A week later, Simmons, calling himself the Imperial Wizard, carried a wooden cross eighteen miles outside Atlanta. At the top of Stone Mountain, he set it on fire.
He intended the fiery cross to become the symbol of the Twentieth Century Klan, which, Simmons stipulated, would be “a classy order of the highest class.” There would be “no ‘rough necks,’ no ‘rowdies,’ no ‘yellow streaks’ admitted.”
Recent waves of immigration spurred his recruitment drive. Fourteen and a half million new citizens had come to the United States in recent decades and were no longer readily absorbed into the prevailing culture. With Europe racked by war, suspicion of foreigners—German-Americans, Irish-Americans—had spread. To Woodrow Wilson, mistrust was only prudent.
“Anyone who carries a hyphen about with him,” the president warned, “carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”
Along with the new immigrants and isolated cases like Leo Frank, America’s black population remained the Klan’s dependable target. World War I had drawn 750,000 black workers to Northern jobs, which evaporated with the armistice of 1918. Competition became as venomous as in the poorest Southern districts.
Simmons joined forces with Edward Young Clarke, an energetic public relations man in Atlanta, and their Klan expanded within a year to eleven hundred Imperial Kleagles. Those men headed local chapters and supported themselves by selling Klan memberships for ten dollars and keeping four dollars for themselves. They also poached for members on the rival fraternal organizations, especially the Masons. Griffith’s film became a useful recruiting tool. In little more than a year, Clarke could claim an increase in nationwide membership from three thousand to a hundred thousand.
One emerging Klan leader boasted a high pedigree. Nathan Bedford Forrest III, the general’s grandson, said he was getting twenty letters a week urging the Klan to start punishing minor offenses with threats or flogging. According to Forrest, some women were requesting the Klan to stage lynchings to avenge their honor.
By late 1921, that demand for threats and flogging was being obliged. Klansmen had surfaced before the election of Warren G. Harding to warn Southern blacks away from the polls, and reports reached the North of a black dentist in Houston “mutilated” by hooded Klansmen for his affair with a white woman. Another victim in Texas was kidnapped from jail, where he was charged with insulting a white woman, and released with a sign on his back, “Whipped by the K.K.K.”
Offenses could be more abstract. An Episcopal archdeacon in Mississippi was whipped for preaching racial equality. In Birmingham, Alabama, a black butcher was whipped for his “friendly relations” with white customers.
From his perch in the ambivalent city of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken offered his distinctive defense of the Klan:
“If the Klan is against the Jews, so are half of the good hotels of the Republic and three-quarters of the good clubs. If the Klan is against the foreign-born or the hyphenated citizens, so is the National Institute of Arts and Letters. If the Klan is against the Negro, so are all of the States south of the Mason-Dixon Line. If the Klan is for damnation and persecution, so is the Methodist Church.”
But Klan membership was not always mocked. After President Harding backed anti-lynching legislation—which failed—his enemies retaliated with a story that he had accepted Klan membership in a secret White House ceremony in the Green Room.
The public’s ambivalence about the Klan was reflected in the unexpected result of a 1921 exposé by the New York World. It turned out that not all Americans were appalled to read about the 152 crimes recently committed by Klansmen. Instead, a rush to join raised Klan membership for the first time above one million.
Simmons’s background as a preacher served the Klan well during the 1920s, an era of religious fundamentalism. Protestant ministers—estimates put their number as high as forty thousand—joined the Klan, and some became Exalted Cyclops. In Pennsylvania, Texas, Colorado, and North Dakota, clergymen were elevated by their state to the rank of Grand Dragon.
And yet fissures were erupting. One high-level Klan officer quit, publicly claiming that Clarke kept Simmons constantly drunk so that he could loot the Klan Treasury. New voices emerged that urged the Klan to become more political and less religious, and Simmons was cast aside into the newly created office of Emperor. By the presidential conventions of 1924, the Democrats confronted an anti-Klan plank in their platform and defeated it by a mere four-fifths of a single vote.
During the 1930s, as rifts between Northern and Southern Methodists and other denominations began to heal, the ideal of universal brotherhood slowly asserted itself. Klan influence gave way to the combined national presence of twenty million American Catholics, three million Jews, twenty million immigrants, and twelve million blacks.
Looking on from the sidelines, one critic assessed the Klan as having “all of the defects of clandestine and reactionary organizations without the strength.” He was a Vietnamese journalist living in exile under several aliases, the last of them “Ho Chi Minh.”
With the Klan declining, the number of blacks who cast a ballot rose from 2 percent of the eligible number in 1940 to an estimated 1.2 million voters twelve years later. In the upper tier of Southern states, black candidates were being seated on city councils and school boards.
But the exclusively white Southern juries ensured that a black defendant would be found guilty. A publicized example was the case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black Tennessee teenagers imprisoned for decades on perjured testimony from two white women who claimed rape.
• • •
During World War II, the number of blacks living outside the South nearly doubled to 4.6 million. Since Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, were seen as sympathetic, there was a shift in allegiance among blacks, particularly those who had moved to the North, to the Democratic Party, despite its powerful and unrepentant Southern wing.
