As the years ticked by, however, Howard’s health began to decline further. By the time Kennedy’s civil case finally made its way to court in the fall of 2011, the Redneck Shop was open for business only one day a week.
Howard’s defense at the non-jury trial was to plead ignorance. In sworn depositions, he admitted that he had heard Kennedy claim to own the theater, but that he’d brushed off the claim as implausible, if not ridiculous. “I figured it was Reverend Kennedy just raving up and down the streets: I’m gonna close him. And I ignored it…I figured the man was crazy.”
Michael Burden, meanwhile, denied having any knowledge or memory of signing over the deed to New Beginning, and claimed that he’d been struggling with addiction issues back in the 1990s. “I was drinking and doing drugs at the time,” he said in his deposition. “My memory back then was fogged with drugs and alcohol and I had my own problems….My memory’s vague—very vague back then because of what I was doing and the problems I was having myself.”
“Nonsense,” Judy said later when she heard about Burden’s testimony. “Mike drank like two or three beers and he would be puking. He’s not a big drinker. Never has been. And on drugs?”
“You couldn’t get that man to take a Tylenol,” Stacy said.
Circuit Court Judge Frank R. Addy Jr. wasn’t buying it, either. In his December 9 ruling, he wrote that “the evidence demonstrates that Mr. Burden was lucid, mentally sound, and not under the influence of any intoxicant at the time of the conveyance [to New Beginning]….Despite contentions that Mr. Burden was impaired because of years of substance abuse, the record indicates that [he] was of sound mind and understood the legal ramifications of his actions….I also find credible the testimony that, at the time of the conveyance, Mr. Burden had developed a spiritual relationship with [Rev. Kennedy], which also contributed to Mr. Burden’s motivation for the transfer.” The judge ruled both the 2006 and 2007 deeds invalid, confirmed Rev. Kennedy’s ownership of the remainder interest, and ordered Howard and Burden to pay Kennedy’s legal fees.
In the wake of the trial, John Taylor Bowles attempted to downplay the significance of the ruling. In remarks posted to a variety of white supremacist websites, he explained that Howard’s original life estate was still valid. “As long as the Redneck Shop is alive and [Howard] can operate his business in the building, the American Nazi Party can hold its activities there as well. The sky did not fall and the ground did not open up.” In reality, however, the trial severely damaged his reputation within the movement. The message boards at WhiteReference.com, a now-defunct white supremacist website, lit up with posts about how Howard and Bowles had duped the young Nick Chappell. “In this matter Nick Chappell is the one who really got screwed over,” one user wrote. “Bowles [and Howard] should learn to be men for once in their lives and actually give that young man back his money, or at least attempt to start paying him back like a real Aryan would do.”
There’s no evidence, however, that Chappell ever got his money back. In emails purportedly written by Chappell and posted to WhiteReference.com, he claimed that he spent virtually all of his $263,000 inheritance on Bowles’s presidential campaign, the Redneck Shop, and donations to other organizations within the movement. “My youthful ignorance proved to be a great weakness of mine,” he lamented. “I don’t associate with Bowles or any other organization at the moment.”*
John Howard, meanwhile, had been dealing with an array of personal issues. Even before the completion of the trial, he and his wife, Hazel, divorced. Soon after, he reportedly suffered a stroke. Within months of the ruling, in May 2012, he vacated the property. After sixteen years, the Redneck Shop finally closed its doors for good.
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Later that fall, roughly ten months after winning his lawsuit, Kennedy received a late-night phone call from the Laurens County Fire Department. He jumped in his car and sped off down the Highway 127 bypass, a thick plume of black smoke already visible above the trees. By the time he arrived on the scene, New Beginning had burned nearly to the ground. The official cause of the fire was ruled to be an electrical issue, though Kennedy was understandably suspicious. He will always wonder if the fire was actually an act of retaliation by the neo-Nazis who had gathered at the Redneck Shop, or some disgruntled members of the Klan.
Given all that had happened, given the loss of his church, the dwindling size of his congregation, the protracted fight for ownership of the shop, and the fact that he is often still ostracized in Laurens, it would be easy to think that his extraordinary kindness in taking in Michael Burden was somehow not worth it.
Burden’s collusion with John Howard, however, was short-lived. After getting out of prison, he found a job at the Anderson plant in Clinton, manufacturing hardwood floors. Before long, he started working toward getting his trucking license, the job he’d always wanted and never before been able—or ready—to pursue. For the first time in his life, Burden gained a modicum of financial stability, a way to support and provide for himself. The trucking job enabled him to finally leave Laurens, and John Howard, for good.
“I can’t never change the fact that I did what I did,” Burden said later. “That’ll be there forever. I do feel remorse. I do feel pity and shame for it. But everything’s a lesson in life. If I hadn’t been through that, I wouldn’t be the person I am now. I do not support the Klan, and I do have remorse for some of the stupidity I was encompassed in. It took me a long time to find that inner peace, for the turmoil and the hatred and everything to dissipate. But it has.”
