She ran into him from time to time after that, but it wasn’t until her marriage faltered in late 1995 that she went looking for him at the Echo. “He made the Klan sound more like a family than a hate group,” she says. And after her divorce, with two young children to support, a family was what Judy desperately needed. “When me and Carl busted up,” she said, “that’s when me and Mike started flirtin.”
Their courtship began almost immediately, but it didn’t take long for Judy to confirm that she had been right about the Klan. It was decidedly not for her, though the first meeting she attended—at Mike’s urging—had been relatively uneventful. The big room on the second floor of the Lanford house was maybe half full, fifteen or twenty people talking quietly and hanging out, just like normal. When Mike called the meeting to order, however, with a sharp rap of what looked like a gavel against the podium, conversation ceased immediately. At his prompting, some of the men came forward and began to assemble items atop a makeshift altar—an American flag, a sword, a Bible.
“Your Excellency,” one of them bellowed, “the sacred altar of the Klan is prepared; the fiery cross illuminates the klavern.” The “fiery cross,” in this case, was a four-foot-tall wooden cross studded with lightbulbs.
It was more pomp and circumstance than Judy was used to—she hadn’t quite been prepared to hear strangers refer to her boyfriend as “Your Excellency”—but the whole thing struck her as an elaborate game of dress-up or role-play. The week’s “business” turned out to be fairly innocuous: talk consisted mainly of progress reports on renovations at the shop. “I was like, ‘Well, there ain’t much to this,’ ” she said.
Her opinion changed three meetings later, when it came time to formally initiate the most recent batch of recruits. “The next thing I know, there’s somebody pullin out a cattle prod and just stickin it to them: to their back, their legs.” She wanted to protest, but the recruits had been ordered not to speak unless spoken to. And though the men were mostly laughing and joking and carrying on, though she was never poked or prodded, Judy was genuinely scared. Most everyone was armed with a handgun, holstered at his side. John Howard was traveling with a pack of five or six men, as a form of protection. It occurred to her that Mike and John had both been breaking her in slowly, revealing the truth about the Klan’s nature a little at a time so as not to scare her off.
“I was like, this is what everybody’s been talkin about? Uh-uh. No way,” she said later. After that meeting, when she and Mike were alone, she unloaded. “I said, ‘I really have feelings for you, but I cannot have myself or my kids around…such crap as this.’ ”
At thirty-three years old, with no job and two kids to support, she had enough trouble on her hands without having to worry about being poked in the rear end with a cattle prod.
Judy Harbeson (née Gray) was born in the fall of 1962, the seventh child in a large, blended family. She’d gotten pregnant at sixteen and adopted out her son, Ricky, to his paternal grandfather, as she felt she was too young to properly care for him. A year later, she was married to a different man and pregnant with baby number two—but that relationship ended before the end of her first trimester. By the time her second child turned one, Judy had taken up with Carl, an employee at a paper and specialty fabric manufacturer in the neighboring town of Clinton.
Out of high school now, Judy got a job in the mills, too, just like her grandmother and grandfather, her aunts and uncles, and her mother and sister before her. “When I went in there,” Judy said, “I’m left-handed, and they told me: ‘You’ll never be able to weave.’ ” By which her bosses meant she might have difficulty tying weaver’s knots—tiny knots used to join new thread or to repair broken threads, small enough to pass through a loom undetected. Weavers tie thousands of them each shift, but it’s a two-handed job and can sometimes be tricky for lefties. Judy, however, was not someone who easily took no for an answer. “I said, ‘Yes, I can.’ ” And so she did. She so excelled in her training, her managers often pulled her off the floor and brought her back to class to teach new employees.
For the next thirteen years, Judy worked the third shift—from midnight to eight—monitoring production in a warehouse-like space vibrating with the clackita-clackita-clackita of nearly two hundred looms. Her association with the mill, however, hardly ended when she clocked out for the day. For thousands of workers in Laurens County, in fact, life utterly revolved around the mills—socially, spiritually, financially.
