Pump it / Pump it up!”). He welcomed speaker after speaker to the makeshift stage. He condemned those who had failed to act in light of worsening race relations. “To my critics,” he said, “you had a chance to do something and you didn’t.”

  It wasn’t until later that the reverend heard about the near-arrest. While Kennedy was praising his “white brothers and sisters” for joining the fight, authorities were questioning a suspicious character who turned out to be transporting military-grade walkie-talkies, baseball bats, a handgun, and a Klan robe in his truck. They let him go, however, because “nothing he had was illegal.”

  Rev. Jesse Jackson, a Greenville native, had been in town visiting family when he heard about the controversy. On Sunday, he met with ministers across the Upstate region to discuss strategy. By Monday he was in Laurens, holding a press conference outside New Beginning Missionary Baptist, urging residents not to back down. “It is not just the symbol, but the act of recruitment of people to titillate their fears, so this group brought in caskets with black mannequins in the caskets, and ropes around the necks of the mannequins, to demonstrate a threat and an act of intimidation, and the police and judges should not rest easy when that happens. If there is silence,” Jackson warned, “they will manifest themselves in the police department, they will manifest themselves in the judiciary, they will manifest themselves in the church.” He announced that he had contacted Attorney General Janet Reno and requested that she launch a federal investigation into the shop.

  The demonstrations that week generated far more attention than any of Kennedy’s previous protests. But in the immediate aftermath of the first rally, the demands of his day job took precedence over the new cause. The Soup Kitchen, which operated out of an industrial kitchen in the rear of his church, served an average of 225 meals every day, prepared and delivered entirely by volunteers. If the church van broke down—and it often did—someone had to make sure that Alberta, his aunt and head cook, had a ride in the morning.

  During the day, Kennedy was notoriously difficult to schedule a meeting with. Any time someone within a three-county radius called for help—and someone always called—he would leap into his car and speed off, no matter who might’ve been waiting to see him. It was not unusual to find a line of people queued up outside Kennedy’s office door, with no idea when he might be back. And these days the line seemed longer than usual. Younger parishioners started dropping by, angry and indignant about the shop on the square—the fact that it was still open for business, despite the protests. One evening, however, he took an impromptu meeting that left him more distressed than the others. A local school bus driver had shown up at the church and plopped himself down in the chair across from Kennedy. “He was wild-eyed,” the reverend remembers, “and I said, ‘Oh, Lord, what’s wrong?’ He told me that he was tired, and he was crying.”

  “Rev,” the driver asked, “why they treat us like this all the time?”

  “They have something in them, telling them that they are superior. That they are better than us.”

  “Will it ever change?”

  “No,” Kennedy said. “Never. Not till Jesus come back.”

  A different sort of minister
might’ve offered more comfort, but placating his parishioners, especially when it came to matters of race, was not Kennedy’s style. The two men sat for a long while, until the driver said quietly, “I want to burn it down.”

  It was not the first time that Rev. Kennedy heard someone in the community threaten violence. “I told him, ‘Fight with me. Join with me. Don’t burn it down. Give me your word.’ ” But the meeting left him feeling uneasy. He started to believe that some kind of major altercation was inevitable, that it was only a matter of time before he got word that someone was in serious trouble down at the shop.

  The only surprising part was how quickly the call came.

  It was Sunday, March 24, a little over a week after the first rally. Gregory Fielder, the owner of a nearby car wash, watched in stunned silence as a white 1975 Ford van backed into the Redneck Shop’s storefront at high speed, crushing display cases and clothing racks, sending shards of glass glittering across the pavement. The van rolled forward and then slammed into reverse, ramming through the shop windows again and again and again. Fielder was already on the phone with police when a middle-aged white man emerged from the van, climbed onto its roof, and started beating the Echo’s old metal marquee with a hickory stick.

  The vigilante turned out not to be a member of Kennedy’s congregation. He wasn’t even a resident of Laurens, in fact, but rather a forty-three-year-old carpet installer from Columbia named David Prichard Hunter. He was regarded by friends and family alike as something of a hippie pacifist—the incident with the van was deemed profoundly out of character. Yet even after police took him into custody, Hunter expressed no remorse for what he’d done.

  “I think it’s better to do this than, six months from now, to have to look at the face of an anguished black woman on television whose son has been hung from a tree and tortured,” he said. “I want to tell the rest of America that apathy ain’t going to get us anywhere. If no one takes a stand, a stand won’t be taken.”

  Hunter had actually made the hour-and-a-half drive to Laurens once before—five days before the incident—staying just long enough to peek in the windows of the empty shop before turning around and heading back home. It wasn’t until Sunday morning, after reading yet another article about the controversy, that he snapped.

  Word spread quickly. McDaniel was on the square within minutes, passing out more of his unity ribbons. The street was roped off by police, and a crowd gathered to gawk at the scene. But when it became clear that no one was injured—Hunter had apparently confirmed that the shop was empty before driving through it—the general vibe downtown shifted from fear and concern to something more like schadenfreude. “While we cannot condone willful destruction of anyone’s property,” McDaniel told reporters, “in my heart, I cannot tell you I’m sorry it happened.”

  Rev. Kennedy likewise stressed to reporters the importance of nonviolent resistance (“We disagree with the method”) but nonetheless met with Hunter and helped him raise the funds to make bail. As for Hunter’s family, they weren’t exactly upset. “This was madcap,” his brother Kevin admitted to the Greenville News, “but I’m kind of proud of him.”

