Mike, on the other hand, was quiet and skittish, which did not necessarily make him any easier to trust. “He was resisting who was helping him, so to speak,” Clarence said. But one morning, something shifted.
“We usually arrived at the church first,” Clarence says, “and they would come and sit with us. And one morning he told me, ‘I love Judy, and she loves coming here, and I’m gonna get on board.’ ”
Clarence had been among those urging Burden to come more often to Sunday services.
“You don’t think they mind?” Burden asked, gesturing to the folks filing into pews.
“Mind? No, they don’t mind. We don’t see no race in here.”
The truth was that Burden was desperate for reassurance. “Mostly he wanted to be assured that the congregation had nothing against him,” Clarence said. “He didn’t want to leave a whole bunch of men who cared about him”—the Klan—“to come to a congregation that didn’t care about him. He wanted the love and affection of the congregation to surround him.”
Burden’s need for reassurance was just as evident when he finally admitted to Kennedy how close he had come to taking the reverend’s life. Judy had insisted on it, had been insisting on it for weeks, in fact, until she finally dragged Mike to the church and sat him down in the reverend’s office. “She was real serious. You oughta see Judy when she get serious,” Kennedy said. “And she said, ‘If we’re going to have any kind of future, he’s gonna have to talk to you. Tell you everything.’ ”
Having thus deposited her husband, she gently closed the door behind her. “I’m going to leave you two alone now.”
Both men stared at each other for a moment in silence. Mike got up and began pacing along the narrow space just beyond the reverend’s desk. “I don’t know how to tell you,” Burden began.
“Just tell me.”
“There’s certain…words you won’t like.”
“Don’t worry about the words. I don’t care how you have to say it. Just give it to me plain.”
Kennedy settled into his chair as Mike began to describe the conversations he’d had with John Howard, the weapons stockpiled inside the shop, how Howard had described the reverend as a thorn in his side. “John Howard wanted me to kill you,” Mike said.
“And…? Keep going?”
The casual nature of the question—the same tone Kennedy had used with the police officer, months before—brought Mike up short. This wasn’t quite the reaction he had anticipated.
“Were you going to do it?” Kennedy asked.
Burden took a deep breath and then nodded. He described having climbed onto the roof on the night when Kennedy followed the angry young couple to the Redneck Shop, an evening when Kennedy had anticipated the potential for violence. To hear that a young Klansman had been dispatched as a kind of security measure was not particularly surprising. But then Burden began to describe a different evening, a time the reverend didn’t remember.
“That night, you were right there on 221 at the convenience store,” Burden said.
Kennedy sat up a little in his chair. “What night?”
“He told me the exact night,” Kennedy remembered later. “I had left the Greenwood-Abbeville area, and I was on my way home.” A little ways outside of town, the reverend stopped for gas at a convenience store beside the highway. Burden explained that he’d been following Kennedy for weeks, that he’d been waiting for an opportunity, a moment when the reverend was alone and vulnerable. On his way inside, however, Kennedy ran into the grandson of one of his older white friends, a boy he knew well and with whom he had a fond relationship. “He was like the leader in his group, and since he liked me, all these kids got around me.” Kennedy had been flanked by the group of chatty white children on his way inside the store, and they followed him all the way back to his vehicle after he’d paid. He hadn’t been alone at any point, which he now realized might have been the thing that saved him. “I remember that night, and I said, ‘My God.’ ”
“I hate to tell you all that,” Burden said when he had finished his confession. And then, with a sort of childlike innocence, he asked, “You mad at me?”
“I’m glad you felt the freedom to talk to me,” Kennedy said. “But we just have to get you on your feet, help Judy take care of those kids.”
If the reverend felt uncomfortable, or doubted the sincerity of his newest parishioner’s conversation, he did his best not to show it. His family, however, felt differently about the strange man who had joined the congregation. They wondered if the whole thing might have been some sort of plot to gain greater access to the reverend. They became more watchful, a little more suspicious.
“There were many times we would go to the church with prayer in our heart,” Pam, the reverend’s sister, said. “Even opening his office door, wondering and not knowing…would we find him alive?”
eight
“LET’S TALK BUSINESS”
Three days after the Laurens City Council voted to deny him a new business license, John Howard sued the city in federal court. Officials may have thought they were stepping up to do the right thing—“standing for something,” as city administrator Gene Madden described it. But it turned out that by refusing to accept Howard’s application for processing, failing to provide a written reason for the denial of a license, and denying Howard the right to address City Council in executive session before the decision was made, the city had violated a number of its own bylaws. Laurens City Code Section 11-37c plainly stated that no person should be “subject to persecution for doing business without a license” unless he or she first had been granted the chance to appeal.
“The city has simply chosen to disregard all its own procedures,” Suzanne Coe told the Clinton Chronicle. “They’re doing this kind of like a kangaroo court.”
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Howard in U.S. District Court in Greenville on July 20, asked for damages, attorneys’ fees, a reversal of the city’s ruling, and a declaration that the Redneck Shop was not a “public nuisance.” “I don’t agree with many things Mr. Howard says,” Coe explained, “but I don’t believe the First Amendment should be compromised simply because you’re offended.”