“They had what they call the company store,” Judy explained. “You could buy food, clothes, furniture. You could go in there and say, ‘I want to charge this to a payday.’ That’s how us mill workers survived. Say it was the middle of the week and you broke. You need, like, bread, milk, cereal? You could go to the company store and tell ’em, ‘Put it on my account.’…I’d watch my sister go in there and actually buy Christmas for her kids, and put it on a weekly plan.”
With Carl, Judy conceived two more children: Carla, who arrived early (weighing just a pound and a half) and died shortly after birth, and Stacy, born in the summer of 1985, just a month shy of Judy’s twenty-third birthday. Like many in the community, she relied on the company store to help provide for her family. But by the mid-1990s, the wave of mill closures raging across the Upstate had finally reached Laurens. The shuttering of the Lydia Mill and the Laurens Glass factory—announced within weeks of each other—would go on to put eight hundred people out of work. “One minute you had a job, and the next it was gone,” Judy said. “It was that fast.”
She bounced from odd job to odd job, starting with a gig working the register at a convenience store. But even when she could find work, it was hardly enough to survive on, especially without the crutch of the company store. And though Carl proved a dutiful co-parent even after the breakup, child support for Stacy amounted to just thirty dollars a week.
Not that Michael Burden could offer her much better. He had no real job to speak of, as he wasn’t really paid for his time at Plantation Concrete. What little money he did manage to scrape together was shunted into the fledgling downtown business. But there was something about him. Away from the Klan—in particular, away from the watchful eyes of John Howard—he dropped his tough-guy facade. He was suddenly tender and attentive, prone to making grand romantic gestures: leaving a single rose on her pillow or writing pages-long love notes, even drawing her baths and ironing her clothes for her. He was sweet with her kids. On their first official date, Burden had invited Judy and the children to spend the afternoon with him at Lake Greenwood. She thought she saw something in him that perhaps no one else did. “When we were by ourself and the Klan wasn’t involved, he was a totally different person,” she said. “I already had it in my mind to get him away from it.”
In the meantime, Burden found himself juggling the demands of his new girlfriend and those of his old boss. Every moment he wasn’t with Judy, he was down at the shop, preparing for the imminent grand opening. He hauled in glass display cases and filled them with 1920s-era patches and pins and Klan calling cards (“You’ve been visited by the Ku Klux Klan. This was a social call. Please don’t make the next visit a business call”). Howard’s old studio portrait—the 1970s-era photo of him dressed in full Klan robes—was given prominent placement on the wall behind the register. Curiosities were stacked willy-nilly atop every available surface: cement statues of Klansmen trucked over from Plantation Concrete, segregation-era signs—NO DOGS, NEGROES, MEXICANS. In one corner of the room, a small television played The Birth of a Nation on loop.
Howard, meanwhile, took pains to bestow legitimacy on the whole enterprise. After Burden’s promotion to Grand Dragon, he had given himself a new title: Imperial Emperor of Fraternal Rites, a keeper of Klan traditions and ceremonial proceedings. He started to portray himself as something of an amateur historian—a clever way of disavowing the Klan’s legacy of violence and bigotry. In opening the Redneck Shop and t
he soon-to-be-completed museum, he told the press, he was merely preserving records and documents for posterity.
Judy knew better. She’d seen the “exhibits,” including one featuring a black mannequin lying in an old casket with a noose around its neck. In the coming weeks, when word of the grotesque display ripped through town, Howard would deny the display’s very existence, going so far as to claim it was actually a white mannequin dressed in a black robe. The whole installation, he said, was merely a way of symbolizing “that the Klan was dead.”
Judy remembers it differently. “It was a black mannequin,” she said, shaking her head. “And it did have a rope around its neck. They wanted to cause a scene. They thought it was funny.”
Judy had always known the store would cause a stir, but even she underestimated the effect her boyfriend’s business would have on Laurens. Because within days of the Redneck Shop’s grand opening, hell broke loose.