It was Roosevelt’s successor, however, who issued the most sweeping racial decree since Emancipation. On July 26, 1948, Harry S. Truman ended by executive order all legal discrimination within America’s armed forces.
Slowly and grudgingly, branches of the service obeyed. By 1950, the army, which had been the last to comply, was sending mixed companies of white and black soldiers to fight in Korea. On military bases at home and abroad, the bars and messes, athletic teams and swimming pools, were all integrated with little of the resistance that had been predicted.
At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court was reversing its decades of tolerance for Jim Crow. Starting with Morgan v. Virginia in 1946, the justices struck down segregation on trains crossing state lines. Dwight Eisenhower, who followed Truman in the White House, declined to call for federal legislation, and local trains continued to segregate the races.
But Eisenhower struck a far more lethal blow to Jim Crow than he knew by appointing as Chief Justice his Republican political rival, former governor Earl Warren of California.
In 1954, segregating students in public schools was required by law in seventeen states and the District of Columbia. But there were politicians who anticipated the trend of court decisions. South Carolina governor James F. Byrnes said his state would soon be “forced to do now what we should have been doing for the last fifty years.”
On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Warren spoke for his unanimous Court when he wrote that the nation “could not turn the clock back” to the time when Plessy v. Ferguson had been written. In present-day America, he continued, “segregation of white and colored children has a detrimental effect on the colored children.”
Warren’s ruling added, “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
• • •
How fast would Jim Crow disappear? Not fast enough to save Emmett Till. A black fourteen-year-old visiting Money, Mississippi, in August 1955, Till assumed that a ch
eeky flirtation with a white cashier in town would be as harmless as it would have been back home in Chicago. Instead, the woman complained to her husband, who enlisted a friend to help him kidnap and murder the boy. The men were brought to trial, but an all-white jury acquitted them after deliberating for just over an hour.
From its formation in Indianola, Mississippi, a white movement of so-called Citizens Councils spread rapidly. Council members were less clandestine than the Klan but as firmly pledged to segregation forever.
After a year’s deliberation, the Supreme Court allowed school boards to set the tempo for their own integration so long as they acted in “reasonable time.” Georgia’s jubilant lieutenant governor pointed out that the phrase “could be construed as one year or two hundred.”
But racial change in America again was moving outside the courts. In 1956, the admission of a black student, Autherine Lucy, to the University of Alabama set off rioting, and Virginia senator Harry Byrd called on the South to mount “massive resistance” to integration.
When the university suspended Lucy “for her own safety,” Eisenhower proved to be more like Hayes than Grant. He refused to send federal troops, and the Alabama campus remained segregated for the next seven years.
That pattern seemed destined to repeat in Arkansas the following year when Governor Orval E. Faubus called up his state’s National Guard to prevent nine black children from attending all-white Central High School in Little Rock. This time, however, Eisenhower sent a thousand paratroopers to uphold the law and put the state Guard under federal control.
As Arkansas children returned to school, the Supreme Court ruled against further delays of desegregation. To retaliate, Faubus closed all of Arkansas’ public high schools for the 1958 year.
On February 1, 1960, four black college students in Greensville, North Carolina, took seats at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and ordered coffee. The local Jim Crow law required that they be ignored, but they went on sitting at the counter.
By the end of the month, that passive approach—labeled a “sit-in”—had spread to seven more Southern states. A founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., explained the nonviolent tactic: “We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.”
Within a year, more than a hundred Southern lunch counters were serving black customers.
The movement, persistent but peaceful, attracted Northern sympathy and Southern resistance. John F. Kennedy, the winning presidential candidate in 1960, placed a well-publicized call to King’s wife after the minister was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama. Political analysts agreed that the call had inspired black voters and contributed to the narrow Democratic victory.
In September 1962, James Meredith, a black student, was turned away from the University of Mississippi in Oxford. But six years had passed since the drama of Autherine Lucy. Kennedy sent federal marshals to escort Meredith onto the campus.
Mississippi governor Ross Barnett had told Kennedy he would maintain order. When he did not, the riot that broke out rivaled those of the Reconstruction era. Two people were killed and 375 injured, including 66 federal marshals.
During the next years, the Klan looked to the racial strife as its one last recruiting appeal. After a Birmingham rally, dynamite exploded at the home of Dr. King’s brother and at a black political headquarters. With television cameras now on the scene, the world could watch as peaceful demonstrations and racist crimes competed to define the nation’s future.
On June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi, Medgar Evers, thirty-seven years old, World War II veteran, father of three, and a field agent for the NAACP, was shot and killed in an ambush by a member of the local White Citizens Council. Three months later, a bomb killed four black girls at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
• • •
President Kennedy called that year for civil rights legislation to end segregation in public schools and public accommodations. His critics within the civil rights movement complained that his proposals were too mild and that they lacked rigorous enforcement.
On August 25, 1963, an outpouring of two hundred thousand men, women, and children, black and white, gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, had offended prominent black leaders by asking that they delay their rally until after his brother was re-elected in 1964. They refused.
The audience that afternoon heard Martin Luther King call for racial harmony and justice and assure the nation, “I have a dream” that the day would come.
