Burden

by Courtney Hargrave

  Dees called it a “day of reckoning.” The Christian Knights were officially out of business, and Klan-watchers hoped that fear of similar lawsuits might drive other groups farther underground. “It could very well make them much more cautious in terms of public appearances and statements,” Bill Moore, a political science professor at the College of Charleston, told the Associated Press. In South Carolina, the Klan was declared effectively dead.

  But they were wrong. Less than two years after the trial, a new faction—the Carolina Knights—sprang up in the Christian Knights’ place, led by a former acolyte of King’s, an eighty-year-old preacher named Charles Beasley. Charles Gladden, a fifty-one-year-old plumber and former rank-and-file member of the Keystone Knights, ascended to the position of Grand Dragon and announced plans to march in Wagener, Salley, and Charleston. In the fall of 2000, in the hamlet of Burnettown, near the Georgia border, he was joined by a longtime associate: John Howard. Despite having insisted to reporters for years that he was retired, Howard donned his robes, hoisted a Confederate flag, and crowed that there was “a place reserved in the fiery pits of hell” for those who refused to rub elbows with the Klan.

  The scandal surrounding the Redneck Shop, like all scandals, had lost its potency with time, fading considerably from public view in the ten years following Rev. Kennedy’s acquisition of the remainder interest. Every so often, a reporter would nose around town, snap some photos of the “World Famous KKK Museum,” talk to locals about the Confederate flag or illegal immigration or the legacy of slavery, and write up an article about the state of contemporary race relations. (“Slavery was eons ago,” a Laurens bar patron once explained to a Vice reporter. “We’re past that.”) But for the most part, people just wanted to move on. Even the new mayor expressed a kind of resignation whenever she was asked to comment about the shop. “They’re in business just like anyone else.” The sigh was practically audible.

  Actual goings-on at the Echo hadn’t generated much news since the spring of 1997. The mural painted on the back wall—the Klansman on horseback—was replaced with a more palatable tableau: a portrait of Jesus, arms outstretched, hovering above a single eyeball and three interlocking rings, symbols associated with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, a centuries-old (non-racist) fraternal order in which John Howard claimed membership.

  Most residents had no idea the Redneck Shop had only grown more prominent among white supremacists, or that Howard was playing host to a far larger audience than a ragtag group of backwoods Klansmen. Beginning in 2002 or 2003, a Michigan-based neo-Nazi group chose the shop as the venue for its annual White Unity Christmas Party. At a 2006 gathering of the Aryan Nations—dubbed the Twenty-Fifth World Congress—more than 150 white supremacists of all stripes packed the meeting hall to hear speeches about the evils of blacks (“soulless mud people”) and the depravity of Jews (“Satan is their father”), interspersed with information about the benefits of “leaderless resistance.”

  Virgil Griffin was there, telling those in the audience to “get every weapon you can get.”

  He was followed onstage by a South Carolina–based Aryan Nations officer, sporting on his biceps the double lightning-bolt insignia of the Schutzstaffel. “You want to see blood in the streets?” he hollered. “I do!”

  Afterward, attendees milled around the crowded lobby, where they could peruse the usual assortment of racist bumper stickers and T-shirts, as well as merchandise brought in specially for the event: Workbench AR-15 Project, for example, a how-to manual for assembling one’s own assault rifle and flouting federal gun laws.

  The 2006 gathering was the rare occasion when a journalist, John F. Sugg of the now-defunct paper Creative Loafing, was allowed to document the proceedings. Through the windows of the lobby, mere moments after the conclusion of the day’s speeches, Sugg noticed a small black child, perhaps eight years old, ride past the Echo on a bright orange bicycle. John Howard, who had been sitting on a wooden stool behind the sales counter, sidled over to the front of the shop and waved his finger in the direction of the boy. “There’s a nigger I’d like to hang.”

