It must have provided a real thrill to go scooting through the shadowy roads in somebody else’s flivver, to meet in lonely dingles in the pine woods and flog other men, to bounce down the fifteen-foot declivity where the ridge ends and swoop at twenty-five miles an hour through the flatlands around Mer Rouge, through phantasmal Lafourche swamp with its banshee live oaks, waving their snaky tresses in the moonlight. It was perpetual Halloween. And even if one didn’t care much for church, and took one’s shot of white lightning when one could get it, and would pay a dollar any day for five minutes in a trollop’s arms, it was reassuring to know that religion approved and sanctified one’s pranks. It made one bolder.3
There are many examples of floggings and lynchings from this period. The state of Texas was notorious for its tar-and-feather parties, and during the spring of 1922 the southern state was credited with having flogged as many as sixty-eight people in what became known as a special Klan ‘whipping meadow’ by the banks of the Trinity River. But perhaps one of the best-known Klan incidents took place in Louisiana. Two young black men, Watt Daniel and Tom Richards, were targeted for punishment by the Klan’s Mer Rouge (in Morehouse Parish) outfit, at that time led by a Dr. B. M. McKoin. Daniel and Richards had been caught spying on Klan meetings and generally badmouthing the organization, so it was decided that the the two boys would be taught a lesson. After being kidnapped in broad daylight, they were taken to some woods and warned that their behavior was unacceptable. Then they were released. Sadly, however, the story did not end there. A few weeks later, on August 24, 1922, after a baseball game and barbecue which most of Mer Rouge had attended, Watt Daniel and Tom Richards, together with their fathers and one other unnamed man, were ambushed in their car, seized by masked figures, blindfolded, hog-tied and bundled into a waiting vehicle. The prisoners were then driven to a clearing in the woods, at which point the two elder men were tied to trees and flogged. Watt Daniel, seeing his father in distress, succeeded in breaking free from his captors, but in so doing tore off the hood of one of his assailants. In this moment it is thought that both he and Tom Richards recognized their tormentor. Their fate was duly sealed, for while their fathers and the unnamed man were later released, Watt and Tom were dragged further into the woods never to be seen alive again.
Klan members gather in full regalia at an initiation ceremony not in the ‘Deep South’, as one might expect, but in Baltimore in 1923.
Back in Morehouse Parish there was a public outcry. Pro- and anti-Klan factions were at each other’s throats, ready to fight one another to the death over what had occurred. The Democratic governor of the state, John M. Parker, had lost control. So serious was the situation that he had personally requested help from the Justice Department in Washington. After much deliberation, however, President Harding felt his administration did not have the jurisdiction to take the case further. Governor Parker would therefore have to act alone, a prospect he did not relish. Eventually, he ordered the dragging of a lake where it was thought the bodies of the two boys lay and, after several setbacks, the corpses were recovered. A coroner confirmed they had been flogged and later crushed to the point that every bone in their bodies had been broken.
There then followed a protracted period of time while evidence was gathered against Klan members, but as is the way with any secret society, it proved virtually impossible to identify the culprits. In the small number of cases where there was enough evidence to proceed, two successive grand juries refused to indict anyone, not least because sitting on the said juries were several influential Klan members. The most Governor Parker could do was to attempt to convict some of those involved for minor misdemeanors, which he did with varying degrees of success. Some of the culprits were given small fines, while others left the county never to return.
Parker made it known that no district judges would be appointed if they were known to be Klan members, and in state elections during 1924, all of the candidates for the governorship declared themselves anti-Klan. Was this the beginning of the end for the Invisible Empire? The answer is less than clear, for although the organization was on a downward spiral in several key states, including Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and California, membership had reached a peak during the mid-twenties, when it numbered approximately three million. By 1928, however, only a few hundred thousand remained.
