Howard’s distinction between the old Klan and the new—between the terrorism of the 1860s and the seemingly benign fraternalism of the 1920s—is one that gets trotted out often, and like all good propaganda, at its core lies a kernel of truth. It’s why modern Klansmen routinely claim they aren’t racist or anti-black, but rather “pro-white.” It’s why they reject the label “white supremacist” in favor of “white separatist” or “alt-right.” Whatever label one chooses, though, Howard’s claim that no Klansman had ever made threats in South Carolina is demonstrably untrue. The vicious assault on future congressman John Lewis by a Rock Hill, South Carolina, Klansman in the spring of 1961, for example, is merely one of the most famous instances.
In any case, it wasn’t violence that ultimately drove Howard away from Scoggin. It was, as it almost always is where the Klan is concerned, money and infighting. In her 1978 book, Sims reported that Scoggin earned the nickname “Prophet for Profit” for his enthusiastic hawking of Klan paraphernalia: bumper stickers, autographed photos of Klan dignitaries. (At a rally in Greenville, he once auctioned off “the glass eye of the former Grand Dragon of Pennsylvania.” It fetched five dollars.) He developed a reputation as a teller of tales, one prone to stretching the truth. Rumors swirled that Scoggin might have turned government informer. When asked about his leadership style, Howard told Sims: “I seen so much mismanagement, mistreatment of Klanspeople—and too much drinkin.” So, sometime between 1971 and 1974, when the drinking and mismanagement got to be too much, Howard switched allegiance again, this time to the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan under the command of Imperial Wizard James Venable.
An attorney and second-generation Klansman, Venable had his own long and winding history with the hooded order. His uncles had actually owned Stone Mountain and granted the Klan an easement to hold rallies there in the early 1920s. His bigotry, hardened over the decades, was vicious and virulent: he believed that African Americans were “animalistic” in nature, germ-carriers in possession of “inferior” blood. When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, he suggested the assassin had merely done the world a favor, telling Sims that King was “the worst troublemaker…the world’s ever known, and yet they honor him as the great emancipator of the nigger race.” After breaking away from the United Klans in the mid-1960s, Venable became Shelton’s main rival, with aspirations of one day uniting all the Klans under his sole leadership. His National Knights never amassed the size and strength of the UKA, however. By the early 1970s, his following had dwindled to no more than a few hundred.
Ironically, that may have proved a boon to John Howard. The Klan’s power structure mimics a representative democracy, with a central, national figure—the Imperial Wizard—propped up by state, regional, and local leaders, all of whom are (ostensibly) elected to office. It’s certainly easier to rise through the ranks of a smaller organization, and it wasn’t long before Howard was elevated again, to the rank of Grand Dragon. As a statewide leader, Howard would be responsible for setting up new klaverns, organizing rallies, and driving recruitment. In the summer of 1975, with his authority and influence on the rise, he descended on the small town of Greenwood, not long after a white highway patrolman shot and killed a young black man. A local chapter of the NAACP had petitioned for the cop’s suspension and sponsored a protest march, which the Klan intended to counterprotest.
It turned out to be something of an odd reunion: representatives of Shelton’s UKA were there, steering a twelve-car motorcade through the streets of downtown Greenwood. Across town, Scoggin presided over a rally attended by some fifteen hundred Klansmen. Howard’s rally, on the other hand, turned out to be little more than a few National Knights waving hand-lettered signs—WE SUPPORT LAW AND ORDER!—on the side of the road for a few hours.
It’s impossible to know if Howard was bothered by the weak showing. (He’d anticipated as many as four hundred protesters.) But just one month later, in September 1975, he broke ranks again. Whether by choice or by sheer necessity, though, is a little harder to parse. According to Venable, Howard—along with four other Grand Dragons—had attended a secret meeting, at which he violated his oath as a Klansman by participating in an “illegal election,” and had therefore been banished forever. According to Howard and his co-conspirators, Venable was old and senile, and they’d willingly split from the National Knights.