  The Klan wasn’t dead—in fact, it was growing. Between 2000 and 2007, the Southern Poverty Law Center observed a 50 percent spike in the number of hate groups operating in the United States, as well as increased cooperation among groups on the far right, a trend largely attributable to a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment. “If any one single issue or trend can be credited with re-energizing the Klan, it is the debate over immigration in America,” Deborah Lauter, civil rights director of the Anti-Defamation League, warned in a press release. The Klan was returning to its nativist roots. And just a few months after the Aryan Nations convention, the Redneck Shop would find itself in the news once again—this time for its association with a man named John Taylor Bowles, a neo-Nazi running for president of the United States.

  Bowles, the party hopeful for the National Socialist Movement (NSM) in 2008, was a short man with a ruddy complexion and a youthful chubbiness about him. A Maryland native and thirty-year veteran of the neo-Nazi movement, Bowles had moved to Laurens earlier that year, making his campaign headquarters at the only place in the country audacious enough to host such an effort. For his running mate, he needed someone with bona fides, someone who could give his campaign legitimacy within the broader white supremacist crowd. He chose Wild Bill Hoff, who by then had left the Klan for the NSM and risen to the rank of “major,” in charge of East Coast operations.

  Bowles’s presidential platform was absurdly ambitious. Upon his election, he promised free healthcare, free college education, low crime, low gas prices, zero-interest mortgages, a retirement age of fifty-five, and a 5 percent flat tax. His appeal to neo-Nazis lay in how he intended to pay for such promises: by no longer “wasting white taxpayer dollars on third world countries, no-win wars, and foreign aid to Israel.” He also advocated sending nonwhites “back to their respective homelands.”

  “This,” he said to a curious reporter from the Columbia City Weekly, pointing to the swastika on his armband, “is coming back into style again.” He admitted that there were many different symbols his party could use, but that the swastika seemed “to do the trick.”

  “Trick” is the right word for it.

  The National Socialist Movement had been an obscure, little-known group on the far-right fringe since its founding in the mid-1970s, long overshadowed by more prominent neo-Nazi organizations such as the National Alliance and the Aryan Nations. Things started to change in 1993, however, when the group’s founder showed up at a Minnesota state legislative committee meeting in full Nazi regalia, a stunt that landed him on the front page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. A year later, twenty-one-year-old Jeff Shoep assumed control of the party and immediately began agitating for attention. It worked. By the mid-2000s, the NSM had become the largest—and flashiest—neo-Nazi group in the country. Members dressed in Nazi-style brown shirts (or Braunhemden), jackboots laced tight to the knee, and red armbands bearing the swastika. Every event they organized was designed to attract maximum unrest. The bigger the spectacle, the more intense the media coverage. The more intense the media coverage, the more prospective members sought the group out. A 2005 rally in a crime-ridden, gang-infested neighborhood outside Toledo, for example, drew as many as six hundred counterprotesters and quickly descended into a four-hour riot, which generated international press attention. Within months, the NSM, which before the rally had had fifty-nine chapters in thirty-two states, grew to eighty-one chapters in thirty-six states.

  Bowles’s presidential campaign was just one more in a long line of publicity stunts. No one in his right mind—not even among the white supremacist crowd—thought Bowles would actually win the election. (According to campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, Bowles raised a little more than $3,500 between the fall of 2006 and the summer of 2008.) The point of the White House run was t
o further increase the NSM’s visibility and to bolster its membership ranks. The group’s largest event in 2007—at which Bowles announced his candidacy—was an anti-immigration rally at the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, followed by a three-day national meeting in Laurens, hosted by the Redneck Shop.

  To anyone with even a cursory knowledge of John Howard’s forty-year career in the Klan, it would’ve seemed odd that he was suddenly palling around with neo-Nazis. This was a man who had preached about the legacy of William Joseph Simmons and the Klan’s supposed roots in American patriotism. Back in 1996, the Keystone Knights had actually banned anyone wearing neo-Nazi uniforms, emblems, armbands, or insignia from its public and private functions. Yet Howard seemingly had no qualms about his new friends, nor did he mind when the Nazis wanted to paint over the back wall in the shop yet again: the Odd Fellows mural was replaced with side-by-side portraits of George Lincoln Rockwell (founder of the American Nazi Party) and Hitler, their faces superimposed over the American and the Nazi flags, respectively.