Several key factors contributed to this decline. With the end of the First World War, Americans felt more secure and the economy appeared to be picking up, signaling greater prosperity for all. The Klan also had to battle the negative publicity caused by events such as the Mer Rouge murders, together with a handful of other notorious cases including the murder of a police constable which took place in Inglewood, California. The state of Texas’s flogging parties were also proving a severe embarrassment. Suddenly, law-abiding citizens began to see the Klan as a divisive force, disrupting communal harmony, causing civil unrest. Many of those who had previously belonged to the organization wanted to distance themselves from it. Even with the onset of the Depression, when it might be thought that the Klan would see a swelling of its ranks, membership dwindled even further. Large swathes of the country were out of work and quite literally starving, yet the best the Klan could come up with was to announce that anyone involved in civil unrest such as hunger marches were nothing better than ‘Negroes, Hunks, Dagoes, and all the rest of the scum of Europe’s slums.’4
By the late thirties, it seemed that nothing could revive the Klan’s fortunes, and as if mirroring this decline, Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans retired. Taking over from him was a man by the name of Jimmy Colescott. Colescott immediately put into action a major recruiting campaign, which included the usual Klan tactics of violence and intimidation. However, it was doomed to failure from the start for, alongside the onset of the Second World War, which effectively concentrated everyone’s minds elsewhere, major incidents such as the ‘Shoemaker flogging’ brought nothing but adverse publicity.
Consistently against any kind of organized labor or union membership, the Klan was particularly active in the citrus state of Florida where, in 1935, a political group (the Modern Democrats) began trying to create several labor organizations, as well as campaigning for employment reform. Ever alert to such threats, the Klan sent an undercover agent to spy on the Modern Democrats and, after one meeting of members, they detained several men whom they suspected of being key players in the new movement. Among those detained was Joseph Shoemaker. Shoemaker was taken away, flogged, castrated and tarred all over before having one of his legs plunged into a vat of boiling tar. Nine days later he died of his injuries. Though the incident brought national condemnation, and despite the arrest and trial of several of those responsible, ultimately no one was convicted of Shoemaker’s murder.
Drawing confidence from this blatent evasion of justice, the Klan then tried to regroup and regain some lost ground over the next decade, particularly where recruitment was concerned, but Imperial Wizard Colescott didn’t seem up to the job, and with the Second World War drawing to a close, Grand Dragon Dr. Samuel Green took over Colescott’s position. Reintroducing parades, mystic initiation ceremonies atop Stone Mountain, night raids and floggings, he did his best once again to swell the Klan’s ranks. But his recruitment drive was beset by problems, mainly caused by bodies such as the FBI and the Bureau of Internal Revenue, which were keeping a close eye on the white-hooded society.
In 1949, Samuel Green died suddenly, plunging the Invisible Empire into even greater turmoil. Splinter groups formed, creating numerous factions that each clung desperately to its own violent agenda. Burning crosses could be spotted across the whole of the south and yet, although united in violence, the Klan could still not rally around one leader to form a cohesive political whole. One result of this was that many Klan leaders ended up in jail. Even with the abolition of public-school segregation, which took place on May 17, 1954, the Klan could not unite properly.
Violence was the only factor that brought the Invisible
Empire together, a fact which is illustrated horrifically in the following extract from a report by the combined forces of the Friends’ Service Committee, the National Council of Churches of Christ and the Southern Regional Council, which lists over 500 cases of intimidation and violence after the passing of the Supreme Court’s school decision.