“Our dream is to one day overcome all this jealousy an’ bickerin an’ power struggles an’ money-grabbin and unite into one,” Howard explained to Sims in the spring of 1976. But no matter how many factions he joined, the bickering and money-grabbing never ceased. Virtually all of the leaders he’d once stood behind were felled by their own greed, pride, or hubris. Scoggin, the Prophet for Profit, grew ever more eccentric over the years, his influence gradually waning until he ceased being active sometime in the early 1980s. In 1987, Robert Shelton and his UKA were sued into bankruptcy by the Southern Poverty Law Center, after two of Shelton’s acolytes lynched a black teenager in Mobile, Alabama. Venable’s outfit never recovered from the defection of Howard and the other Grand Dragons; he died in a nursing home in 1993, suffering from Alzheimer’s, cancer, and pneumonia.
Howard continued to bounce from one Klan faction to the next, all the way through to the early 1990s. Most of these factions were small and floundering, and many of them fell apart not long after Howard pledged his membership. Upon each sect’s demise, he would carry with him a cadre of core followers—perhaps as few as twenty members, perhaps many more—and link up with some new organization.
Then, sometime in 1993 or 1994, he finally decided to start his own group—in partnership with a Pennsylvania-based Grand Dragon.
It’s difficult to determine when, exactly, Howard first met Barry Black. Harder still is determining why Howard had any faith in Black’s ability to help unite the Klans, or to avoid the fate of every other Imperial Wizard to whom he’d once been loyal. Howard had largely managed to avoid any trouble with the law; Black, on the other hand, had a lengthy criminal record, with convictions for larceny, burglary, and a firearms violation. He had escaped from police custody twice—once from the Greene County Jail outside Pittsburgh, and later from a psychiatric unit at Washington Hospital, where he’d been sent for evaluation. Black was a large man, bald, with a thick neck, broad shoulders, and a worldview the Southern Poverty Law Center deemed “emblematic of the gutter aspects” of the Klan. What Black reportedly had was followers, hundreds of them, in as many as seven states. So Howard and Black ultimately decided to merge their factions.
For a supposedly “secret” order, the Ku Klux Klan often has a very public face. Though some factions are extremely clandestine, others function not entirely unlike legitimate businesses—which is to say they are legally incorporated entities, with a paper trail and a tax status. According to paperwork filed with the South Carolina secretary of state, Howard and Black’s new entity—the Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—would be incorporated as a religious nonprofit; its mission was to protect “the patriot beliefs in Christ” and “Ango [sic] Saxon Heritage.” Howard and Black referred to themselves as “reverends,” and as vice president and president, respectively, in their Articles of Incorporation. The group’s principal office, its primary place of business, was listed as 108 W. Laurens Street—the old Echo theater.
Howard had quietly purchased the building back in 1992, for the bargain price of $4,000. Even then, he had designs on one day turning the place into a meeting hall and a Klan museum, funded by some sort of retail shop. Everything he had learned about the Klan had been passed down to him via older members; anything the Klan might accomplish in the future would be at the hands of a new generation. A Klan museum, in addition to a moneymaking enterprise, was about legitimacy and posterity—things Howard cared about deeply. Because by then, at forty-seven years old, with his career as a Klansman entering the phase when a man starts considering his legacy, he had something better than
a fancy-sounding title or a source of income. He’d found a protégé.
*1 That the original Klan was formed for purposes of entertainment, as a salve for boredom, has long been historical consensus—but that doesn’t mean the birth of the Klan was entirely “innocent,” or that its founders were without racial prejudice. In her 2015 book Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction, historian Elaine Frantz Parsons points out that race relations in Pulaski were particularly fraught. Violent clashes between whites and freedpeople were common. Spontaneous rioting—and, later, organized violence—was already taking place across the South. It’s certainly possible that some (or even all) of the founders committed acts of violence against freedpeople, too, but not as part of a secret, vigilante movement. From its founding through the spring of 1867, Parsons writes, “Ku-Klux members…did nothing to differentiate themselves from other white social and fraternal orders of the time.”
