Little by little, it seemed to be working. “I had nothin in the world before I met Judy,” Burden says. “I had nothing. I didn’t have no cares. I didn’t care about anybody’s feelings. I was a very angry person. But Judy once told somebody that she saw a side of me nobody else seen. She was what made me think. Because I was a soldier. I mean, I do what I’m told and drive on. But her, she would make me sit down and we’d talk and it’d be like, ‘Well, you’re right. You’ve got a point there.’ She was my conscience.”
One night that spring, Judy and Mike went back to the bar on Highway 221 to hear the same band play—the White Buffalo Band, a Greenwood-based southern rock cover band. Mike had gotten friendly with some of the members. “I went up, talked to that lead singer, told ’em what I was gonna do,” he said. “Grabbed that wireless mic…”
Over at the bar, Judy turned around and realized she had no idea where her boyfriend was. “All of a sudden, he disappears.” She swiveled in her chair and hopped off her stool. Then suddenly she heard his voice come through over the loudspeaker.
“Judy, I love you. Will you marry me?”
Mike had climbed up onstage and dropped down on one knee. Whoops and cheers rang out from the crowd. “I was in love with him,” Judy said later. “And I thought, ‘Well, he really loves me and my kids. He’ll go along. He’ll shy away from the Klan.’ For a while there, I thought he had.” So she said yes.
six
“CHOOSE”
Despite her loose affiliation with the Redneck Shop and her relationship with Mike Burden, Judy was kept mostly in the dark when it came to the inner workings of the Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. She’d never been privy to high-level talks or strategy sessions, and she had only a cursory knowledge of the various dignitaries who stopped by with increasing frequency, whether to inspect the merchandise, drop off application forms and white supremacist literature, or inquire about renting out the meeting hall. As for John Howard’s plans, all she knew was that he’d hired a lawyer at some point. “They kept that private,” she said. The phone would ring; John would summon Mike to a room in the back of the shop and ask his wife, Hazel, to take over the register for a spell.
By early May, just days after Mike and Judy were married at the courthouse in a no-frills civil ceremony, everyone in Laurens found out what those clandestine conversations had been about: John Howard was suing Councilman Ed McDaniel for slander. The lawsuit, filed on Howard’s behalf with the Laurens county clerk’s office, cited McDaniel’s comments to the press, suggesting that Howard might have been involved in the van incident. The suit alleged that McDaniel had tarnished Howard’s reputation in an attempt to “curry political favor.” In the filing, the Redneck Shop’s proprietor was cast as an upstanding, law-abiding citizen, one who had never been charged with any crime of “moral turpitude.” (Perhaps his 1970 arrest on suspicion of murder had been expunged from the record.)
For his part, McDaniel didn’t seem particularly worried. “I would not spend 15 cents on an attorney to defend this,” he told the Clinton Chronicle. Still, the suit was a clear sign that Howard had no intention of backing down. He had also started speaking out against his other nemesis—by name this time. “If Mr. Kennedy wants to continue [with his protests],” he told a group of reporters, “he’s going to end up in trouble. I’m just interested in putting a stop to all this foolishness taking place.”
McDaniel and Kennedy were far from the only folks with whom Howard was fighting, however. Because now he had to contend with Judy, too.
Even before their marriage, Judy had set about trying to discredit John Howard in the eyes of her husband. Seemingly every chance she got, Judy would goad Howard into an argument—about race, about prejudice, about southern history, about the Klan. “I’d sit back and I’d actually think of stuff to argue about,” she said, “and then when Mike and I would leave, I would be like, ‘See how ignorant he really is?’ ” After their marriage, her influence on Burden had only grown. Mike had officially moved into her trailer; for the first time in seven years, he wasn’t living on the Lanford property, wasn’t at Howard’s constant beck and call. And the more time he spent with his wife and step-children, the more receptive he became to Judy’s insistence that the Redneck Shop had caused them all nothing but problems.