  Howard’s longtime friendship with William Hoff might have had something to do with it. More likely, however, is that he was looking to cash out. There were rumors in the larger white supremacy community that Howard, who was aging and in ill health, was looking to sell the Redneck Shop. (Despite the initial publicity surrounding Kennedy’s purchase of the remainder interest, no one in Howard’s circle seemed to realize that the shop was no longer his to sell.) When no one in the Klan ponied up, Howard turned to Nicholas Chappell, the treasurer for Bowles’s campaign, an eighteen-year-old who had just inherited a large sum of money after the death of his stepfather. In a package deal, Howard sold both the shop and the Lanford property to Chappell for a total of $25,000. Once again, however, Howard reserved for himself a life estate—the right to live in his home and run his shop for the rest of his life. He had found himself a new Mike Burden.

  * * *

  —

  Rev. Kennedy was stunned.

  Sure enough, there were two deeds “on top” of his deed, staking claim to the Echo theater. The most recent, dated March 30, 2007, transferred ownership from Hazel Howard—John Howard’s wife—to Nicholas Chappell, reserving a life estate for John. It was basically the same deal as Kennedy’s 1997 transaction, only with his name swapped out for someone else’s, as if Michael Burden had never sold him the building all those years ago.

  Kennedy flipped to the next page. The second deed—the older of the two, dated November 16, 2006—was even more troubling. This deed purported to transfer Mike Burden’s remainder interest to Hazel Howard. As he read through the paperwork, the story became clear: through a circuitous series of swaps, Burden and Howard had conspired to circumvent Kennedy’s rightful claim to the property. They had transferred ownership to Hazel; Hazel then transferred ownership back to John. And there was no doubt about Burden’s complicity: his signature was right there in black and white, notarized and witnessed by two parties.

  Kennedy had heard rumors over the years that Burden had rekindled his friendship with John Howard, even though he was still incarcerated. The more pressing question was how two fraudulent deeds could have been filed in the first place. Kennedy tracked down a legal assistant named Donna Jackson—the same legal assistant who had prepared the fraudulent deeds for John Howard—who informed Kennedy that no one in her office had performed a title search to verify Howard’s right to sell the Echo in the first place. Apparently no one in the clerk’s office had vetted the deeds for legitimacy before recording them, either. Any number of steps might have prevented the error, but it seemed as though Howard had just gotten lucky. As for the incompetence, Kennedy was nonplussed. “That’s South Carolina for you.”

  The discovery of those fraudulent deeds would mark the beginning of a years-long journey to understand what had happened, and to reassert his claim to the Echo. Kennedy hired a lawyer, but in the meantime he decided to pay a visit to an old friend.

  Kennedy phoned the prison chaplain at Northside Correctional Institution—a minimum-security facility in Spartanburg County—and set up an appointment to see Michael Burden. But as he waited in the visitation room, a drab room lined with large windows, through which he could see prisoners shuffling single-file toward visits with their friends and family, he wasn’t quite sure what to expect—whether his former congregant would even agree to see him, let alone admit to the fraudulent deed transfer. And then, through the glass, he caught his first sight of Michael Burden in nearly ten years.

  “I’m trying not to get tearful,” Kennedy said later, “but when I saw Mike coming…his hair had turned gray. It was like watching a movie—everything had gone by so fast.” Burden was then a few years shy of forty years old, still thin and lanky, but the boyishness had gone out of him. Tiny lines formed at the corners of his eyes. “I had to keep from breaking down,” Kennedy said, “because if he had stayed with us he never would’ve gone to prison.”

  As Burden walked across the room, the reverend stretched his arms wide. “And he fell in my arms,” Kennedy said, “just hugging and squeezing.” They sat and chatted for a while as old friends, catching up about New Beginning and the members of Kennedy’s congregation. Clarence had since left and become a reverend in his own church, Wateree Baptist. Judy and her children, now grown, were living and working in the area; Kennedy sometimes took up a collection for her when money got tight. Finally, Kennedy brought up the subject of the deed transfer. “I said, ‘Mike, I have a paper from the courthouse, and there are rumors that you got back with John Howard. Did you join with him at any time to try and resell the Redneck Shop property?’ ”

  Mike shook his head.