In the meantime, she advised her client to reopen the Redneck Shop, which Howard did—gleefully. He passed out photocopies of Section 11-37c to members of the press, praised his attorney, and touted the merits of his case during an impromptu press conference on the courthouse square. “When your own city council don’t even know their own laws,” he said, “it looks pretty bad for them.” Ten days after being put out of business, Howard’s store was headed toward a grand reopening.
“I knew it was going to happen,” Burden said later. “What I done was just threw a monkey wrench in his spoke. I was tryin to shut the store down and get it eliminated, but I didn’t have enough juice to do it.”
In the meantime, he and Judy continued to rely on Rev. Kennedy and New Beginning for even the most basic of needs. Mike spent more and more time helping out around the church. “There’d be times when Rev. Kennedy would come by and say, ‘Hey, can you come to the church and fix this?’ Or ‘My car is acting a little weird, would you look at this?’ ” he explained. “So it was kind of a trade-off, more or less.”
In addition to working as a sort of on-call handyman for New Beginning, Burden was also frequently asked to recount the story of his conversion. It turned out that loads of folks wanted to meet the man who left the Klan and joined a predominantly black church. At one point, an entire congregation from Pennsylvania made the trek to Laurens in a big Greyhound bus.
“That church was just packed,” Judy said later. “It was plumb full. They came all the way down from Philadelphia to meet Mike and me.”
Though Judy may have been enjoying, for the most part, her newfound celebrity status, Burden was considerably more wary. He had only just gotten used to the
members of Kennedy’s congregation, had only recently come to trust that the people of New Beginning had no plans for retaliation or retribution. “Now I’ve got people from Philadelphia,” he said later. “I don’t know these people. And I’m tryin to be cordial, but I’m also on guard as well. Because I’m waitin on anything. Anything. It can happen that quick.”
After so many years as the Klan’s enforcer, tasked with spotting any possible threat to himself and other high-level members, Burden felt strange putting himself at the mercy of strangers. It took the better part of the afternoon for him to relax enough to enjoy chatting with the churchgoers who lined up to shake his hand or ask him questions.
“There was an older lady—she didn’t shake my hand, she actually hugged my neck,” he said. “And then she grabbed my arm, and she looked at me. Then she rubbed her arm and rubbed her hand and she goes, ‘See? It don’t rub off. It’s all just skin color. We’re the same underneath.’ ”
* * *
—
As the weeks slipped by and Howard’s lawsuit worked its way through the court system, city officials came to understand just how much trouble they were in. By late summer, Howard had officially reapplied for a license (and been denied), but officials were compelled to let him do what he essentially had already been doing: operating the business as usual, pending results of the appeal process. In November of that year, Howard and his attorney were finally granted a private meeting with the City Council. Afterward, legal advisers warned that the city faced certain defeat should his case actually make it to trial. Granting him a license and abandoning the fight, on the other hand, would save taxpayer dollars and prevent the city from having to pay damages.
Rev. Kennedy could sense which way the wind was blowing even before he showed up to a City Council meeting in November and watched council member Johnnie Bolt motion to approve Howard’s license. Mayor Taylor, in his capacity as chairman of the council, put the motion forward for a vote. “All in favor, raise their right hand.”
Six hands shot up in the air.
“All opposed?”
Councilwoman Marian Miller was the only nay.
Standing in the back of the room, leaning against the wood-paneled wall with his hands clasped in front of him, Kennedy’s voice was barely audible: “That’s a disgrace.”
An Associated Press cameraman had traveled to Laurens to document the proceedings that evening. Mayor Taylor, perhaps sensing the possibility of an on-camera confrontation, quickly adjourned the meeting. Kennedy followed him outside, however, and accused him of betraying the best interests of his citizens. He then promptly got into a shouting match with Councilman Richard Griffin on the square. “I have no respect for a city that will approve the presence of a Ku Kluxer,” Kennedy declared, vowing to continue his protests. But even then, he knew that city officials were finished with the fighting, and the Redneck Shop was likely back in business for good.
Later that week, the editors at the Laurens County Advertiser—who just four months earlier had praised council for denying the license—now praised the decision to grant one. “We would encourage residents not to patronize the shop. The battles up to now only have served to give the business a bounty of free publicity it never could have afforded on its own and drawn numerous curiosity seekers to enter its doors. We hope that in the future, lacking the free publicity…the store will prove not to be economically viable and be forced to close or go bankrupt.”
For Kennedy, the request to ignore the shop was the most frustrating reaction of all. After all those months of protests, very few people in Laurens seemed to grasp what he had been trying to tell them: the store was little more than window dressing for whatever the Klan was doing behind the scenes. No matter what the reverend said, he couldn’t quite get the larger community to take the shop—and what it meant to African Americans in Laurens—seriously.
“Morally, I think [Howard] is wrong,” Councilman Griffin had told reporters after his verbal altercation with the reverend, “but legally, when we start taking apart the constitution of the United States, then we will be called ignorant. My point is, I know when to fold ’em. We need to move on.”