• 6 Negroes killed;
• 29 individuals, 11 of them white, shot and wounded in racial incidents;
• 44 persons beaten;
• 5 stabbed;
• 30 homes bombed; in one instance (at Clinton, Tenn.), an additional 30 houses were damaged by a single blast; attempted blasting of five other homes;
• 8 homes burned;
• 15 homes struck by gunfire, and 7 homes stoned;
• 4 schools bombed, in Jacksonville, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Clinton, Tenn.;
• 2 bombing attempts in schools in Charlotte and Clinton;
• 7 churches bombed, one of which was for whites; an attempt made to bomb another Negro church.5
But if the violence of the 1950s was horrific, during the 1960s, with the ever increasing influence of the civil-rights movement and the fact that the black population was becoming a growing economic competitor to the working-class white male, it only escalated. The Klan finally succeeded in appointing a new Imperial Wizard, a man who, if not accepted by every Klan member, was at least favorable to the majority. Robert Shelton was a Tuscaloosa rubber worker who harbored a violent dislike of black people, whom he saw as little more than savages. With Shelton at the helm, the Invisible Empire slowly began to claw back some degree of coordination, and once again began to make life for its black victims barely tolerable. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Birmingham, Alabama where, during the early part of the 1960s, bombing of black homes and businesses became an almost weekly occurrence until, on September 15, 1963, one of the most infamous crimes in American history was committed when the Klan bombed the Sixteenth Street Bethel Baptist Church, killing four young girls – Cynthia Wesley, Dennise McNair, Carol Robertson and Addie Mae Collins.
Birmingham’s law enforcement agencies at first attempted to blame black activists, but soon even they couldn’t shy away from the fact that the KKK was involved. Yet, despite clear evidence pointing towards those responsible, at the time no one was charged with the killings. Eventually all four murders went on file, along with several hundred other unsolved crimes of the period. This did nothing to discourage KKK violence. During the summer of 1964 in St. Augustine, Florida, the black population, with the support of Martin Luther King (or ‘Martin Lucifer Coon,’ as the Klan nicknamed him), embarked on ‘integrationist’ marches along with their Jewish neighbors. The most militant of the hooded Klan knights were ready and waiting. The marchers refrained from using any sort of violence, but not so the white knights, who stoned and clubbed and threw acid at them. The clashes between the two groups lasted for weeks, the police seemingly powerless to intervene. The violence eventually died down, but other outbreaks of Klan activity sprung up elsewhere. One infamous incident involved Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn who, along with several other soldiers, was returning from a summer training camp at Fort Benning in Georgia. Colonel Penn was black, as were several of his companions. When their car, sporting a Washington number plate, was spotted by a group of Klansmen, they immediately jumped to the conclusion that the occupants were civil-rights supporters, with the result that Penn’s vehicle was peppered with gunshots. Tragically, Colonel Penn died in the attack, but what followed was even more outrageous, for although the culprits were eventually arrested and put on trial, the all-white jury was loathe to convict. As the defendants’ attorney put it, no ‘… Madison County jury [ever] converted an electric chair into a sacrificial chair on which the pure flesh of a member of the human race was sacrificed to the savage revengeful appetite of a raging mob.’6 A verdict of ‘not guilty’ was returned, and much to the federal government’s annoyance, if not embarrassment, the defendants went free.
If the Ku Klux Klan thought it was making any inroads into mainstream American life, however, nothing could have been further from the truth for, a little less than a hundred years after the Invisible Empire’s birth, when it was formed primarily to stop black people gaining any foothold in mainstream America, the African-American population had begun to claim its rightful place in society. Educated, economically independent and making huge inroads into middle-class America, the country was more truly bi-racial than it had ever been in its entire history. Nonetheless, a great deal of work still had to be done if African Americans were ever to enjoy equality in their own country. Martin Luther King campaigned vigorously to bring down the racist barriers. Rallies were organized, as well as sit-ins and other means of peaceful protest, yet even then the Ku Klux Klan couldn’t resist using violence to make its voice heard.
One victim of the Klan, Mrs. Viola Gregg Liuzzo, was shot dead while transporting demonstrators to and from a march in Lowndes County in 1965. The perpetrators were all brought to court; once again no conviction was secured.7 The only positive outcome of the whole sorry affair was that it did at least prompt the then President, Lyndon B. Johnson, to denounce the Klan publicly and declare a war against all that the Invisible Empire stood for.
