The KKK?!…In 2016?! Say it Ain’t So!
By Patrick Anderson, editor
The trash in history’s dustbin seems never to be discarded. The rubbish pile just gets higher and higher, spilling over from one generation to the next. Where is history’s waste management system when we need it?
The Ku Klux Klan has been around for 150 years. Established by white Christians in the South immediately after the Civil War, the focus was on resisting all efforts by the federal government to provide rights and equality to freedmen. Viewing the distinction of the races as ordained by God, swearing loyalty to Christianity and “Christian morals,” the Klan was devoted to white supremacy and black servitude. Membership grew to four million in the early 20th century, then declined in membership but remained a factor in southern culture, gaining new prominence during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Now, the fourth generation of Klanspersons has raised its ugly hooded head.
I thought they had been safely placed in history’s trash bin. In recent years, I have treated the occasional notice of KKK activities as anomalies – evidences of the diehard antics of holdovers from bygone days, irrelevant to modern American life. But, no.
When I was a track athlete at Furman University in the 1960s, my teammates and I drove through Alabama and Georgia one night on a return trip from a track meet in Montgomery, Alabama. As always in our low-budget travel arrangements, six of us were packed into a sedan. Cruising down a country road late at night we drove up on a KKK rally in a large field. Cars and trucks were parked along the road as robed and hooded parking attendants directed traffic. Hundreds of people milled around while a Klansman stood on a hay wagon with a megaphone and preached his version of Christian white supremacy. A huge cross was afire.
I had recently purchased an eight millimeter film camera with a zoom lens, a technological marvel in its day. The sight of the rally was exciting, scary, thrilling and appalling to us. We pulled into the parking area, jumped out of the car, and made our way toward the action. I started filming, zooming in on everything. I filmed young children, women and men in full KKK regalia marching around the burning cross. I heard the background sound of the preacher. It was wild and I was caught up in my through-the-lens view. The men marched around in single file, forming a circle. As I filmed and zoomed, it took a few minutes for me to realize that the circle they were making was around me.
As the circle drew tighter, I finally lowered my camera and stood in the middle of the angry-looking bunch of hooded white guys, some with faces covered, others not. As they closed in on me, a leader said, “You can’t take pictures here!” I nervously replied, “I didn’t know." From the crowd I heard someone say, “Smash that camera!” Another said, “Let me have that boy, Sam!” Yet others murmured threatening things.
I focused on the one I thought was the leader. “Please don’t smash my camera,” I said. “I just bought it. I’m just a college boy returning from a track meet.” I opened the back of the camera and several men directed their flashlights on the inner workings of the camera. One of them said, “Let’s see them pictures,” as though I were going to pass out eight-by-ten glossies. “There!” I said, “You have exposed the film. It is no good now. You don’t have to smash my camera. You’ve ruined the film!”
I snapped the camera shut and, inexplicably, the head man instructed me to leave, which I did, escorted by two burly Klansmen. I joined my teammates who had long ago escaped to the car, faithfully waiting to see what became of me. I jumped in the car and off we went, laughing and joking as scared white boys from college would do. Only a portion of the film was exposed. I still have some grainy footage of the burning cross in a hayfield surrounded by robed KKK.
When our track team reunited recently, that story was remembered and recounted over and over, passing down from generation-to-generation a relic of a bygone era. Otherwise, I have given only occasional thought to that night.
Then, in 1981, Carolyn and I and our three children drove through rural Louisiana toward Baton Rouge on our way to my new post on the faculty at Louisiana State University. In the morning hours, on a country road, we drove past a large field and saw the smoking embers of a large cross that had been burned the night before. We could tell by the tire ruts and trampled ground that a lot of cars, trucks and people had recently been in that field for a public event and cross burning. It was a good time to talk with the kids about the KKK, but even then I could not help but consider this an example of a dying, atavistic throwback to an earlier time in human development.
Last summer, my grandson Davis and I took a jeep ride through the mountain roads of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. Neither of us thought to take our cellphones and, of course, my old jeep is not equipped with GPS, something on which I have become far too dependent. We became thoroughly lost and disoriented in the late afternoon. We took it as an adventure, although both of us kept a wary eye on the gas gauge since neither of us had any money and I had not bothered to bring my wallet and credit cards. Davis scrambled through the ashtray and other likely spots and found about two dollars in change.
To add to our thinly-veiled anxiety, we noticed confederate flags unfurled on poles in front of ramshackle houses, signs with confederate insignia near mailboxes, trucks with flag stickers, an occasional confederate flag stuck in the back of a pickup truck, motorcycles with confederate insignia attached. Davis and I talked about all those sights and wondered about what people were thinking, hoping to find a way home sooner rather than later.
And now, in 2016, the KKK is back in the news. At political rallies, we see them pushing and shoving and yelling, directing their invective at persons of color or persons identified as having contrary opinions. The images appear on television, ugly images, hateful and frightening images. Sometimes news commentators such as Rachel Maddow juxtapose images of Hitler and the Brown Shirts, or Mussolini and his militia guardians, enabling dictators to be propelled into public office through the use of strong arms and the clubs of bigots. The unmistakable conclusion is that the same could happen in America.
I confess to taking all this too lightly. My experiences described above are, after all, the experiences of a white person. My African American sisters and brothers, friends and colleagues, have an entirely different and more visceral experience. Scholars like historian Bruce Gourley have written much about how white Christians, clergy and laity, empowered the KKK during the 20th century. Churches and denominations in the South allowed the KKK to lay their robes at the altar on Sunday mornings after Saturday night’s lynchings, bombings, beatings and other atrocities, much as Saul permitted the mob to lay their robes at his feet as they stoned Stephen to death. Nary an old-line Baptist church in the South existed without deacons and other leaders attached to the Klan.
The radical Christian Right has terroristic tendencies, much like radical Islamic followers. Florida historian James M. Denham has written much about the bombings of African Americans by radical Christian terrorists, the KKK, not so long ago. In Denham’s book on the history of Florida sheriffs, he found that every sheriff prior to 1950 was in the Klan. His study ended with that year, and he cannot authoritatively speak to the status of sheriffs after 1950, although we are left to wonder, especially knowing Lake County’s infamous Sheriff Willis McCall.
Near my ancestral home, Cedar Key, Florida, the massacre in 1923 at a black township called Rosewood is rarely talked about. But the smell of dynamite and smoke and the eviscerated bodies of black people is still fresh in the nostrils of many living people. White folks are shocked to learn of such things, or they deny them, with public schools seldom teaching about such elements of our shared history.
Today, the KKK and other white supremacists support the same Republican Party, especially Donald Trump. American politicians, aspirants for highest office, use one group of terrorists (KKK and other Christian white supremacists) to demonize another group of terrorists (radical Islam); but they do not stop there. They speak ill of black people, liberals, gays, democrats, immigrants, refugees, labor unions, socialists and more. We all lose and everyone is endangered. But this loss is more than the mere loss of political advantage; we lose the soul of society, the truth of the Gospel, and our basic humanity.
It is embarrassing and shameful that dangerous hate groups under the banner of Jesus, have emerged so publicly and forcefully in 2016. Will we never put the KKK into history’s trash compactor? Does this strain of America persist forever?