* * *
—
“Are their sole motives to display history?”
Ed McDaniel, a prominent local businessman and one of only two African Americans on the Laurens County Council, had been suspicious of the Redneck Shop from the start. As soon as the doors opened on Friday, March 1—as soon as he caught a glimpse of the Klansman’s robe positioned prominently in the shop window—he, too, started to speak out. It wasn’t the first time he’d squared off with members of the Klan. Decades earlier, he’d spent more than one evening watching over his family’s home, in the event that local boys from the hooded order felt like doing a little night-riding. He was, somewhat ironically, a collector of Klan memorabilia, a reminder of that harrowing time in his own history. So when it came to John Howard and his brand-new business, McDaniel had no trouble admitting that he took personal offense.
He also knew that the situation, already explosive, would only get worse. McDaniel had been a senior at historically black South Carolina State University in the winter of 1968, when three African American teenagers—two SCSU students and a local high-schooler—were shot to death by members of the Highway Patrol during an on-campus demonstration against a local segregated bowling alley. The tragic scandal would come to be known as the Orangeburg Massacre. He knew better than most just how quickly activism could become deadly.
In the first five days alone, police had been summoned to the Redneck Shop twice to break up minor disturbances. The storefront had been pelted with rocks, eggs, and bricks. The mannequin positioned in the window, meanwhile, had caused such outrage that Howard had no choice but to move it to the back of the shop. A special agent from the State Law Enforcement Division had been dispatched to “take the pulse” of the community. The story about the Ku Klux Klan museum in the little southern town had already gone national—the square was awash with reporters and news cameras. Traffic was clogged. And Howard, the man who started it all, had been all too eager to put the blame on anyone but himself. “I didn’t mean for this to take place,” he told the Laurens County Advertiser. “I wanted to sell a few things—not to offend anyone and not to glorify the Klan. I did not realize the black race was so prejudiced about this. I’m very sorry we’ve caused any trouble. All I ask is for the respect I give them”—by which Howard meant the respect he’d given African Americans.
It was a ridiculous assertion, and McDaniel wasn’t having it. “Ignoring the Redneck Shop and hoping it goes away is a mistake,” he said. It was Tuesday, March 12, the first regularly scheduled County Council meeting since the grand opening. McDaniel had expected a larger-than-average turnout, and he wasn’t disappointed. Residents had packed themselves into the council chambers, an auditorium on the second floor of the county courthouse.
McDaniel wasn’t a particularly large man. With his high forehead and bushy mustache, he bore an uncanny resemblance to a 1970s-era Sherman Hemsley, but he nonetheless cut a stately figure in Laurens. He was known throughout town as a man of great integrity, possessed of both wit and wisdom. Prejudice, however, was never very far from his mind. McDaniel had yet to see folks in Laurens denounce racism, nor reckon with their past. “I haven’t had the general citizenry of Laurens County stand up in my lifetime and say this is morally wrong,” he said.
McDaniel spoke at length about the necessity of addressing issues of race openly, stressing that it was a moral responsibility on the part of his fellow council members. It was also, he said, an economic matter. In the wake of the Lydia Mill and Laurens Glass closures, the county was in desperate need of investment dollars. Geographically, Laurens was positioned to attract exactly that. Drawn by favorable tax rates, easy access to the deepwater port of Charleston, a rock-bottom cost of living, and a century of anti-union policies, foreign companies including BMW and Michelin had already started to dump millions of dollars into the northwest corner of the state. Site Selection magazine, a trade publication for corporate executives and real estate professionals, would soon rank five Upstate towns—all in the Greenville-Spartanburg metro area—among the top twenty cities nationwide for foreign direct investment. The existence of the Redneck Shop, however, could jeopardize any hope Laurens had of righting itself. McDaniel reminded his fellow council members that representatives of one foreign company had recently asked how their nationality and culture would be viewed by local residents, should they relocate to the area. McDaniel’s question was a simple one: What in the world do we tell them?
