The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America

526 Pages·1998·14.302 MB·English

by  Wyn Craig Wade

The Fiery Cross
The Ku Klux Klan in America
Wyn Craig Wade
Oxford University Press
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 1987 by Wyn Craig Wade
First published by Simon and Schuster,
A Division of Simon and Schuster, Inc.
Simon and Schuster Building, Rockefeller Center,
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1998
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wade, Wyn Craig.
The fiery cross : the Ku Klux Klan in America / Wyn Craig Wade /
p. cm.
Originally published : New York : Simon and Schuster, ©1987. With new pref.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-512357-3 (pbk.)
I. Ku Klux Klan (1915- )—History. 2. White supremacy movements—
United States—History. 3. Racism—United States—History.
I. Title.
HS2230. K63W33 1997
322.4'2'0973—dc21 97-44001
10 9876 5 4321
Printed in the United States of America
Acknowledgment is made to the Massachusetts Review for permission to the quote from Andrew
Goodman’s “Corollary to a Poem by A.E. Housman " reprinted from the Massachusetts Review, © 1965,
the Massachusetts Review, Inc.; and to Playboy Magazine for permission to reprint an interview that
originally appeared in Playboy Magazine, © 1965 by Playboy.
In memory of my Kentucky grandmother—
Sarah Walls Dishon
1888-1986
—a fierce and steadfast Radical Republican
from the wane of Reconstruction until her
death nearly a century later
Contents
Preface vii
Prologue “Beware the People Weeping” 9
Book One: 1865-1915
1. “The Shrouded Brotherhood” 31
2. “We Are the Law Itself’ 54
3. “Let Us Have Peace” 80
Postscript 112
Book Two: 1915-1930
4. “Writing History with Lightning” 119
5. “Here Yesterday, Here Today, Here Forever” 140
6. “I Found Christ through the Ku Klux Klan” 167
7. “Practical Patriotism” 186
8. “Ain’t God Good to Indiana?” 215
Postscript 248
v
vi CONTENTS
Book Three: 1930-1987 '
9. “The Klan Is an American Institution” 257
10. “Divisible Invisible Empire” 276
11. “The Roaring Sixties” 307
12. “His Hot and Awful Light” 333
13. “A Bible in One Hand and a .38 in the Other” 368
Postscript 397
Acknowledgments 404
Appendices 409
Notes 447
Index 514
Preface
A number of remarkable things have happened to the Ku Klux Klan
since this book was first published. Certainly the most outstanding
development has been that prosecution of Klansmen who commit
atrocities has not stopped at the mere perpetrators but has extended
to their parent organizations. And no group has been more deter­
mined and successful at such prosecution than the Southern
Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama.
In Mobile, Alabama, 1984, a young black male was tortured and
murdered by two young Klansmen who were members of Robert
Shelton’s United Klans of America. The victim was selected
entirely at random, and the two Klansmen gave as their motive
their desire “to show Klan strength in Alabama.” The two perpe­
trators of this heinous crime were dealt with appropriately by the
justice system. But the leaders of the Southern Poverty Law Center
weren’t content with this. They decided to go after the United
Klans of America, of which the two murderers were members.
Cutting off the toes of the dragon wasn’t enough; the Center went
for the dragon’s head. The Center argued that the United Klans of
America was a corporation, and a corporation is responsible for
the behavior of its agents “acting within the line and scope of their
vn
VÜi PREFACE
jobs.” It was an ingenious approach to the problem. The Center
therefore conducted a civil suit against the UKA for encouraging
this ghastly murder by its members. The consequence of the suit
was that Shelton’s UKA was found guilty and was financially
ruined—it had to declare bankruptcy. Its principal building in
Tuscaloosa was sold, and the proceeds from the sale were award­
ed to the victim’s mother.
Several years later, the Southern Poverty Law Center did it
again. When Klansmen attacked peaceful members of a rally on
Martin Luther King’s birthday, the Center effectively sued and
bankrupted the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in
Georgia. And in 1990, when in Portland, Oregon, two members of
the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) murdered a black student, the
Center sued and bankrupted WAR. As Morris Dees, lead attorney
of the Center, says, “Hit them in the pocketbook.” It has been an
enormously successful tactic.
Klansmen have now learned that they are neither immune nor
invulnerable to the far reach of justice. This realization took 122
years. But although these successful legal processes have demon­
strated that there are multiple means to curtail Klan atrocities, these
actions haven’t completely solved the problem—a problem which
may be beyond solving. Because, in response to the success of
legal prosecution, Klan mentality has undergone permutation.
Fewer and fewer Klansmen are wearing white sheets; the sheets are
now more comical than symbols of strength. Today, whenever
there’s a Klan parade, there are more bystanders hooting and jeer­
ing at them than there are Klansmen themselves.
Consequently, most Klansmen don’t call themselves Klansmen
anymore, and they don’t wear the sheets. The two most striking
permutations of Klan mentality are the militia movement and the
Christian Coalition. Many members of the militia movement are
hard-core racists and neo-Nazis: weekend warriors who wear cam­
ouflage fatigues, revel in paramilitary activities, threaten and com­
mit violence, and who are determined to defy the federal govern­
ment. In these respects, they very much resemble the Klan in the
days of Reconstruction. One could call them the Khaki Klan.
The Christian Coalition is different. Journalist Walter Cronkite
