KU KLUX KLAN INVADES NORTH

Silver, Albert De

Ku Klux Klan Invades North Secret Organization Spreads Terror in Many Communities; Imperial Wizard Denies Responsibilities for Many Crimes By ALBERT DE SILVER (From The Nation) THE modem Ku Klux...

...Against Nonpartisan League IT is, of course, unlikely that the remarkable series of mob outbreaks were foreseen by the Imperial Wizard in 1916...
...What becomes of all this money is not known...
...Its leader asserts its purpose to protect the security of the people "in the absence or inadequacy of the forces of law and order...
...In the fall of 1316 be was ready and on Thanksgiving night of that year be took thirty-four intrepid spirits to tbe top of a mountain near Atlanta, Georgia, and there "on the mountain top that night at the midnight bour while men braved tbe surging blasts of wild 'wintry mountain winds and endured a temperature far below freezing, bathed in the sacred flow of tbe fiery cross, the Invisible Empire was called from its dumber of haif a century...
...Cults for Admission THE Imperial Wizard made this verbal magnificence somewhat more specific in an interview later vouchsafed a Chicago representative of the Universal Service...
...We exclude Catholics because they owe allegiance to an institution that is foreign to the Government of the United States...
...The day before, an elderly farmer was similarly seized and whipped at Warrensburg, Missouri...
...It costs $10 to be initiated into the Klan, plus $6.50 for a white robe—and it is obvious that these robes can be produced at a cost of about one dollar...
...Mennonites from the Saskatchewan district of Canada have purchased tracts of land in Paraguay, South America, where they plan to settle...
...The fiery cross appears to have remained hidden under a bushel...
...But the cases of threat, tar-and-featherings, and general rowdi-ness by mysterious masked and white-capped men calling themselves Klansmen continued...
...At Miami, Florida, on July 17, the British rector of a church in the Negro quarter was tarred and feathered by masked men...
...Dedicating bis life to tbe cause, "he kept Ms own counsel during these years, and in tbe silent recesses of his soul he thought out tbe great plan...
...On July 23, a man and woman at Birmingham, Alabama, received like treatment...
...One was a former Marine who served at Chateat Thierry...
...Responsibility for two, at least, of the mobbings was pablicty avowed by the Beaumont, Texas, branch of the Klan and it was widely Assumed, is the absence of local disavowal, that suck responsibility was general...
...In conclusion the Order was stated to be "tbe soul of chivalry and virtue's impenetrable shield...
...One might have expected that such a portentous event would have best attended by some extraordinary disturbance of tbe celestial spheres or at least by some strange end mysterious currents in tbe affairs of men...
...The law-abiding Negro who knows his place has nothing to fear from us...
...In the fall of 1920, however the name began to appear in the newspapers in a disquieting manner...
...others indignantly oppose the Klan but copy its methods...
...It is a child conceived in the tradition of a lawless past and brought forth in the extravagant obscurantism of present-day prejudice...
...William Joseph Simmons) an 'Imperial proclamation" directed "to the whole world," in which the aims of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., were set forth...
...The Paraguayan Government has exempted, by act of the national congress, their people and their descendants forever from military service...
...Such a program would have been too hazardous to have been deliberate...
...We can get the bunch if we can get the law handed out honest...
...Many accidents have occurred on the bridge in the past and they were put up as a warning to careless motorists...
...The modern Ku Klux Klan does not deserve to live and it had much better die...
...They are assured complete religious freedom and the right to establish their own schools, provided they pay a fixed school tax to the government...
...to maintain forever white supremacy in all things...
...Large signs in black and white bearing the inscription, "Private cemetery across the bridge for reckless drivers" and decorated with, skull and crossbones have been erected on both sides of the Otterkill bridge on the state road between Goshen and Chester, New York...
...An anti-Ku Klux Klan organization in southern Texas adopted the slogan, "Kill 'em on eight like yon would a mad dog...
...The last was on July 16, at Tenaha, when a young white woman was seized on a hotel porch by masked men wearing white uniforms, taken several miles into the country, undressed, tarred and feathered, and returned to town...
...Major Craven's charges are disputed by the King Kleagle of the Realm, Mr...
...Some call themselves Ku Klux Klansmen without paying does...
...Which, after all, gave more hint of the sober reality of the Klan than did the Imperial Proclamation of 1915...
...And indeed, on July 4 next, there did appear from tbe Aulic of His Majesty, tbe Imperial Wizard (Mr...
...W. V. Guerard, but they should perhaps serve to make other public officials fol.ow the example of the Mayor of Philadelphia, who has directed that inquiry be made as to the disposition of the fees for which membership in the Order is bestowed...