In late May, yet another scuffle broke out on the square. This time a white male in his mid-twenties, Herbert Neely, wandered inside the Redneck Shop and began tearing down the makeshift curtains tacked up along the front windows to block the sunlight. John Howard promptly called the police, though Neely wandered right back out of the store only moments later, as wordlessly as he’d arrived. By the time Lieutenant P. J. Quinton showed up to take Howard’s statement, Wild Bill was rushing in—he’d heard about the disturbance and intended to help out his friend. In his hand was a sawed-off pump-action shotgun with a pistol grip—illegal in the state of South Carolina. Hoff spent the evening in jail. Bond was set for $30,000.
Each new drama or showdown at the store seemed only to confirm what Judy had been telling him. And for a few weeks that spring and summer, the Burdens enjoyed something close to a happy, somewhat stress-free life. Then they got served with eviction papers.
“I got behind in the rent,” Judy said, “and Mike wasn’t really workin….” That she’d been expecting the eviction notice did not in any way lessen the blow—she had no savings and no safety net, and in seven days they had to be out.
“I was graspin at straws,” she says. “You know, ‘How are we gonna get the money? What are we gonna do?’ And Mike said, ‘There’s only one person I can turn to.’ ”
He had gone to John Howard in the hope of securing a loan or an advance on his earnings in order to make a down payment on a trailer. Howard, however, wasn’t willing to offer any financial assistance. Instead, he offered the Burdens a place to stay: the “apartment” in the basement of the Redneck Shop.
The arrangement was supposed to be temporary—and it’s not as though Judy had any other options. But whatever she imagined, whatever reservations she had, the reality turned out to be far worse. For all the attention paid to renovating the Echo’s street-level space, virtually nothing had been done to the basement. It was damp, musty, dark, sectioned off into what passed for three different “rooms”—a living area, a bedroom, and a makeshift “washroom,” little more than a garden tub hauled into a corner, to which you could run water via a hose. No toilet. The tiny amount of light filtering through the garden-level windows did little more than illuminate a blanket of dust. “You couldn’t breathe in there,” Judy said. “It was a nightmare.”
The state of the accommodations was one thing; the sudden proximity of her children to the Klan—or of the Klan to her children—was another thing entirely.
In the earliest days of her flirtation with Mike, long before Judy attended a meeting or learned the truth about the Klan, she had brought her children, Brian and Stacy, along on visits to the Lanford property and to the Redneck Shop in order to check out the renovations in progress. That in itself was not unusual—both the shop and John Howard’s property were usually crawling with children. “If you’re a Klan member, your kids are there,” Stacy said years later. “And the kids are basically absorbing any- and everything that’s talked about.” She was a few months shy of her eleventh birthday then: blond, bespectacled, a bit of an introvert, but also very smart, with a wry sense of humor. For the most part she liked Mike—though she was a bit suspicious of the speed at which he’d seemingly replaced her father—but it hadn’t taken her long to determine that she was no fan of John Howard. “He’d be like, ‘Don’t you wanna grow up to be like us?’ ” she remembers. “He had my friend Katie totally convinced—at eight years old—that we needed to start a junior Klan chapter.”
Whatever John Howard was selling, ten-year-old Stacy wasn’t buying it.
Even worse, in her eyes, was Wild B
ill Hoff. Ever since arriving in South Carolina sometime in the early 1990s, Wild Bill’s primary place of residence had been the Lanford property. As renovations on the shop got further under way, however, he began spending an increasing amount of time in a makeshift apartment on the second floor of the Echo theater. He largely kept to himself, but one day he offered to give Stacy guitar lessons.
“I really wanted to learn how to play,” she said, “but he had a creepy vibe to him. And he would never come downstairs. He would always want me to go upstairs in his room.” Nothing untoward ever happened, but there was no doubt that Bill made her uncomfortable. Judy, meanwhile, had known virtually nothing about Wild Bill’s criminal past, but the mere hint that something inappropriate might have gone on upstairs brought out the fire in her. “I’d kill him.”
Judy and her family moved into the basement sometime in mid-June, but she kept virtually all of their belongings boxed up, pulling out only what she needed to get through the day—she had no intention of staying long. And when it came to her children, she was emphatic about keeping her eyes on them. “I kept ’em right here with me,” she said. “So I could see ’em and I’d know what was going on around ’em at all times. I told ’em, you stay right here with me. You don’t have anything to say to none of ’em.”
