Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South

by David Beasley

  The first Klan was launched right after the Civil War in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a social club, but the next year it became a “regulative and protective organization” and began terrorizing former slaves, trying to put them back in their places, trying to make sure they realized that they might be free but they were not equal. This first Klan was disbanded in 1872 by its grand wizard, the former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. By then, it had accomplished its goal of making sure that the freed slaves understood: The white man was still running the show in the South, emancipation or no emancipation, Thirteenth Amendment or no Thirteenth Amendment, and the Klan would enforce this with the sword if necessary.

  While the Klan was founded in Tennessee, Georgia was where it was reborn in 1915, on Thanksgiving night, when fourteen men burned a wooden cross atop Stone Mountain, a granite outcropping east of Atlanta. The decision to resurrect the Klan in 1915 was the idea of William J. Simmons, a former Methodist minister and recruiter for a fraternal organization, Woodmen of the World. The climate seemed right for a new Klan. The year of 1915 was an ugly year. There was violence in the air. This was the same year as the Leo Frank lynching. And there was a resurgence of nostalgia for the Old South, for the Confederacy, for white supremacy, and for the original Klan.

  That same year, D. W. Griffith’s silent movie The Birth of a Nation premiered on screens across the country. Nearly three hours long, the film was a major hit nationally, screened even by President Woodrow Wilson, a former Georgian, in the White House.

  The Atlanta Constitution said about the film, “It is bigger, vaster, and more thrilling than anything ever conceived by a movie producer.”5 There were something like eighteen thousand people and three thousand horses in the production, and the movie even had a scene of the burning of Atlanta by Sherman’s troops in 1864.

  It portrayed the original Klansmen as heroes. There’s a scene where a white woman, pursued by a freed slave, jumps off a cliff rather than submit to his sexual advances. The black character, named Gus, is lynched by the Klan and, in the earlier versions of the film, castrated. The movie was so controversial, it sparked race riots in several northern cities.

  This was the first full-length feature film, and moviegoers had never experienced anything like it. For white southerners, The Birth of a Nation had everything: great cinematic innovations and a depiction of the North’s brutal subjugation of the South.

  “The Southerner sees grievous wrongs of history righted,” said the Atlanta Constitution.

  The movie opened at the Atlanta Theater on Forsyth Street accompanied by a thirty-piece orchestra. The audience reaction was visceral. During a scene of white-hooded Klansmen on horseback in a field, members of the audience could not restrain themselves. “Many rise from their seats,” the Constitution wrote. “With the roar of thunder, a shout goes up. Freedom is here. Justice is at hand. Retribution has arrived.”

  There were a hundred Confederate veterans at the Atlanta premiere, some who served with General Robert E. Lee himself up until he surrendered at Appomattox. They were honored with free tickets on the house. They drowned out the sound of the orchestra with rebel yells.

  For the veterans who had endured the humiliation of Reconstruction, the movie was a cathartic vindication. “I remember the day I went to the polls and they wouldn’t let me, me a white man, vote,” said one of the veterans.6

  Even with this simmering atmosphere over “grievous wrongs” of the past, the new Klan was at first slow to catch on, with membership reaching only a few thousand. Simmons, the founder of the new Klan, never believed it would have mass appeal outside the former Confederate states. But the national commercial success of The Birth of a Nation may have been a sign that the sentiment for white supremacy so passionately endorsed in the South was much broader than Simmons suspected.

  This became evident when Simmons engaged the Southern Publicity Association to help with recruiting. It was owned by Mary Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke, and the two partners were experts at this kind of work, having previously represented organizations such as the Red Cross and the Salvation Army.

  They used good old-fashioned capitalism in the Klan recruiting drive, paying “kleagles,” as they were called, hefty commissions for each new member. Klan membership rapidly increased and is believed to have peaked in the mid-1920s at more than a million paid members. It was particularly popular in the midwestern states of Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana, and there was eventually a Klan auxiliary for women and even a junior Klan for children.