...Of course much is charged to the Klan that cannot be traced directly to Mr...
...It proclaims its purpose to maintain white supremacy and to protect womanhood, the two customary cloaks for lynching...
...Of late there have come serious charges of a financial nature against the Klan...
...William Joseph Simmons' dues-paying organization...
...These fees appear to go to the Grand Aulic of the Imperial Wizard at Atlanta...
...The men, it seems, had tried to force him to sign a declaration adverse to the claims of his client...
...Imperial Wizard Denies Responsibilities for Many Crimes By ALBERT DE SILVER (From The Nation) THE modem Ku Klux Klan, according to its descriptive folder entitled "The Ku Klux Klan—Who—Why—What," has been in the making for the past twenty years...
...The reporter, after passing the "ghoul," "the goblin," and the "cyclops" who guarded approach to the Grand Wizard, was told: We exclude the Jews because they do not believe in the Christian religion...
...Indeed the group of rowdies at first described as American Legion men who tore Mrs...
...It was God's act to make the white race superior to all others...
...It may be said that William Allen White was probably not unjustified in exulting that it was "to the ever-lasting credit of Emporia that the organizer of this cheap clan found no suckers here with $10 each to squander...
...In as far separated places as Houston, Beaumont, Dallas, Waco, Belton, Goose Creek, Fort Worth, Glidden, Deweyville, and Timpson men were seized by masked bands and roughly handled...
...Proclamations and warnings signed "Ku Klux Klan" and directed against grafters, idlers, bootleggers, and agitators appeared in a number of places, including the State Capitol...
...It was inevitable that all this should have attracted those most easily stirred to mob action and that the range of prejudice to which the Order appeals should have led to repeated outbreaks...
...He had much better "destroy the child of his own handiwork," as he threatened to do not long ago...
...By some scheme of Providence the Negro was created as a serf...
...And so it has gone...
...He added that "the most notorious criminal in the county got in by paying for it . . . and the organizers kept him in because he was bringing in others of the same kind at so much per head...
...I have lived here sixty-four years, not educated, but want right, want the laws executed, and tried to get the grand jury to do so...
...We harbor no race prejudices...
...Local branches charge further dues, usually $5 or $10 annually...
...Landscape improvements," including an artificial lake and "about $30,000 worth of marble and plaster statuary," were to be made...
...Southern as well as Northern newspapers became loud in their de-numcistion of the violence of the Ku Kluxers...
...Its organizers in the North admit at private meetings that there it is to be mainly an instrument of anti-Semitism...
...I took the letter to the grand jury and asked the jury to tell my boy if he was violating the law but they done nothing so far as I could tell...
...He cannot now absolve himself by proclaiming lawful and beneficent purposes for his Empire...
...The "Black Hand" of Joaquin, Shelby County, Texas, threatened to burn the whole town if Klansmen committed more violence...
...and the Kansas City Post frankly describes the Klan in that part of the world as an anti-Nonpartisan League organization...
...It is of record that few colored people voted in Jacksonville os Tuesday...
...He also suspended the charter of the Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida, chapters, which also were caught in rather too flagrant and public violence...
...Its Imperial Wizard, Mr...
...The Imperial Wizard says he pays himself only $100 per week, but an Atlanta paper recently announced the purchase by the Ku Klux Klan of an entire block on Peachtree Road which was to be made National Headquarters "at a cost of about one million dollars...
...The Imperial Wizard (Mr, William Joseph Simmons) should have foreseen all this...
...And ten evenings later, and just before election day, five hundred members of the Ku Klux Klan marched in costume through the streets of Jacksonville, Florida, following the fiery cross, "supposedly," according to the New York Times, "as a warning to Negroes to attempt no lawlessness at the polls on Tuesday...
...The game was too inviting...
...Major Craven, the Grand Dragon of the Invisible Empire for the Realm of North Carolina, recently issued an order disbanding the Klan in that State, saying that as conducted in North Carolina "it is an organization engaged excusively in collecting initiation fees under false pretenses, without any legal standing in the State, and is, in my opinion, a failure and a fraud...
...But what should have been foreseen was that such a consequence was well-nigh inevitable, The Klan springs from the memory of post-civil war lawlessness, when the Negro was disfranchised by terror...
...Their abductors on some occasions acted anonymously...
...This imptessive document, done in a literary style which should perhaps be described as neo-African, stated simply that the Order, inter alia, was "dedicated to the sublime and pleasant duty of providing generous aid, tender sympathy, and fraternal assistance in the effulgence of the light of life and amid the sable shadows of death...