Meanwhile, tensions between her and John Howard continued to escalate. “We would go out and buy food for the month,” Stacy explained, “and of course we was on food stamps. But John would let his employees come down there and eat everything.”
When Judy broached the subject with her husband, it seemed like he was in denial. “Well, you livin here for free. What did you expect?” he said. “You gonna say something just because one of the guys ate a snack cake?”
It was around that time that she discovered, buried among her son’s possessions, a small pocketknife bearing the Klan’s logo.
“I asked Brian where he got it,” she recalled. “And he said, ‘John Howard gave it to me. He told me I could be a future Klansman.’ ”
She took it from him, of course, but it was just further confirmation that the situation she was in wasn’t just an inconvenience or a temporary rough patch. It was dangerous.
* * *
—
The farming community of Pelion—population five hundred—sits little more than an hour’s drive southeast of Laurens, nestled among dense pine forests just west of Columbia. It was originally a whistle-stop, one of several small towns that sprang up along the old Carolina Midland Railway around the turn of the century. In more recent times, Pelion has become known for its annual Peanut Party, a two-day autumn festival honoring the region’s most cherished crop. But for more than thirty years, the town was also home to one of the state’s most notorious residents—and John Howard’s friend—Grand Dragon of the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Horace King.
King was born two counties over in 1933, the son of a poor sharecropper, one of ten children expected to work the fields rather than attend school with any regularity. “Nobody could have been brought up worse than I was,” he once told a reporter from the Orangeburg Times and Democrat. “Part of the time we didn’t have nuthin to eat. We were in the fields from sunup to after sundown.” He dropped out by the sixth grade, and for the rest of his life remained functionally illiterate.
It was a hard life, and the years of privation showed. At sixty-three, King could easily have passed for two decades older. He was tall and gaunt, with extreme, almost witchlike features: deep-set eyes, sharp cheekbones, a pointed chin. His bottom lip rolled permanently inward, probably a side effect of a lifelong tobacco habit.
Like John Howard, King found a sense of purpose with the United Klans of America during the turmoil of the civil rights movement. He gradually moved up the ranks until 1985, when he broke away and helped to form the Christian Knights. At around the same time, he also purchased (with money he’d collected from his followers) a seven-acre plot off an unpaved, red-clay road, which served as both his home and a headquarters for Klan activity in the state.
The house was a simple frame affair, yellow shiplap with a gray shingled roof. A single-story outbuilding fifty yards to the northeast doubled as a meeting hall. But during rallies—such as the one held on June 29, 1996—the flat field between the buildings transformed. A folding card table became a makeshift concession stand; a tent canopy housed the various knickknacks for sale (T-shirts, pocketknives, and all manner of trinkets bearing the Klan logo). A wooden utility trailer was trucked in to serve as a mobile pulpit. King, dressed in his knee-length satin robe, presided from the stage. “A race war is coming!” he hollered. “The Klan is the only hope for the white race!”
King was known for his fiery rhetoric, and his speeches always revolved around the same themes: that black people were lazy and government-dependent (“the taxpayers in the South is what’s feeding them bums you see laying in the street”), that black churches were evil, and that it was up to white folks to beat or burn or otherwise drive them out. In fact, virtually nothing about the June rally was different from any other held in the previous twenty or thirty years—the same soundtrack crackled from ancient speakers (“The Old Rugged Cross” and other gospel songs). The same jury-rigged pews—planks of wood set atop five-gallon drums—formed a semicircle around the stage. The same sweet stink of kerosene wafted through the air.
There was, however, one small addition to the proceedings that evening. An upturned ball cap—a makeshift collection plate—was circulating among the crowd. King was raising money for a legal defense fund, after being served with a lawsuit that all but threatened to end the Christian Knights.