*2 That an organizational meeting of some kind took place in Nashville in the spring of 1867 and that this meeting was significant in terms of the Klan’s transformation into a political entity remains the most commonly held view among historians. However, it is possible—even likely—that accounts of said meeting were exaggerated or outright fabricated, constructed after the fact by Klan members or sympathizers as propaganda. Parsons points out the relative “shakiness” of the few available contemporary sources describing the event, and contends that the Klan did not expand much beyond Pulaski until the spring of 1868, a year after the purported Nashville meeting. She writes, too, that the growth of the Klan was not organic but rather spurred along by the national media. Newspaper accounts about a “secret” and “outlandish” and “mysterious” organization contributed to the group’s growing popularity and mythology; the more the Klan was written about in the press, the more white southerners decided to form their own Ku Klux groups.
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THE PERFECT RECRUIT
By the time a young man named Michael Burden turned up in Laurens at the tail end of 1989, John Howard had been a Klansman for half his life. He was remarried by then, to a round, doughy woman with a mop of short brown curls, Hazel. His kids were grown. And for the better part of a decade, he’d been living on a secluded plot of land just off Highway 221, right on the border of Laurens and Spartanburg Counties, in the small town of Lanford.
Although “town” is a bit of a stretch. Lanford doesn’t even show up on most maps of the area; it’s little more than a deserted railroad community, a ghost town dotted with a few falling-down, turn-of-the-century structures that seem to sink deeper into the brush with each passing year. Howard’s property, eight-tenths of an acre bounded to the east by the old C&WC railway, was likewise overgrown and unkempt; rising from patches of gravel and thickets of scratchgrass were a dilapidated two-story frame house—white, with a rust-colored roof—two mobile homes, and a tin shack, out of which he operated his business, Plantation Concrete.
Since the Klan’s rebirth at Stone Mountain in 1915, high-ranking leaders have often tried to eke out a living on the backs of their members, usually by cobbling together a nominal salary (subsidized by membership dues) and hawking white supremacist and KKK-branded merchandise. Some of the more industrious have managed to live far beyond the means of their followers. Bessie Tyler, one-half of the publicity duo that transformed William Joseph Simmons’s struggling fraternal club into a national movement, built a palatial residence on fourteen acres of land in Buckhead, a ritzy section of uptown Atlanta. The UKA’s Bob Jones, a lightning rod salesman by day, very famously drove around in a shiny new Cadillac, which was gifted to him by fellow Klansmen in the winter of 1964.
John Howard never amassed that sort of wealth. Like most of the piedmont’s working poor, he’d taken a job in the mills as a young man. By the mid-1970s, as Howard entered his thirties and was elevated to the rank of Grand Dragon, he was still making little more than minimum wage working as an orderly at the Whitten Center, a state-run facility for disabled adults and children. As the decades rolled by and Howard’s health declined, his primary source of income became the family business. Privately, some Laurens natives have described Plantation Concrete as little more than a front for the Klan, but by all accounts Howard did manage to sell some stuff: cement birdbaths, fountains, planters, and other forms of “ornamental concrete.” For those who shared his political persuasions, he also offered a range of more colorful items, from cement skulls to miniature Klansman statues.
Exactly what Mike Burden was doing walking through such a desolate area isn’t entirely clear—most details of his upbringing aren’t, and to this day he isn’t particularly forthcoming. But the gist of the story, the story Burden tells when he is compelled to talk about his background, is that he got caught in a storm one afternoon, saw a light on in Howard’s shop, and asked if he might set down for a bit to get out of the rain. The details vary. In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, Burden claimed to have met Howard three years earlier, in 1986, shortly after he was kicked out of high school. In some versions of the story, he portrays himself as essentially homeless, sleeping most nights in an abandoned car. In other versions, he was living in a friend’s vehicle. Mike Burden has trouble with details. But the basic outline of the story remains the same: the men introduced themselves, and Howard’s face suddenly brightened with recognition. Apparently he and Burden’s parents had long ago been part of the same “organization.”
“He told me, ‘Son, I’ve held you when you was a baby and changed your diapers!’ ”
The coincidence struck Burden as unlikely. “You’re full of crap,” he said.
“No,” Howard shot back. “You were.”