In time, he was able to reconnect with Judy, but as friends. “We’ve talked once or twice,” she said, “and I wished him all the luck in the world. That’s how I found out that he was a truck driver now, and I said, ‘Well, good.’ ’Cause he really wanted to do that back when we were together. He really wanted to do that.”
Judy believes that Burden’s brief collusion with John Howard was largely based on fear.
“He really done a number on Mike, he really did. I’m so thankful that he was able to get out of here.”
As for her relationship with the reverend, she believes it’s not an exaggeration to say that he saved her life. “I don’t know what me and my kids woulda done back then if it hadn’t been for Reverend Kennedy.”
For several weeks after the church fire, Rev. Kennedy operated out of his vehicle. He and his wife delivered food to needy families, as the Soup Kitchen was temporarily closed. They hosted Sunday services at their home, packing the den with thirty or forty people each week. But it wasn’t long before he got a call from a local businessman, Harry Agnew, who wanted to help the church get back on its feet. “New Beginnings does so much good in the community, and Rev. Kennedy has reached out to so many people,” Agnew later told reporters. “I was honored to help.” Agnew and Kennedy spent several weeks visiting properties around the county until finally settling on an industrial building on a quiet stretch of Route 76, between Clinton and Laurens, which Kennedy purchased with insurance money and private donations. In lieu of pews, the sanctuary was filled with rows and rows of chairs—donations from Ryan’s, the same steakhouse where Kennedy and Burden had shared their first meal some twenty years earlier, gifted to New Beginning when the restaurant went out of business. The Soup Kitchen is housed in an adjacent property, and on most days there are more visitors to the pantry than to the church. Yet Kennedy is thankful. “It was a tremendous blessing,” he said of the new building. “All that came together to allow it to happen was an incredible blessing from God.”
The reverend is in his sixties now. He still protests all manner of injustice in Laurens, still rankles people with his fiery rebukes, still challenges people to reckon with the past—and remains a deeply controversial figure in Laurens. Yet he is surprised when people express awe or disbelief at his church’s willingness to take in the Burdens.
“I never saw anything great in wh
at we did,” he admits. “Nothing phenomenal. It’s what we do. If you can’t be moved to see about the human condition, then something is wrong with you.” He quotes the theologian Howard Thurman, author of the classic religious treatise Jesus and the Disinherited. “He wrote about fear, hatred, and hypocrisy—the three hounds of hell. They will track you and destroy you. They kill the spirit.” Thurman, an African American writer and educator, is most famous for providing a religious framework for the leaders of the civil rights movement. His philosophy of nonviolence profoundly influenced Martin Luther King Jr. By invoking him, Kennedy continues in a long tradition within the black church of confronting injustice without succumbing to hatred.
He preaches less often than he used to, choosing instead to guide and train the next generation of ministers. When he does ascend to the pulpit, however, he speaks with the same passion and fire he had in the spring of 1996, demanding from his parishioners a commitment to fighting intolerance. At a recent service, he challenged his tiny congregation to examine their own good works.
“I wanna know,” Kennedy thundered, “is your work speakin for ya? Have you fed the hungry, clothed the nekkid? Have you visited the sick? Have you visited those who are incarcerated? Have you taken in strangers that you did not know? Have you given water to those that are thirsty? Remember what Jesus said: whatever you did not do for the least of these, my brethren, you did not do for me.”
Afterward, members of the small congregation milled around the sanctuary, discussing the upcoming youth retreat and making plans for Sunday supper. Reverend George Dendy, one of Kennedy’s associate pastors and a recent addition to the New Beginning family, was eager to share a few anecdotes—from his childhood in the days just after integration, to the casual racism he still experiences every day, to the fights his pastor continues to wage in the name of injustice. “If anyone has a right to hate, it’s Reverend Kennedy,” he says. “But he doesn’t, because the love of God has come in, and I am glad about it.” He wants people to know about the sacrifices Kennedy has made in order to help so many others. It’s why he joined the church in the first place.
“I came because I like what they do in the community,” he says. “I wanna serve, so the soup line, the dinners? I just like being a part of that. And I’m amazed at the church not having but a few members, but yet feeding fifteen hundred people. I’m amazed that they got a food bank. So that let me know that God is doing some great things here, even if there’s not great numbers.” That’s what keeps Kennedy’s church going, despite everything that happened in Laurens, and despite all of the work that remains to be done. Dendy points to a verse from Hebrews 11: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
He believes good things are in store for the church, and especially for Rev. Kennedy.
“He’s overdue for a blessing,” he says.
* Chappell’s retirement from the white supremacist movement was ultimately short-lived. By 2017, he was living in South Dakota with his wife and four children and had become a “reverend” in the Creativity Movement, formerly known as the Church of the Creator, a neo-Nazi group. As he explained to journalist Chris Hagen, he was busy preparing for RaHoWa—or racial holy war. “I do believe that eventually this will boil down to a race war as we have already seen with the riots in cities like Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore.”