Over the previous few months, concerns about the wave of church fires across the region had only grown more intense. For the Christian Knights, however, the situation was suddenly dire. Two of King’s acolytes, Timothy Welch and Gary Christopher Cox, had been arrested for the back-to-back burnings of two rural churches in nearby Manning, South Carolina. Now one of those churches, Macedonia Baptist, was suing the Christian Knights—and Horace King, specifically—for using “disparaging and inflammatory statements about black churches” to inspire and encourage the burnings. The lead attorney was Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the same Morris Dees who had effectively bankrupted Robert Shelton’s UKA and J. W. Farrands’s Invisible Empire.
“This is a conspiracy,” King thundered from the stage, “but it’s a conspiracy against the white race. The Klan is not about race hatred. It’s about the Bible.”
Considering the seriousness of the charges—not to mention the size of the SPLC’s endowment, some $68 million—King’s backyard rally was unlikely to put much of a dent in his Klan faction’s mounting legal fees. But to the men gathered that night, it was an issue of honor. Virgil Griffin had driven down from North Carolina to mark the occasion, shoving a few crumpled dollar bills into the impromptu collection plate. “I will not bow to Morris Dees,” he said. “The only way he’s going to stop me is to kill me.”
Interestingly, the biggest donation of the night didn’t come from a member of the Christian Knights at all. It came from Howard’s old friend and accomplice Barry Black, who had pledged the Keystone Knights’ loyalty and support in fighting the suit. “We haven’t done anything to deserve this persecution,” he said, dropping $50 into the hat. Representatives of the Christian Identity movement and the Aryan Nation had made the trek to rural Lexington County, too. The mingling among usually disparate groups had put law enforcement officials and Klan watchers on edge.
“It’s a concern,” Chief Robert Stewart of the State Law Enforcement Division told the Associated Press. Jack Levin, director for the study of violence and social conflict at Northeastern University and a well-known expert on hate crimes, also expressed dismay. Increasingly, he noted, the Klan and its allies were relying on Christianity to “lend an air of religious credibility” to their message and d
rive recruitment.
Of particular interest was a twenty-six-page pamphlet, The Bible Answers Racial Questions, which purported to show biblical “evidence” supporting segregation. Passages were quoted out of context, alongside analysis that described black people as “cursed,” exalted white people as “chosen,” and—most troubling, given the circumstances—advocated the burning of black churches (e.g., “But ye shall destroy their altars, break down their images, and cut down their groves”; Exodus 34:13). The booklet, blue-jacketed and crudely stapled, had surfaced at King’s late June rally, a development that received considerable press attention. No one, however, seemed to have any clue as to its origins.
In fact, it was written in the mid-1950s by an Alabaman named Eugene S. Hall. At the time, Hall was a fairly prominent member of Montgomery society and a director of his local White Citizens Council, though he caused a bit of a stir by staging a mock hanging at the courthouse square during the Montgomery bus boycott. Rosa Parks had been arrested just six months earlier, and the demonstration was intended as a show of force. Law enforcement would have done well to take him seriously. Less than a year later, Hall was arrested along with six other men in connection with a wave of bombings across the city. Targets included four African American churches and the homes of three African American ministers, including Martin Luther King Jr.
All seven co-conspirators were acquitted, however, and Hall’s racism never abated. By the mid-’70s he was cavorting with James Venable and the National Knights in Stone Mountain, Georgia. “Took me years to do that book,” he told journalist Patsy Sims, before launching into a bizarre screed about the inferiority of blacks and the biological differences between the races. When asked about his religious background, Hall readily admitted that he was self-taught. Despite his lack of formal education and training—despite an appallingly poor grasp of Christian theology—Hall’s pamphlet achieved a fairly impressive reach in the decades that followed. In 1974, the booklet turned up in the mailbox of a federal judge, W. Arthur Garrity, after his ruling in Morgan v. Hennigan led to the compulsory busing of students in Boston’s public school system. By the 1980s The Bible Answers Racial Questions was circulating among members of the Christian Identity movement, and at some point in the 1990s it was available for sale from an Aryan Nations catalog based out of Idaho. Its sudden presence in South Carolina, however, suggested a potential link between the book and the church fires.
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