Burden was a few months shy of twenty years old, thin and wiry—five foot eleven, 147 pounds—with an edginess about him. He was cagey, drawn in on himself. His brown hair, shaggy and unkempt, was usually shoved under a backward ball cap, and he held his narrow jaw in such a way that his bottom teeth—straight, if tobacco-stained—were more readily visible than his upper incisors.
By that time, Howard’s property in Lanford had become a crash pad of sorts for a revolving cast of veteran Klansmen. His second-born son, Dwayne, was in his early twenties and more or less living at home. Howard’s longtime friend and associate Charles Murphy made frequent appearances, popping over from the nearby town of Woodruff to attend meetings or strategy sessions. At some point, a rail-thin bespectacled Klansman in his late fifties, William Hoff—known to his friends as “Wild Bill”—just sort of showed up and never left.
In addition to the various old-timers stopping by or taking up residence, there was often a slew of youngsters running around, as Plantation Concrete was more or less operated by teenagers. (Kids of fellow Klansmen, mostly, sent up to Lanford by their parents—ostensibly to learn the value of a hard day’s work.) By the time the rain stopped on that first day, Howard had offered Burden a job, too. Instead of cash, however, the young man would be paid in kind: food to eat, clothes to wear, a roof over his head. For the next seven years, Burden’s primary place of residence would be a single-wide trailer on the edge of the Lanford property.
The Klan, like other white supremacist organizations, has a long history of pursuing young men and boys for recruitment—papering high school parking lots with racist literature, staking out concert halls and music venues, and infiltrating college campuses are all popular tactics. Disaffected young men and boys, in particular, make for especially prime targets. Bill Riccio, an Alabama-based neo-Nazi who rose to power in the late 1980s, readily admitted that he would comb local shopping malls and swimming pools in search of kids to lure back to his Birmingham-area headquarters. In interviews with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, a victim of Riccio’s alleged sex abuse put it more succinctly: “He would prey on kids with legal problems, emotional problems, and disadvantaged kids.”
There’s no evidence that John Howard actively sough
t out disadvantaged youth for his klavern, but Michael Burden certainly would’ve fit the profile. His biological parents divorced when he was five, and his father—again, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear—promptly severed all contact. “His exact words,” Burden says, “were, ‘I don’t want that little bastard around anymore.’ ” Burden’s mother soon took up with a new man, a welder, setting off a nomadic ten years during which the trio bounced from oil town to oil town across the Southwest. It was not a happy childhood. And in the way of male role models, Burden’s stepfather wasn’t much of an improvement over the one who’d split. He was, according to Burden, a drunk with a penchant for blowing his paycheck at the local watering hole rather than on, say, food for the family. By the time he turned sixteen, Burden had left—and wound up right back where he had started: in Laurens.
* * *
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The miseducation of Mike Burden began virtually the moment he stepped foot on Howard’s property. Though his days were suddenly taken up with work related to the concrete business—accepting and filling orders, mixing cement, maintaining and repairing machinery—his evenings were largely free for socializing. Talk invariably turned to the Klan, a topic on which John Howard seemed to be a fount of wisdom.
The Anti-Defamation League once wrote of the UKA’s leader, Robert Shelton: “He has no hobbies, does not indulge in sports, and has no other interests” beyond the KKK. Howard’s identity, too, was bound up in being a Klansman. The ring he wore, which resembled a class ring with a red stone in the center, featured an embossed A—shorthand for “AKIA,” a 1920s-era password meaning “A Klansman I Am.” On the wall of his living room was a studio portrait, taken back in the mid-1970s, featuring a younger, thinner Howard in full Klan regalia. The second floor of his crumbling farmhouse had been turned into a meeting hall, appointed with several rows of folding chairs and a makeshift podium. Along the walls were framed snapshots of Howard cavorting with other state-level leaders of the KKK, as well as old black-and-white and sepia-tone prints of notable Klansmen throughout history: members gathered at the Imperial Palace back in the 1920s, a parade of Klansmen marching through the streets of Washington, D.C., headshots of William Joseph Simmons and Hiram Evans.
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