Copyright © 2018 by Burden Film Production, LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Hargrave, Courtney, author.
Title: Burden / Courtney Hargrave.
Description: First edition. | New York : Convergent, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018013781 | ISBN 9781984823335 (hc) | ISBN 9781984823342 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Laurens (S.C.)—Race relations. | White supremacy movements—South Carolina—Laurens. | Burden, Michael (Michael Eugene) | Kennedy, David (David E.) | Ku Klux Klan (1915– )
Classification: LCC F279.L3 H37 2018 | DDC 305.8009757/31—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013781
ISBN 9781984823335
Ebook ISBN 9781984823342
Cover design by Jessie Bright
Cover photograph: agadoyle/Getty Images
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For Beck
If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat;
And if he is thirsty, give him water to drink;
For so you will heap coals of fire on his head,
And the LORD will reward you.
—PROVERBS 25:21–22
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword by Andrew Heckler
Prologue: “This Is What We’ll Do”
Chapter One: The Mask That Grins and Lies
Chapter Two: A Kernel of Truth
Chapter Three: The Perfect Recruit
Chapter Four: Burn It Down
Chapter Five: Non Silba Sed Anthar
Chapter Six: “Choose”
Chapter Seven: “This New Beginning, Ain’t It?”
Chapter Eight: “Let’s Talk Business”
Chapter Nine: The Substance of Things Hoped for, the Evidence of Things Not Seen
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes and Sources
About the Author
FOREWORD
Every once in a while, there comes a story that must be told. Burden is one of those stories.
I have vigorously pursued the telling of Burden since 1997, joined by producer Robbie Brenner in 2004, and feel more strongly about it at this moment than ever. With today’s historic eruptions of racial division and cultural anxiety, this story in its best incarnation has the power to say something crucial about racism and bigotry across the United States and around the world.
I first read about the saga of Michael Burden, Judy Harbeson, Reverend David Kennedy, John Howard, and the Redneck Shop and Ku Klux Klan Museum in the local South Carolina newspaper The State. I’ll never forget that moment, twenty years ago, when a short write-up about a KKK museum opening in a small southern town became the source of a lifelong pursuit. It was just a blurb, but it penetrated me. Seven months later, another story landed in front of me: “A Tale of Faith, Hope and Hate,” in the Los Angeles Times. It told of how a Klansman named Michael Burden, the same man who’d opened the KKK museum, left the Klan after falling in love with a single mother who slowly changed his heart, and was befriended by Reverend David Kennedy, an African American minister who led the local protests against Burden’s establishment. This story blew my mind. I picked up the phone, called Reverend Kennedy, and asked if I could come to Laurens and see him.
I spent over a month in Laurens, researching and getting to know the people and details of their extraordinary circumstances. For this short but pivotal period, I found myself experiencing firsthand the plight of the American South. I saw a society rife with unemployment, where the old factory towns that thrived in the South throughout the twentieth century had closed their doors and left people without jobs, education, or hope. I got to live among a forgotten sector of society, bearing witness to their struggles and their hatred—but at the same time their love, their tears, and their perseverance. By the end of my time in South Carolina, I knew that this story needed to be told, for it was the story not just of one isolated group of people but of much of America: millions of people divided by history and conflicting points of view, unable to find common ground.
One of the fondest memories from my time in Laurens and the process of making this film was spending time with the members of Reverend Kennedy’s congregation, some of whom are featured in this book, and some who aren’t. I was struck that people who had so little in the way of material things could have so much love and joy in their lives. I loved spending time at the church and watching all the fun they had. Whether it was the love between Mina Bates and her husband, Henderson, Jan Kennedy concocting “slitch a mo” stew in the kitchen, Too Ray dancing around the front steps, or Toosie (better known as Miss Shake-a-Leg) doing her shake for everyone’s entertainment, they all shared one thing: joy.
Through getting to know Mike; Judy; Reverend Kennedy and his wife, Jan; Clarence Simpson; and the whole gang, I learned what it means to find courage in the face of adversity. These people did something truly heroic during the period of time portrayed in this story, all without calling attention to their deeds or asking for reward. They did what they did because it was the right thing to do. Their humility, compassion, and kindness taught me that there is no “evil” in the world, only pain, self-hatred, wounded souls, and disenfranchised humans. I believe this may just hold the key to healing the angry predicament we are in today.
After eighteen years of false starts and unfortunate events that kept Burden from getting realized, we finally jumped off the cliff—and without a net. Six weeks before the shooting was supposed to start, we had no funding, no actors cast for Mike and Judy. Only through the sheer faith, tenacity, and unwavering belief of my producer, Robbie Brenner, was this all possible. On the morning after her film Dallas Buyers Club was nominated for an Academy Award, Robbie reached back out to me and said, “Burden is next.” In Hollywood, these kinds of promises are a dime a dozen, but Robbie is not your typical Hollywood producer. She is fierce, incredibly loyal, and cares deeply about creating films that mean something. She willed this project into existence, and I am grateful for her deep support.