  Still, the Klan never minced words about its purpose, which was to preserve white supremacy, white Protestant supremacy, and the purity of the white race. “Being in all things true and loyal to the Caucasian race, its traditions and civilizations and keeping its civilizations pure by preserving it from the contaminating intermixture of aliens and their influence, maintain WHITE SUPREMECY first last and all the time,” said a 1924 Klan pamphlet. “Keep Caucasian blood, society, politics and civilization PURE!”7

  The Klan was very specific, spelling out its terms in near-legal, contractual language. A Klansman was to abstain from and prevent “carnal physical contact with or by colored races, thereby, keeping secure from pollution from inferior blood the precious blood of the Caucasian race.”

  The Klan operated in the name of Christ, its terrifying symbol the burning cross. African slaves had also embraced Christianity, the religion of their masters, and many of the slave descendants had remained devout Christians, despite the many contradictions that must have been apparent to them. Now, the Klan was using Christ as a sword in its war of oppression. The Klan’s vision of Christ was quite different from the savior the former slaves worshipped. The Klan saw Jesus as a “potent and vengeful Redeemer.”8

  Yet, amid the push for white purity, the moral and religious proselytizing, there was one other thing the Klan was interested in, and that was money, cold hard cash. The Klan was a corporation, a moneymaking machine that bought real estate and even ventured into the movie business to make propaganda films, hoping to counteract the growing influence of Jewish producers in Hollywood who were, the Klansmen believed, encouraging interracial sex.

  Every new member paid $10 to join the Klan plus annual dues. And the Klan sold robes and masks by the thousands plus jewelry and other merchandise.

  The money—millions of dollars—poured into Klan headquarters, called the Imperial Palace, a stately white-columned mansion in the 2600 block of Atlanta’s Peachtree Road, just a few blocks away from Graystone, the home of Richard Gallogly’s grandmother, Mary Inman Gray. At the palace, the imperial wizard, first Simmons and later Hiram Evans, presided. Klansmen called them “emperor.”

  The Klan bought and renovated the Imperial Palace in 1921, but that was just the beginning of its many real estate ventures. That same year, the Klan bought Lanier University on Highland Avenue in Atlanta, a Baptist school on the verge of financial collapse. Simmons was named university president, and the Klan immediately bought forty-five extra acres to expand the university, which would teach the Bible, Christian ethics, and the principles of American citizenship. A separate building was planned that would be called the “Hall of the Invisibles,” where the principles of Ku Kluxism and the art of “Klancraft” would be taught.9

  Along with the money spending, the university buying, the filmmaking, the childish wordplay, there was always within the Klan a streak of violence.

  Dallas, Texas, was one of the Klan’s hotbeds, with an estimated fourteen thousand members there. The Dallas klavern was led by the dentist Hiram Wesley Evans, the man who would later name E. D. Rivers a “great titan” of the Klan. Evans ran out of money before he finished dental school at Vanderbilt University but was able to pass the Texas dental exam. His friends and supporters always referred to him reverentially as “Dr. Evans.” He was a garrulous man with a giant, beaming grin.

  And Hiram Wesley Evans was a real hell-raiser.

  In April 1921, a group of fifteen masked K
lansmen in Dallas kidnapped Alex Johnson, a black bellhop at the Adolphus Hotel who had allegedly had sex with a white woman, threatening that most precious of all Klan values, white purity. They took Johnson to a secluded area and beat him with a blacksnake whip until his back bled. They then used acid to brand the letters KKK on his forehead.10

  This “acid branding” was one of the Klan’s more legendary attacks, and it would later turn out that Evans was present at the branding. In fact, it helped propel him in the Klan bureaucracy. He was named a great titan, or district leader, in 1922, and that same year was promoted again to “imperial kligrapp” or national secretary. This was a headquarters job. Evans packed up his wife and three kids and moved to Atlanta, buying a house on Peachtree Road, just a short commute to the office at the Imperial Palace.