Beyond speaking out, though, McDaniel didn’t have much in the way of real options. Michael Burden had filed for and been granted a business license. Even if city administrators hadn’t fully grasped the nature of the shop, there were no ordinances on the books preventing such a business from operating within city or county limits. Forcibly shutting down the Redneck Shop, much as that was exactly what McDaniel would have liked to do, would be a legal nightmare in the making. (As a fellow councilman warned: “We are treading on dangerous ground if we’re talking about violating [Howard’s] First, Fifth, and possibly Ninth Amendment rights.”) So instead, McDaniel urged his fellow council members to do the only thing they really could do: draft a resolution condemning the shop, the Ku Klux Klan, and everything the Klan stood for. It would be little more than a symbolic gesture, but one McDaniel felt they needed to make. Remaining silent, he said, would only “lend credence to the KKK.”
As he reached the end of his prepared remarks, McDaniel gestured to a small ribbon pinned to his lapel. In the twelve days since the shop opened, he had talked with those closest to him about how best to turn a bad situation on its head. “We were saying we have a lemon here,” he later told the Laurens County Advertiser. “How do we turn it into lemonade?” The awareness ribbon—two strands, one black and one white, intertwined to represent racial unity—had been the brainchild of his wife, Sheila, and his mother, Ethel. McDaniel expressed that he hoped folks in town would join him in wearing one.
Almost immediately, the “unity ribbon” campaign seemed like a hit. Thirty-six hours after the County Council meeting, McDaniel estimated that as many as three thousand had been made up and handed out. Two local AM-radio DJs drummed up publicity for the cause on their morning talk show, and a slew of local businesses donated materials. By Wednesday afternoon, ribbons adorned the lapels of school district personnel and government workers, and streamed from the antennae of cars passing through the square. A large black-and-white bow had even been affixed to the front door of City Hall.
But for all the feel-good talk about unity and tolerance and coming together, there was still no consensus about how best to deal with the troublesome shop on the square. Laurens City police chief Robin Morse was indifferent. “If everything runs smoothly,” he told reporters, “I’ve got no beef with Howard.” A growing number of residents, meanwhile, seemed convinced that ignoring the shop was the most appropriate response, that giving Howard the publicity they imagined he craved would only prolong the controversy. “I think we need to be together and united about this thing,
” a Laurens woman told Channel 7 News, “so that we can get back to our normal lives.”
And that’s exactly why McDaniel had proposed his resolution—getting back to “normal” would mean restoring the very environment that fostered the store in the first place.
In the March 15 edition of the Laurens County Advertiser, printed right alongside an editorial condemning the shop, was the “Your Two Cents” column. It was a regular feature in which readers could call in to the paper and leave an anonymous phone message, weighing in on any number of issues. And judging from that week’s published responses, not everyone in town had a problem with the shop.
This is concerning the Redneck store. I don’t see anything wrong with it. They have stores that sell Malcolm X shirts and black power shirts and Farrakhan shirts and so on, and there’s no big to-do about that. So I don’t know why they’re all upset about the Redneck store. The man’s trying to make a little money.
This is about The Redneck Shop on the Square. While I might not agree with the theme of the store, I disagree with the way blacks in the community are reacting to it. He is an American just like they are, and he has every right to run a business as long as he is within the laws of the land. And the man has done nothing wrong and I believe that blacks in the community—if they will look—they will understand that he is just a businessman doing business. And that’s my opinion. That’s my two cents worth.
I’m calling concerning this Ku Klux Klan over here on the Square. I’m so glad that thing come to Laurens that I don’t know what to do, and I think that the white people was sitting back letting these blacks tell the whites what to do and what they can’t do, when they have black television. They have black colleges and they have anything they want but they don’t want the white people to have anything. And I’m behind the Ku Klux Klan, the redneck store here in Laurens—I’m behind it, 100 percent.
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