Nevertheless, under United States law, it is impossible to forbid the existence of any type of organization, and it fell to individual counties to gauge the political temperature of the country and begin prosecuting Klan crimes. Slowly but surely, the tide began to turn. FBI agents infiltrated many Klan groups and with the evidence they were building up they began securing convictions against Klan members.
In 1965 a voting-rights law was passed, increasing the significance of black citizens and causing politicians to begin taking note of their non-white constituents. Towards the end of the 1960s, it seemed nothing could stem the increasing growth of black power, and several areas with black majorities voted in black mayors, councilors and sheriffs. In such an atmosphere, the decline of the Ku Klux Klan was inevitable.
So determined was the US government to stamp out the KKK that it sanctioned the FBI’s ‘disrupt and neutralize’ programme, otherwise known by the acronym COUNTERINTELPRO, which, by the early 1970s, led the FBI to claim that one in six Klan members were actually FBI informers.
The specter of the four young girls who were killed in the Birmingham bombing several years earlier, also began to catch up with the Klan. In Alabama there is no statute of limitation where murder is concerned, and a certain young lawyer by the name of William Baxley had forgotten neither the crime nor the fact that convictions could be sought at any time so long as there was enough evidence. On leaving law school Baxley set his sights on becoming Attorney General of Alabama, and by the time he was thirty, he had achieved his goal. In a position of authority, Baxley now began hounding the FBI for their files on the case and eventually, with the relevant documents in his possession, realized that the FBI had had, within weeks of the bombing, enough evidence to convict those men responsible. In September 1977, almost thirteen years after the crime was committed, one of the guilty men was brought to justice when an Alabama grand jury (made up of three black and nine white jurors) indicted and afterwards convicted Robert Edward Chambliss on four counts of first-degree murder.
Baxley promised to pursue everyone else who had been involved in the crime and bring them to justice, too. But perhaps the most poignant yet powerful sign that America was moving away from Ku Klux Klan-type politics was that in 1979, Birmingham, Alabama elected its first black mayor.
With Klan ranks thinning daily, and sheriffs and juries increasingly willing to arrest and convict anyone involved in Klan activities, membership of the Invisible Empire waned once again. Small pockets of resistance did still remain, people whose deeply entrenched beliefs were succinctly expressed by the female jockey Mary Bacon, who not only publicly declared her Klan membership but announced that:
We are not just a bunch of illiterate, southern, nigger killer
s. We are good white Christian people, hard-working people, people working for a white America […] When one of your wives or one of your sisters gets raped by a nigger maybe you’ll get smart and join the Klan.8
Even with a brief renaissance (particularly in the Deep South) toward the end of the 1970s, the Klan struggled to achieve the kind of power it wielded in the 1920s. A young, college-educated man by the name of David Duke tried creating a new Klan image by appealing to America’s growing middle class. Duke lectured at university campuses up and down the country, and appeared on television and radio shows, but to little avail. Indeed, the Klan seemed only to have become an organization that ultra-right-wing men and women could look back on with nostalgia. The Ku Klux Klan was part of American history, part of a long tradition that represented a yearning amongst some for white supremacy.
But there were some further hideous throwbacks to times gone by. In the town of Greensboro in North Carolina on November 3, 1979, a sizeable anti-Klan rally was gathering in Greensboro’s black district when into their midst drove a nine-car cavalcade of Ku Klux Klan and American neo-Nazis. The demonstrators on the street began pounding on the cars, but what happened next was almost beyond belief. In front of TV cameras and numerous witnesses, several of the men inside the cars stepped out of their vehicles, brandished guns and began firing into the crowds. Four white men and one black woman were killed, and many, many more (including children) were badly injured. The incident drew national attention. President Carter ordered the FBI to investigate. Fourteen of the assailants were arrested and charged with the murders, but the Greensboro incident showed that, although America was becoming a more tolerant, interracial society, there were still deep pockets of bigotry and evil at large.
The Most Evil Secret Societies in History Page 10