  “I knew he was lying,” Kennedy said later, “because his name was on the paper.” And yet, as frustrated as he was by the deception, Kennedy still felt a measure of empathy for the man. Burden’s collusion, Kennedy understood, was at that point less about ideology than it was an act of total desperation. Without Judy and the constant support of the church, Burden was in many ways more vulnerable than he’d been on the outside. “It makes me think about all the children caught up with the Klan and other hate groups,” Kennedy said. “They just want to belong somewhere. They just want to feel a part of something, and unfortunately the wrong people nourish them and make them feel like they are important. So I always had to keep an opening for Mike. I didn’t beat him up—‘Oh, you lying.’ ”

  Since Burden wouldn’t admit his part in the deed transfer, Kennedy had little choice but to take his case to court. In the meantime, he could only hope that Burden might change his mind and once again gather the strength to defy John Howard. “When people get to the root of it,” he later told the New York Times, “this is a horror story about what happens to young guys who are drifting and fall prey to the Klan.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time Rev. Kennedy filed suit against John Howard, Michael Burden, and Nicholas Chappell in order to resolve the cloud on his title to the Echo theater, tragedy had struck the NSM. One day after announcing Bowles’s and his campaign for the White House, William Hoff was killed in a car accident on a rural stretch of Highway 146, not far from the Lanford property. Though he had five brothers and sisters, the only survivors mentioned in his obituary were “two special and close friends,” John and Hazel Howard, and an “adopted grandson,” Dwayne. Not long after his death, Hoff’s brother Sheldon publicly revealed their family’s biracial heritage, which he’d discovered some fifteen years earlier when he got interested in genealogical research. (In the 1910 census, his father’s family is listed as black.) Sheldon had learned about Hoff’s death while surfing the Internet. “We don’t have his ashes,” he later told a reporter from GoUpstate.com. “We don’t even have a button from his clothes. [The neo-Nazis] stole him in life, and they’re stealing him in death.”

  Bowles tried to make political hay out of the situation by insinuating to repo
rters that Hoff’s death was suspicious, but the grandstanding eventually cost him. After publicly accusing the leader of the NSM of mismanaging funds and failing to support his presidential campaign, Bowles was booted from the organization. He promptly formed his own splinter group, the National Socialist Order of America, which failed to attract many members and later disbanded after Bowles suffered a massive heart attack. (Upon his recovery, Bowles joined up with the American Nazi Party.)

  As for the young Chappell, he refused to acknowledge Kennedy’s claim to the Redneck Shop, telling a reporter from the Canadian National Post, “Blacks think that they own everything. That’s part of their nature, part of their mindset. I could claim I own any building I want but that doesn’t mean it’s true.” Not long after the collapse of the National Socialist Order of America, however, Chappell packed up and left Laurens. Once again, day-to-day operations at the shop fell to John Howard. And for the next three years, as Kennedy’s civil case wound its way through the court system, Howard continued to sell his wares and “educate” people about the history of the Klan, cheerfully leading customers through the shop and pointing out photos and placards and bits of memorabilia like some kind of macabre museum docent.

  Sometimes videos of Howard’s proselytizing made their way to YouTube. In a clip posted to the site on August 24, 2010, Howard points to a framed snapshot of a man in a black cowboy hat, standing in front of a green pickup truck, holding a sign printed with the words PRAISE GOD FOR AIDS. “He’s the one that killed those niggers down there in Birmingham, Alabama,” Howard says. “All those kids at that church? He’s the one that blew ’em up.” Slick as a used-car salesman, Howard suddenly switches gears and starts to hawk his merchandise. “These stickers are not but two dollars each…You can get ya a Nazi sword—whaddaya call them damn things? Bayonets? Daggers? Fifteen dollars.”