  Michael Burden, on the other hand, was livid. He’d arrived on the scene later that morning to find shattered antiques and display cases, merchandise strewn across the sidewalk, books and charters and other irreplaceable Klan relics completely destroyed. “I wanted to kill the SOB,” he said. Before a crowd of roughly two hundred onlookers—many of them straight from church, dressed in their Sunday best—Burden set about boarding up the windows and doors and piling up items into the back of the shop to be sorted through later. Mad as he was, he and Howard took comfort in the fact that they weren’t alone. “We had people all the way from Spartanburg come down and they were helping us put the place back together,” he said. “We had one lady from Laurens, she actually took materials—shirts and stuff that’s been thrown out into the street—she took ’em to her house and washed ’em and brought ’em back, and we hung ’em up again.” Most of the helpers were either fellow Klansmen or Klan sympathizers—all were white—but there were enough people on hand to make quick work of getting the Redneck Shop back in business; the store reopened inside of eight hours, with the windows and doors boarded up.

  Speaking to reporters, John Howard claimed that he’d already forgiven Hunter “from the bottom of my heart.” But behind closed doors, he was gearing up for battle. Six additional security cameras were set up around the perimeter of the building. (The preexisting two had captured the entire episode with the van, and the footage had been shared with Laurens police.) Howard and Burden started spending nights at the shop, staying up until one or two o’clock in the morning, watching TV on a small set in the back hall near the restrooms and the water fountain, just waiting for someone else to come along and wreak more havoc. The longer they sat there, the more Burden was made to believe that the van was just the beginning of the violence, and that whatever else might be coming their way, Rev. Kennedy would be the man behind it. “The best weapon John had was me,” Burden said. “And the best way to get me activated was to make me believe my life and my livelihood was in jeopardy. He knew what buttons to push.”

  Judy heard Howard goading Mike into action, too. “He always used to tell him—and I heard him, quote unquote: ‘Mike, you got to do something. That nigger is like a thorn in my side. You hear me, boy?’ ”

  five

  NON SILBA SED ANTHAR

  For a brief moment that spring, immediately following David Prichard Hunter’s decision to plow his van into the front of the Redneck Shop, there was in Laurens a certain sense of levity—a feeling, almost, of victory within reach. Even with all the drama and turmoil, residents seemed to be talking more, making active efforts to “fix” the way in which their town was being portrayed around the world.

  Ed McDaniel, however, wondered aloud if Hunter’s actions—though lauded by many as nothing short of heroic—might have been too good to be true. In fact, he wondered, what if John Howard was in on it? “Could this be something contrived to get enough money to open his museum?” he mused to a reporter from the Associated Press.

  Technically, the museum was already open—just small, relegated to the corridor in the back of the shop, not yet fully realized. Howard’s plan had always been to finish renovating the cavernous screening room and relocate the exhibits there. In fact, he insisted that the store was merely a means of financing the larger mission. “I’m just trying to tell the truth of what took place,” he’d said back in early March. “The good, the bad, and the ugly of it. I’m not trying to lift [the Klan] up.”

  Still, McDaniel’s theory wasn’t exactly far-fetched. As part of Hunter’s preliminary hearing, Howard claimed nearly $15,000 worth of damage to the shop—more than $9,000 in losses to personal property, another $5,000 in damage to the building itself. The problem with that figure, as Hunter’s defense attorney Duffie Stone pointed out, was that a Laurens city tax assessor’s notice had pegged the value of the building and the land at just $5,200. “I don’t believe there is any allegation that the building was burned to the ground and the land scarred,” Stone said in court. “It appears to me that what Howard is doing is over-inflating the damage to the building.” Outside the courtroom, Stone’s dismissal of the charges bordered on outright sarcasm: “I can’t imagine that particular type of merchandise being worth fifty cents, much less ten thousand dollars.”

  The Klan has always traded on fear and intimidation—or, at least, spectacle—as a means of gaining power. Howard, in particular, was a known provocateur. But even he hadn’t expected opposition to the shop—and to him personally—to escalate so rapidly. In a matter of days, Janet Reno’s team at the Department of Justice agreed to launch an investigation into possible civil rights violations by the Redneck Shop. According to the local papers, a Laurens bank had asked John Howard to close his account. Whatever the true monetary value
of the damages, the shop was certainly a wreck. And now he had a County Council member accusing him, publicly, of insurance fraud.

  “John was getting royally pissed off about it,” says Burden. For all his years in the Klan, Howard had never been up against this kind of public pressure. He had always served some larger, more notorious Klan figure, and he’d stayed out of serious trouble, in part, by goading his subordinates into action. So it wasn’t long before he started suggesting to Burden that something ought to be done about McDaniel.

  “Well, he’s a councilman,” Burden replied, figuring there must be some kind of law against badmouthing one’s own constituents. “Why don’t you just sue the hell out of him?”

  “How?” Howard asked.

  “Easy. Get a damn lawyer.”

  * * *

  —

  McDaniel had no way of knowing what sort of trouble might be coming his way. On the contrary, by early April it seemed as though he had plenty to celebrate. Two weeks after hearing his formal proposal, the Laurens County Council voted—unanimously—to pass his anti-Klan resolution, condemning the Ku Klux Klan specifically and organized hate groups in general. The official text made no mention of John Howard or the Redneck Shop, but McDaniel hoped its passage would be viewed by those both inside and outside of town as a significant step. “By your vote tonight,” he told his fellow council members, “you have sent a message about Laurens County. You may not know it, but tonight you have fired a shot that in the morning could be heard round the world. You have done something you can look back on and tell your children you were proud to do. You have taken a stand—not against a business, but a belief.”