Burden is the definition of a “labor of love.” I am so incredibly grateful to everyone who participated and gave their heart and soul to the film—especially the actors, who treated the project with so much love and respect. They all traveled to Laurens on their own time to meet with and get to know the real people they were portraying. They treated their representation of those people with the greatest dignity and care, and I was floored by their generosity. Garrett Hedlund, Forest Whitaker, Andrea Riseborough, Tom Wilkinson, Austin Hébert, and Usher—we owe you all a huge debt of gratitude.
In making this movie, I set out to create a very honest portrayal of the people I met in Laurens, revealing some of the darkest strands of our social fabric while also taking care not to vilify anyone. I am so grateful for this book, which expands on the movie and reveals the actual events that took place before, during, and after the period portrayed in the film.
Now, at a time when the world has become so polarized and divided by ethnicity, race, and religion, Burden is the true story of one man’
s struggle to overcome a lifetime of senseless hate against a cultural backdrop of racial tension, economic upheaval, and systemic poverty. A story in which he must face his sworn racial enemy and find a path to tolerance and redemption. It is a story about faith—not simply religious faith or blind faith, but faith in humanity, faith in oneself, and faith in doing what is just and right, appealing deeply to the good within each of us. It is a story that locates the present world’s ethnic dilemmas within an individual and the people who rescued his life.
It is all of these things. But at its core, Burden is a love story, and it is love that solves all that ails us. Hatred, both along ethnic and religious lines, has cast a dark shadow on our society for far too long, but we can eradicate shadows by shining a light on them. Hopefully Burden can become a part of that light.
Thank you for bearing witness to this story.
ANDREW HECKLER
Jackson, Georgia, November 2016
prologue
“THIS IS WHAT WE’LL DO”
The city of Laurens sits in the northwest corner of South Carolina in a region known as the Piedmont Plateau, an undulating expanse of verdant foothills and stream-cut valleys, a remote stretch of country that locals call “the Upstate.” It’s accessible by one of two main roads: Highway 221, which runs north-south out of Spartanburg, passing by, on the outskirts of town, a million-square-foot Walmart distribution center; or Route 76, a two-lane country back road that cuts east-west across acres of pastureland, oak-hickory forests, and pine woodlots. It’s small, just a hair over ten square miles, and predominantly residential, such that you could drive right on by without ever having noticed much of a town at all. Nor is there much reason to stop there. But despite its modest size and its rural setting, Laurens has a surprisingly rich heritage, and deep southern roots.
On the west side, dotted every fifty yards or so along Main Street, are some of the more than one hundred properties that, collectively, make up the historic district: Queen Anne and Italianate frame houses set back on wide lots shaded by mature trees, interspersed along the boulevard with Gothic and Romanesque and Victorian churches. The James Dunklin House, a two-story clapboard farmhouse with white columns and blue shutters, built in 1812, operates now as a little country museum. Six lots down is the William Dunlap Simpson House, built in 1839, which resembles an antebellum plantation and was once home to a South Carolina governor.
Nearer the center of town, the buildings are no less historic but more densely concentrated and almost exclusively commercial: two-story redbrick shops packed tightly together like row houses. Names of businesses long since closed are still etched on some of the windows. To stroll beneath the green and blue awnings outside the Midtown Paint Shop or the mom-and-pop hardware store, past the vintage Coca-Cola mural advertising five-cent fountain drinks, feels a bit like traveling back in time. The whole of downtown—a single square block, in the center of which stands the county courthouse—is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
By the mid-1800s, little more than fifty years after its founding, Laurens had blossomed from a once-lawless frontier settlement into a bustling center of commerce and government. Its courthouse—an imposing, important-looking building done in the Greek Revival style, with grand Corinthian columns and sweeping Palladian staircases—signified the county’s rapid accumulation of wealth during the cotton boom. Years before he became president, a young Andrew Johnson ran a tailor shop on the square, where his business would have been surrounded by the offices of medical practitioners and lawmen, wagon shops, gristmills, a confectionary, and nearly one hundred registered whiskey distilleries. Standing on the courthouse lawn—even now, more than 150 years later—it’s not all that difficult to imagine the clop-clop-clop of horse-drawn carriages or the keening wail of a locomotive whistle.
Laurens experienced a second boom just after the turn of the century, and there are remnants of that period, too. The Capitol Theatre, which opened on a sticky June night in 1926, still occupies a spot on the south side of the square, on Main Street. During the war years—when an average of eighty million Americans visited the cinema each week—the proprietor opened a second movie house on the north side: a narrow brick building with twin second-story balconies, peering like eyes over an art deco marquee, on top of which still stand the old light-up letters spelling out ECHO.