...The boy says he knows the men that done the work...
...Any native-born American who is a member of the English church or any other foreign church is barred...
...The negro never had and has not today a better friend than the Ku Klux Klan...
...In others they were tarred and feathered in addition...
...We do not act until called upon but if needed we have a great invisible and mysterious force that will strike terror into the hearts of lawbreakers...
...Lanier University," Atlanta (a school which does not figure in the rather complete list of academic institutions in the World Almanac), has also been taken over by the Klan, and the Imperial Wizard himself, it is announced, will be the new president...
...On others they acted in the name of the Ku Klux Klan and now and then they placarded their exploit upon the person of their victim...
...The victims themselves were sometimes bad characters and sometimes of good repute...
...On October 21 the New York Tribune reports that a certain Peter McMahon of Yonk-ers, while traveling South to assist a lady in a dispute about her share in the estate of a deceased relative, was "taken from a train at Trenton, South Carolina, by a gang of mes dressed as Ku Klux Klansmen who had attempted to lynch him and then had beaten him...
...Its membership form discloses an unmistakable anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic bias...
...Over the whole has been thrown an amazing haze of mumbo jumbo with its Imperial Wizards, its King Kleagles, its Grand Dragons, Ghouls, Goblins, and Cyclopses, its fiery crosses and the rest...
...In one Florida town a group of alleged Klansmen even threatened a judge guilty of enforcing the speed laws...
...To assure the supremacy of the white race we believe in the exclusion of the yellow race and in the disfranchisement of the Negro...
...And in Charlotte, North Carolina, a 19-year-old genius elected himself "Exalted Dragon" of a Junior Ku Klux, and collected twenty-five cents does each from a large number of his young friends...
...The Galveston, Texas, Daily News for July 19 lists nineteen such incidents in Texas alone, beginning on April 1, when a band of masked men took a Negro bellboy from a Dallas hotel, carried him into the country near by, whipped him, and branded the letters K. K. K. with acid on his forehead...
...Cases in Florida ALTHOUGH the State of Texas has been more favored than any other by these manifestations of a desire to "bless mankind," they have appeared elsewhere throughout the South...
...These fees are large...
...Another, Sherwood Vinson, was the son of a life-long resident of Lufkin, Texas, who writes to the American Civil Liberties Union thus: My 19-year-old boy, Sherwood Vinson, received a letter through our mail ordering him to leave and advise his bootlegger friends to go with him...
...He even revoked the charter of the Beaumont branch, which had indiscreetly written to the papers, with the Klan'a official seal, glorying in its crimes...
...The Imperial Wizard apparently became alarmed, and issued statements (inserted in many papers as full-page advertisements) denying that the lawlessness was due to the Klan...
...Later caught the boy on the streets of Lufkin with a pistol in the hand of one of them, put him in a car, went to the woods, tarred and feathered him, brought him back to the streets of Lufkin, set him out, and our Sheriff paid no attention, so far as I could tell, to the pistol or crime...
...In some cases they were merely beaten...
...Among the persons attacked were both blacks and Whites, men and women, end there was such a variety of apparent causes as to defy analysis...
...Mob Rule in Texas WITH the spring of 1921 there came, principally in the State of Texas, s remarkable crop of mob outrages, all perpetrated by masked bands of men and so similar in technique as to suggest a common origin...
...to bless mankind, and to keep eternally ablaze the sacred fire of a fervent devotion to a pure Americanism...
...The sacred duty of protecting womanhood," no doubt...
...White supremacy" was maintained...
...There is occasional confusion of purpose: in Florida the Klan declares that it is against blue laws, but in Texas it threatens bootleggers...
...William Joseph Simmons (who has copyrighted the folder), "for fourteen years thought, studied, and worked to prepare himself for its launching...
...Ida Crouch Hazlett from a Socialist platform in Mason City, Iowa, last month, and drove her out of town, were quoted by the United Press correspondent as saying that "they preferred to be known as the Ku Klux Klan...
...Its life cannot and should not be a happy one...
...For some years after the proclamation indeed little was heard of the Klan...
...All men who could qualify were invited "to approach the portal of our beneficent domain and join___tbe sacred duty of protecting womanhood...
...naturally it had imitators...
...Its protestations of 100 per cent Americanism and its warnings to agitators suggest the familiar tactics of the conventional opponents of organized labor...

Vol. 13 • September 1921 • No. 9


 
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