AFTERWORD
Twenty years after the Redneck Shop opened its doors, Andrew Heckler’s film about the events in Laurens finally went into production. Burden was shot on location in Jackson, Georgia, a rural community forty miles southeast of Atlanta, over five weeks in October and November 2016. A stand-in for the Redneck Shop was erected in an abandoned storefront just east of Jackson’s courthouse square. The building was then outfitted with a replica of the Echo’s metal marquee, and filled with T-shirts and bumper stickers and racist trinkets—near carbon copies of the merchandise John Howard hawked for more than a decade. In advance of filming, the county issued a press release to alert residents to parking and street closures in the area, and to offer the following warning: “The set dressing…will include placement of some Confederate flags in various scenes. We are asking that [people] take no offense and understand that while this is based on a true story, it is only a movie and is in no way a reflection of the spirit of our community today.”
County officials needn’t have worried. One night, not long after the marquee was nailed into place, Heckler received an urgent call from his production designer, Stephanie Hass. “You need to come down here,” she said. “There are people inside to get into the store. They think it’s real. They’re…shopping.”
Indeed, for the next several weeks, producers and production assistants fielded questions from yet more locals who were anything but offended.
When do you guys open?
This store is just what we needed!
This is the greatest thing to come to Jackson in a long time.
The fall of 2016 turned out to be an especially fraught time to film a movie about combatting racial prejudice. Upticks in hate crimes had been widely reported, as had eruptions of violence at rallies across the nation. Presidential elections aren’t exactly notable for their civility; mudslinging and smear tactics are as old as politics themselves. But as scores of journalists and historians pointed out, much of the increasingly inflammatory and divisive language utilized on the campaign trail—the depiction of a nation in peril, besieged by immigrants, the “America First” sloganeering—bore an eerie resemblance to 1920s-era Klan rhetoric.
Something was brewing, and it was palpable on set.
Dexter Darden, a young African American actor cast in the role of Reverend Kennedy’s son, has since spoken publicly about the night a car full of white men slowed to a stop as he was preparing to film a scene. One of the men hopped out, waved a Confederate flag in Darden’s face, and said: “You don’t fucking belong here. Go home.”
“That’s when I realized it was real,” Darden later told audiences at the Sundance Film Festival. “Because of the election, people became bold and outright and outspoken. We were trying to make a movie about peace and love, and all we were receiving was hate.”
The violence and volatility did not abate after Americans went to the polls. According to a report compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, nearly 900 “hate incidents” took place across the United States in the ten days immediately following the election. The months to come would bring the announcement of a ban on travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries, the assertion that a federal judge could not fairly preside over a case owing to his Mexican heritage, the declaration that a private citizen with the temerity to protest police brutality was merely a “son of a bitch,” and myriad claims that the country was being “stolen” and overrun by “animals” (i.e., immigrants). Yet the sight of neo-Nazis and Klansmen marching through the streets of Charlottesville in the summer of 2017 still seemed to catch the nation by surprise. The overwhelming response to the spectacle of young white men chanting “You will not replace us” and assembling beneath Nazi and Confederate flags was one of disbelief. How can this really be happening? Within hours, the hashtag #ThisIsNotUs began trending on Twitter.
Racially motivated violence, however, has plagued every generation since the country’s founding; meanwhile, race has successfully been made into a wedge issue in every presidential election. What happened in Charlottesville is not new, and it recalls the question Reverend Kennedy asked reporters when they first descended on Laurens two decades ago: “America would love to put all the blame on the Ku Klux Klan. But what allows this atmosphere that allows the Klan to become bold?”
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John Howard died in September 2017 after a long illness. In accordance with his wishes, there was no memorial service. His obituary mentioned nothing about his decades-long association with the K
lan and described him as the “last surviving member of his immediate family.” (Despite his three children, ten grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren.) The tenor of the obit seemed to signal the end of something. Debbie Campbell, owner of the newly renovated Capitol Theatre and Café, recently explained to the Charleston Post and Courier that “blacks and whites are mixing more these days than ever before.”
Less than four months after Howard’s death, however, the Laurens School District 55 Board of Trustees announced a bond referendum that would have raised $109 million for improvements to educational facilities across the county and funded the construction of a new high school. The announcement generated immediate pushback, and within weeks the vote had split along racial lines. Reverend Kennedy—a vocal proponent of the measure and outspoken supporter of the district’s African American superintendent, Dr. Stephen Peters—spoke about Laurens’s “racist history” and “lack of progress” at a local meeting of the NAACP. It did not go over well.
“I thought it was bull crap,” Dianne Belsom, founder of the Laurens County Tea Party, later told reporters. “Instead of celebrating the gains we’ve made, he’s just a race-baiter stuck in the past.” Kennedy endured an enormous wave of criticism for his particular style of activism (which included protesting outside Belsom’s home with a bullhorn). Equally as active, however, was the “Vote No” contingent. Sharon Barnes, owner of a picture frame shop on the square, offered a prize to the first person who delivered one hundred signatures of Laurens residents in opposition to the referendum—four signed prints of Confederate officers J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
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