* * *
—
Rev. Kennedy didn't want to “move on.” If the city couldn’t deny Howard a business license before the fact, he thought, perhaps a case might be made to deny his license for cause—for violating laws that were already on the books.
According to Burden, Howard had taken advantage of some kind of loophole or grandfather clause, wherein areas of the building that weren’t relevant to the business didn’t necessarily have to be up to code. “What the inspector saw, the active parts of the building,” Burden says, “we had set those up correctly. But other parts of the building wasn’t really up to par. I mean, you had exposed wires, open circuits. A massive leak over a 480-volt breaker box—if water hit it, it’d put out a spark. Stuff like that.”
By December, Kennedy was back in City Council chambers, asking for a series of “full and public” investigations. Specifically, he wanted details about how the shop managed to pass its building code and fire inspections and how its occupancy permit had been obtained. “If the city is not serious,” he told reporters, “we are determined to do our own investigation.”
While he waited for an official response from the council, Kennedy also set about trying to pursue a criminal case. Beyond his family and a few members of the congregation, he hadn’t yet told anyone about Burden’s confession of what happened that night on the roof of the Redneck Shop. Now he wanted to press charges—against John Howard, the mastermind behind the alleged plot. He hired a civil rights lawyer, and together they approached the State Law Enforcement Division. Burden, likewise determined to see justice done, readily cooperated with the ensuing investigation. He provided SLED agents with a voluntary statement, wherein he explained that Howard had described Kennedy as a “thorn in his side” and wanted something done about the troublesome reverend. He also sat for a polygraph examination.
It didn’t help matters. To the questions “Did John Howard ask you to cause the death of Reverend David Kennedy?” and “Did John Howard give you guns and ammunition with which to shoot Reverend Kennedy?” Burden answered in the affirmative. The results of the examination, however, indicated deception in those answers.
For plenty of people in Laurens, Burden’s conversion had been far too swift to be believable. Law enforcement officials had more than once expressed concern to Rev. Kennedy, privately, that Burden’s change of heart might have been no more than a play for greater access. Others posited that Burden was just an opportunist, a man willing to say anything to anyone who would provide for his family. Kennedy’s own attorney was somewhat skeptical about Burden’s true motivations. “I trust David’s instincts for the guy to some degree,” he said warily in interviews with the Los Angeles Times. Only the reverend—and the members of his church—refused to lose faith in the newest congregant at New Beginning. “I’m not saying I can’t be fooled,” Clarence said. “But, no, Mike wouldn’t have done what he did with Reverend Kennedy if he didn’t really care.”
The lack of any concrete evidence, however, coupled with the questionable polygraph, effectively shut down the SLED investigation into John Howard. Meanwhile, nothing ever came of Kennedy’s requests for an investigation into the shop by the City Council. At every turn, he was stymied. And just as he feared, the Klan only continued to grow bolder.
At the state level, the debate over the Confederate flag had surfaced once again after Governor Beasley floated a proposal to remove it from the Capitol dome. (It was a surprising about-face for a governor who had supported flying the flag since his election in 1995.) At the next Laurens County Council meeting, McDaniel urged members to take a stand on the issue at the local level. “I’m tired of hearing the words ‘I don’t want to get involved’ or ‘I’m too old,’ ” he said. Support, however
, was lukewarm.
Soon afterward, John Howard’s friend and longtime associate Charles Murphy announced that he was opening a recruiting office on the second floor (i.e., the theater balcony) of the Redneck Shop. The goal, Murphy said, was to grow the Keystone Knights into a political force that could challenge any lawmaker who supported removing the flag. “If you’re in the legislature and vote to remove the Confederate flag,” Murphy told the Greenville News, “[you] can start unpacking [your] desks. You’re not going to be in office anymore.”
Only months earlier, Howard had denied that he was recruiting people to the Klan; now his store was advertising a recruiting office. It was just as Kennedy had predicted: the more the community turned a blind eye to the shop in the square, the bolder the Klan would become in displaying their message.
Soon enough, that message arrived at Kennedy’s doorstep. On Easter Sunday, 1997, the reverend’s mother, Frankie, arrived at the side door of the church early in the morning, expecting to cook breakfast for the congregation. She started up the steps, and then stopped dead in her tracks. Plastered to the door was a Redneck Shop bumper sticker—the logo of the shop printed over a Confederate flag along with the words WE’RE HERE TO STAY.
After the church fires in the area and everything that had gone on with the shop, Kennedy and his congregation interpreted the sticker as more than just a prank. “The sticker was put on the door that I enter every day, the one that is closest to my study,” Kennedy later told the Clinton Chronicle. The Laurens County Sheriff’s Office looked into the vandalism and quickly determined that the sticker had been placed on the door sometime between ten o’clock on Saturday night and eight-thirty the next morning, likely intending for the congregation to discover it on Easter Sunday. Two fingerprints were lifted from the sticker, but they were never identified. SLED agents, meanwhile, interviewed five juveniles who claimed to have seen an unknown white male plaster a similar sticker to a stop sign about a half mile west of the church before hopping in his car and driving off, but that investigation never went anywhere, either: two witnesses claimed the man’s car was white, one said the car was black, and two couldn’t remember the color of the car at all.
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