has characterized the Coalition as an organization with “a militant
ideology—one that encourages deep hostility toward those who
disagree with its agenda.” The Coaliton is lavishly funded, with an
annual operating budget in excess of $20 million. It is extremely
PREFACE IX
well organized and political. Using slander and backhanded meth­
ods—but operating within the political system—it endeavors to
elect candidates who support its right-wing views. In these
respects, it very much resembles the Klan of the 1920s. One could
call it the White-collar Klan.
Such groups will come and go. They inherit and further the
essential spirit of the Klan: fanaticism, contempt for democratic
ideals, and the belief that they have a God-given right to accom­
plish their aims in spite of how they may injure other people.
Democracy is a difficult thing; it requires a genuine love and
commitment to it. In the Age of Enlightenment, America’s found­
ing fathers wrote the best arguments for democracy yet seen on our
planet. The Declaration of Independence and the American
Constitution are documents conceived in the blazing sunlight of the
Enlightenment, and anything standing in the way of this brilliant
light casts a long shadow. Hate groups, like the Klan and its kin,
constitute America’s shadow. They are the dark side of the
American character. The dreadful irony is that they were spawned
and are sustained by the very democratic ideals they mock, invert,
and corrupt. The control of such groups will always require the
unwavering vigilance of Americans who are equal to the challenges
of democracy and who are committed to the basic principles of
human dignity.
Prologue
"BEWARE THE PEOPLE
WEEPING”
The Causes of Radical Reconstruction:
1865-1867
The old South, the antebellum South, “the sunny sunny
South”: Old Massa in an ivory, three-piece suit and black string
tie sits on the piazza of the Big House with one hand clutching his
cane and the other wrapped around a mint julep. Inside supervis­
ing the household slaves is Missy—the flower of Southern wom­
anhood, the saintly, self-sacrificing madonna whose rose-petal
fragility and marble-white purity are enough to make grown men
weep, march off to war, and die for her. Suddenly Beau comes
galloping up to the plantation, his golden hair tossing in ringlets
around his neck. A splendid specimen of Southern virility, Beau
has just returned from up North where he’s been attending a Yan­
kee college. Little Sister squeals in delight at the sight of her
brother and runs out to meet him, her blue crinolines rustling and
her flushed cheeks the color of peaches and cream. The ever-
faithful household slaves come out onto the piazza, brush the
tears from their eyes, and clasp their hands in silent devotion as
Beau and Little Sister embrace and tease each other like children.
And out in the sprawling fields, hundreds of happily hoeing darkies
pause for a moment to watch the joyful reunion at the Big House
and praise the Lord that, with whites in their haven, all’s right with
the world.
Such is the image of the South from the Gone With the Wind
9
10 PROLOGUE
school of literature, stamped further into American consciousness
by the moonlight-and-magnolia school of history. Both schools
continue to influence romantic novels and high school history
textbooks. Only recently has a drastically divergent point of view
been considered—that of the slaves themselves.
Take, for example, the recollections of an eighty-seven-year-old
woman who was once a Tennessee slave. She recalled the time
Missy got sick and she was called into the Big House to stand by
her bedside and fan the flies off her face. “I would hit her all in
the face,” she recalled with amusement. “Sometimes I would
make out I was [falling asleep] and beat her in the face.” When
Massa came into the room. Missy tried to tell him about the young
slave’s subversion, but Missy wasn’t very coherent. He thought
she meant the slave girl was actually falling asleep. “Then he
would tell me to go out in the yard and wake up.” Eventually, poor
Missy died, “and all the slaves came in the house just a-hollering
and crying and holding their hands over their eyes, just hollering
for all they could.” As soon as they had left the house, however,
they grinned at each other and chuckled, “Old damn bitch! She
gone on down to hell by now.”
The discrepancy between black and white viewpoints of slavery
and Reconstruction has led to a historical miasma that is- still in
the process of being dispelled. In the documents of a hundred
years ago, the divergence is readily apparent as an inconsistency
between white accusations and black behavior. More subtle are
the inconsistencies among whites themselves. In the thirty years
before the Civil War, the South had expended considerable time
and effort marshaling scriptural and historical proof that slavery
was inevitable. Philosophical tracts argued that slavery was a bless­
ing to master, slave, and society alike. After all, the “inferiority” of
blacks made them unfit to function outside of bondage, and their
“docility” demanded the benevolent protection of whites. In spite
of their belief in black docility and inferiority, however, Southern
whites were plagued by the constant fear and occasional reality of
slave uprisings, which they blamed on the scurrilous abolitionist
literature that was perverting what they believed to be the natural
order of things. The Deep South followed Maryland’s lead in de­
claring illegal “any pamphlet, newspaper, handbill or other paper
of any inflammatory character, and having a tendency to excite
discontent or stir up insurrection amongst the people of color of
this State.” In spite of their belief that slavery benefited the slave,
whites had to contend with the problem of runaways. Medical