  When Evans walked into an Imperial Palace, it was struggling with an internal Klan sex scandal. Word leaked that in 1919, Mary Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke, the PR geniuses so instrumental in growing the Klan, had been arrested at her house at midnight and charged with disorderly conduct.11 Clarke was a married man, and this did not sit well with the Klan members. The Klan, after all, acted as a moral vigilante group in the white communities where it operated, enforcing its code of clean living by lashing with bullwhips adulterers, drunks, and other miscreants. Tyler, who ran the Klan’s women’s auxiliary, and Clarke, who had effectively been running the Klan behind the scenes for years, were both forced to resign.11 The were also allegations that the Klan’s “imperial chaplain,” a Baptist minister named Caleb A. Ridley, had made “improper advances” to a woman in his neighborhood. He was also arrested for drunken driving.12

  Evans wasted no time in wresting control of the Klan from Simmons, winning for himself the title of imperial wizard. But as always, there was violence.

  Simmons was not going to surrender the reins of the lucrative, growing Klan empire easily. In the fall of 1923, the Simmons and Evans factions were still squabbling, as often was the case, in court. The Klan was supposed to be a secret organization, but Klan disputes were often resolved, and the organization’s dirty laundry was often aired, in courthouses through civil lawsuits and one particularly high-profile criminal case.

  Evans brought with him from Dallas a journalist named Phil Fox, a Harvard graduate and former managing editor of the Dallas Times Herald. Fox was placed in charge of publicity and was also editor of a Klan publication, the Nighthawk.

  At four o’clock on a Monday afternoon, November 5, 1923, Fox walked into the downtown Atlanta offices of William Coburn, an attorney for the Simmons faction, and shot him four times with a .45-caliber automatic pistol, killing him. This act turned out to be motivated by yet another Klan sex scandal. Fox killed Coburn because the Simmons faction had been spying on him and was about to expose a series of affairs with “lewd women.”13

  On December 22, 1923, a jury found Fox guilty of murder. They gave him mercy, saving him from the gallows but sentencing him to life on the Georgia chain gang.

  The Klan infighting subsided as Evans reached a financial settlement with Simmons and consolidated his grip on the Klan franchise. Membership continued to grow and dollars poured into the Imperial Palace. There were serious questions and legitimate fears in the 1920s about the Klan’s potential as it gained financial and political strength nationwide. How big, how powerful, would it become? With its Bible-based moral crusade combined with a staunch vow to defend the purity of the white race, would it be powerful enough to assume control of the country by democratic means? Those were not just the fears of Klan opponents, but the expectations of Hiram Evans and his minions. Yet controversy never really seemed to subside as report after report of Klan violence and more sex scandals surfaced. It is impossible to determine just how many lynchings, floggings, and other acts of violence were committed in the name of the Klan. Most were never prosecuted, because the police and the prosecutors themselves were members of the Klan or sympathizers. There were horrible lynchings before the Klan resurfaced in 1915. Black men were burned alive at the stake and castrated. Even after the new Klan arrived, there were many lynchings that were not Klan-related but spontaneous events as angry mobs gathered outside jails and courthouses and seized black prisoners, taking the law into their own hands.

  In those cases when the Klan’s involvement was obvious, the Imperial Palace, operating as it did with a corporate structure that employed modern public relations techniques, would trigger its spin machine. Evans was the face of that machine, a machine of denial. Reporters would call the Imperial Palace for comment, and Evans would invariably say that the Klan was not involved at all, that the lynching, the atrocity, was a tool of Klan critics to attack the patriotic organization.

  In late August 1922 in a Louisiana town called Mer Rouge, French for “Red Sea,” hooded, masked men kidnapped two white men, Filmore Watt Daniel and Thomas F. Richards, who were opponents of the Klan. Louisiana governor John Parker went to the White House seeking help from the federal government because the Klan had “usurped” power in Mer Rouge. The feds sent Bureau of Investigation agents and Parker sent National Guard units to search for the two missing men.14

  In a lake they found two torsos, headless and limbless, wrapped in wire. At the waist of one of the torsos was a silver belt buckle. An investigator rubbed off the tarnish and found the initials F.W.D. Clearly, this was Daniel.