Both theaters eventually shuttered, however, and the storefronts along the square are mostly empty now. FOR SALE signs hang in the windows, faded from the sun. What few businesses remain are mostly consignment shops and payday loan centers.
Continue east along Main Street, and the homes become decidedly less grand: ramshackle Craftsman bungalows with falling-down porches, oceans of trailer parks. Down on Mill Street, snaking up the side of a low hill, is a crumbling brick retaining wall covered in spider-like brown vines; behind it is the hollowed-out shell of Laurens Cotton, once a massive four-story factory, now little more than an abandoned elevator shaft and piles of rubble, streaked rusty brown from decades of rainwater.
Like virtually every other settlement across the Upstate, Laurens is a former mill town, situated in what used to be the heart of the American textile industry. Proximity to the cotton fields and a temperate climate lured the big companies down from the North in the late 1800s, and most of the towns and villages still bear the names of the mills themselves, or their owners: Watts Mills, Fort Mills, Joanna, Ware Shoals. The first squeeze came in the 1970s and ’80s, with a flood of cheap imports and the rise of automation. The kill shot came later, in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Laurens County lost nearly all of its remaining mills—and thousands of jobs—in the span of little more than a decade. The smokestacks and water towers are all that’s left. Ruins dot the landscape like constellations.
More prosperous towns to the north—Spartanburg, Greenville—have since repositioned themselves as global manufacturing hubs, attracting millions of dollars in foreign direct investment. Laurens, on the other hand, has not fared so well. More than 25 percent of its 9,139 residents live below the poverty line. High unemployment, a flourishing drug trade, and a transient population that sometimes takes up residence in the hollows of the crumbling mill villages have made it one of the more dangerous cities in the state. And for all its quaint, small-town charm, swirling underneath is a darker history.
* * *
—
“I mean, I hear them talk about it.”
Brock Coggins was born in 1918, five years after it happened, but he grew up listening to the stories. “This colored man raped a white woman. And the lynching took place up there in town. On a railroad trestle.”
Rachel Watts heard the stories, too, though she was raised on a farm in an African American community several miles west of town. “When we would go over that trestle, Daddy would say, ‘So-and-so was lynched here,’ ” she recalled in a 1997 interview with historian Bruce Baker. “My father was forever talking to his boys, telling them, you know, ‘Don’t get yourselves involved in instances where you could get lynched.’ ”
Samuel Shipman was a student at Ford High, an all-white school for the children of mill workers, when the Brown v. Board of Education ruling came down, and postcard-sized photos of the lynching victim began circulating throughout the community. “They thought [integration] wouldn’t happen here,” he explained in an April 2000 interview for the Veteran’s Oral History Project. “And that picture has been blown up and reproduced so many times of that black gentleman hanging from the railroad truss because he looked at a white woman or something, I don’t know the story. But that picture was passed around…This is what we’ll do.”
Just south of Main Street, not three hundred yards from the courthouse square, the sidewalk slopes downhill and gives way to a network of gravel parking lots and dusty side streets, beyond which lies a tangle of tracks. The rail serves only freight trains now; the CSX rolls by every fe
w hours, hauling gas and wind turbines from a GE facility outside Greenville, or transporting forest products and farming equipment downstate. The passenger station is long gone, and some of the spur lines are rusted out and covered with weeds. But in the sweltering summer of 1913, this was the spot where an angry mob hanged a man and left his body dangling from a rickety trestle over River Street.
Even before the assault on August 11, Richard Puckett—according to the papers, at least—was a Negro with a “bad reputation.” As the story went, he was fresh off the county chain gang on the afternoon he leapt into the road and began dragging a white woman from her horse and buggy into the underbrush. The woman called out to her brothers, who were traveling along the same road in a separate carriage, and the “would-be rapist” lit off for the woods. Later that day, a search party apprehended Puckett and took him to the county jail.
As word of the attack spread from field hand to tenant farmer, from domestic servant to drayman and finally to the businessmen in their downtown offices, a crowd began assembling on the square. By nightfall, more than one thousand people had crammed shoulder to shoulder in the narrow alleyways, kicking up clouds of dust, banging on the iron gates at North Caroline Street, hollering at the sheriff to bring the prisoner out. Shortly after ten o’clock, they stormed the jail. Armed with crowbars and sledgehammers, they clambered up a flight of stairs and broke down two steel doors to get at Puckett in his cell. They dragged the accused man through the square and down to the trestle, lobbed a twelve-foot length of rope over one of the crossbeams, and hoisted his body into the night air. Then they shot him, firing hundreds of rounds into their victim, an act the Laurens Advertiser later described as “the climax of an exciting day.”
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