When Kennedy invited congressmen to the White House in October to press for the civil rights bill, it was Southern members of his own party who resisted most adamantly. The Democratic chairman of the House Rules Committee let the president know that his bill would remain locked up in committee.
• • •
The following month, on November 22, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. His vice president, Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas, flew back to Washington with Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline, still wearing her bloodstained suit.
Johnson was a tactical master of the Senate, which he had dominated for years as majority leader. Five days after the assassination, he used his first congressional address to assure a grieving nation that no tribute “could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”
Johnson’s former colleagues were unmoved. A close Senate ally, Richard Russell of Georgia, vowed to “resist to the bitter end” any attempt to achieve social equality. Privately, Russell warned Johnson that advocating civil rights would ensure Johnson’s defeat in 1964 if he ran for president in his own right. As it turned out, Johnson won that election against Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona by a margin of 27.6 percent.
Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina had challenged Truman for the presidency in 1948, in part because Truman integrated the armed forces. Now he denounced the civil rights bill as “reminiscent of Reconstruction proposals and activities of the Radical Republican Congress.”
During a filibuster that tied up the Senate for weeks, three young civil rights volunteers disappeared on the night of June 21, 1964, near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Forty-four days later, the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were found. They had been shot at close range by Mississippi law officers who belonged to the local White Knights chapter.
As the filibuster ground on, Robert Byrd of West Virginia spoke for fourteen hours and thirteen minutes. When the bill’s manager, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, concluded that he finally had more than the 67 votes he needed, he cut off debate and brought the bill to success on the Senate floor. On July 2, 1964, the House passed it, 289 to 125.
Five hours later, the president went on television to speak to the nation. He wanted to assure his countrymen, he said, that the new law would in no way restrict their freedoms.
“It does say,” Johnson continued, “that those who are equal before God shall now also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories and in hotels and restaurants, and movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.”
He concluded, “Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole.”
With that, President Lyndon Johnson picked up a pen and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ninety-nine years after the end of the Civil War.
President Lyndon Johnson, July 2, 1964
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALICE MAYHEW’S WRITERS AGREE ABOUT her extraordinary gifts, but I want to thank another editor as well—Sue Horton, to whom this book is dedicated.
For more than a year, Sue drove from her office as opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times to manage the logistics of transmitting my manuscript to New York. My time in a hospital bed, followed by months shut in at home, made her assistanc
e essential, and it came with an unfailing sense of optimism and fun. As I completed my fourscore years, I have thought often about my luck in friendships and how richly rewarded I’ve been by knowing Sue.
Because this will be the final installment in my telling of the American story, I also want to mention other friends who have brightened my life since the series began in 1988, and often long before that: Charles Fleming and Julie Singer, Angel Cruz, Carl Byker, and Joe and Barbara Saltzman.
Also Joe Domanick and Judy Tanka; Natalie Narvid; Donald and Patty Freed; Joan Dew; Ben Donenberg; Marilyn Burns; Marshall and Sue Blumenfeld; Richard and Peggy Houdek; Tom Waldman; Qidong Zhang, Jackson Wen, and Alexandra Lu; Frank Snepp; Andrew and Caelia Bingham; Sarah Bingham; Julia Halberstam; Miles Beller and Laurette Hayden; Gene Lichtenstein and Jocelyn Gibbs; Steve Randall; Lore Segal; Gordon and Anne Goldstein; Tom and Marilyn Clagett; Clancy Sigal; Frances Ring; Anne Taylor Fleming; Robert Schoenberg; Marcia Brandwynne; Rose Marie Tuohy; Bunny Svatos; JoAnn Menzies, Gordon Menzies, and Bonnie Summers; Seymour and Audrey Topping.
And Rosa Bolaños; Jessica Saenz; Jerome Sutherland; Benigno Robles; Phillip Griggs; Martin DeKarver; Richard Sharpe; Helen Sklar; Leo Rhodes. In Rio de Janeiro, Nesio, Mirtes, and Gabriela de Oliveira; Helga Vargas; Jorge Bomfim; Julio Cesar Oliveira de Fernandez. In London, Peter Craske; Sally Taylor and Colin Franey; Caroline Moorhead. In Tuscany, Rennie Airth.
For the first time, I also have occasion to thank three skilled and dedicated doctors: Dr. Thomas Y. Tom, Dr. Thomas G. Mahrer, and Dr. David S. Marlin of Kaiser Permanente, Los Angeles.
My friend Lynn Nesbit, now of Janklow and Nesbit, has represented me adroitly since 1965. Lynn steered me to Simon & Schuster, which has been a supportive home for my last seven books.
In 2014, the publishing company’s highly talented roster includes Jonathan Karp, publisher; Jackie Seow, cover design; Akasha Archer, interior design; Al Madocs, production editor, and Lisa Erwin, production manager; Stephen Bedford, online marketing; and two editors during the course of writing this book: first Roger Labrie, now Jonathan Cox. Thank you to Sean Devlin for his meticulous copyediting. Not surprisingly, Alice Mayhew attracts first-rate colleagues. To conclude: again and always, Alice.
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