  Oddly, the bones in the victims’ chests seemed to have been crushed, but not by something falling on them; instead, they had been crushed by a force from both directions—front and back—indicating that the men had been placed in a vise, some sort of a torture machine. Locals speculated the murder weapon was a sugarcane crusher.15

  Evans, the imperial wizard, immediately entered denial mode. No Klansmen were responsible, because they all took an oath vowing to uphold the law, said Evans. The Louisiana governor, he added, was exploiting the case for political purposes.16

  For a while, Evans was largely successful in his denials, but there was one deadly day in Pennsylvania that Evans had trouble defending. He was actually there.

  In August 1923, Evans and thousands of robed Klansmen defied a court order and marched in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, a heavily Catholic steel town near Pittsburgh. The march devolved into a brawl as Klan opponents hurled pieces of coal at the Klansmen and shots rang out, killing one Klansman. Evans later testified in a civil court trial that he could have stopped the march, but didn’t.17

  When he was not inciting riots or testifying in court, Evans found time to write. He was a prolific writer of books, pamphlets, speeches, and newspaper articles.

  One publication, “The Menace of Modern Immigration,” was a reprint of Evans’s speech at the Texas State Fair’s Klan Day in Dallas on October 24, 1923. Streams of immigrants from abroad were “diluting and often polluting” the Anglo-Saxon race in the United States, Evans told the fairgoers. He did the math, and the great Melting Pot that was the United States was not all it was cracked up to be. Fewer than half the 100 million citizens of the U.S. were of “native Anglo Saxon stock.”

  In a book by Evans, The Rising Storm, a key complaint cited by the imperial wizard was the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control, eugenics, and euthanasia, which Evans described as “the name given to the proposed practice of ending the lives of incurable idiots, lunatics and babies that are hopeless monstrosities.”18

  In the book, he talked about eugenics. How about a law that would prohibit marriage unless the would-be bride and groom had first been certified by medical authorities as being physically fit to have children? Would the Catholics ever approve of that? Of course not.19

  Evans thought that through these measures the white race could be saved, but blacks were a different story. “They have not, they cannot attain the Anglo Saxon level,” Evans said in the speech at the 1923 Texas State Fair. “The low mentality of savage ancestors, of jungle ancestors, of jungle environment, is inherent in the bloodstream of the colored race in America.”<
br />
  With that said, the imperial wizard did not go so far as to advocate exterminating black people. “The Negro is here,” said Evans. “He was brought here. In love and justice, we must ever promote his welfare, his health and happiness. But not in this generation nor in any America will ever know, will real assimilation be possible.”

  In his mind, blacks were a lost cause.

  * * *

  In the 1928 governor’s race, the Klan backed Rivers as he rattled across the red dirt roads of Georgia wearing his trademark black bow tie and searching for votes among the Klan faithful.

  This was an odd political year for the Klan, and the nation. The Democratic nominee for president was none other than a Catholic, Al Smith, the governor of New York. The Klan couldn’t stomach a Catholic president and put its full strength into defeating Smith and supporting the Republican, Herbert Hoover.

  Nathan Bedford Forrest III, grand dragon of the Georgia Klan and a grandson of the founder of the original Klan, blatantly wrote in the Klan’s monthly publication, the Kourier, that he planned to vote for the Republican nominee, Hoover, and called it a “tragedy” that the Democrats had forced him, by nominating a Catholic, to side with the GOP.20

  Rivers was running for governor as a Democrat, but speaking to Klansmen across the state during the campaign of 1928, Rivers took his aversion to a Catholic for president a step too far. He is said to have told assembled Klansmen that he would “vote for the blackest negro rather than for Al Smith,” which was probably, in Georgia, as disparaging a remark as Rivers could have made at the time about the Democratic presidential nominee. Rivers’s opponent for the Democratic nomination, Lamartine Hardman, pounced on that statement, questioning whether Rivers was a loyal Democrat after all. Surely he must not be if he was willing to vote for Negroes and was supporting Hoover, the Republican nominee.21