Burning Memories

Many years ago I dedicated my literary career to writing about the small corner of the North Carolina coast where I grew up and which I still call home. I cherished the deepening familiarity with my remote patch of the American South. I re-peopled with forgotten souls the small towns and rural byways of my youth. I lived surrounded by them, a mortal among the great hosts of the dead. And if I often marveled, to borrow Eudora Welty’s words, how “people are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs,” and could not say, any more than Welty, “what makes them onions or hyacinths,” I always found abundant cause for my faith in a fundamental goodness and decency within my countrymen and women.

Then I found the Ku Klux Klan papers. While writing a book about the civil rights movement in North Carolina, I chanced upon an unprecedented array of government documents about the state’s Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, documents from the State Highway Patrol and the State Bureau of Investigation. None had been open to the public until I found them stacked high in cardboard boxes in a Raleigh warehouse called the State Records Center.

Untouched for 25 years, they included field notes, transcripts, surveillance reports, and investigative files, plus long registers of Klan members’ names and backgrounds. Nothing had been censored. If you wanted to know who had tried to kill whom for seeking to vote, or who had burned whose store for wanting a better education for their children, it was all there, neatly typed, in black and white.

As a historian, I found the documents priceless for understanding both the Southern past and the burning of black churches today. But as a native of coastal North Carolina, the KKK papers troubled me deeply. I recognized every back road and barbeque joint mentioned in them. I was acquainted, if only rarely, with individual Klansmen, quite frequently with their children. I realize now that I pass daily by scenes of the Klan’s misdeeds—victims taunted, churches burned, schools vandalized, businesses dynamited, assassinations attempted. A once-familiar landscape has for me grown strangely foreign.

 

An Old-Fashioned Tent Revival

The Ku Klux Klan lived in our shadows long before the 1960s. Founded in 1868 by former slaveholders, the state’s first Klan acted as a terrorist wing of the Democratic Party during Reconstruction. In subsequent years, the ranks of the KKK swelled whenever black Carolinians made significant gains in electoral politics, civil rights, or economic prosperity. In 1898 the Red Shirts, a group that included many former Klansmen, violently overthrew a coalition of black Republicans and white Populists that had elected the governor and scores of lesser lawmakers. In the 1920s, as many as five million Americans joined the KKK, including untold thousands in North Carolina. In the early 1950s, the Klan rose to quell black labor organizing in our tobacco, timber, fishing, and slaughterhouse industries, as well as to block the surging demands of black veterans whose expectations for freedom at home had risen after fighting in World War II.

Between 1964 and 1967, the Klan again barnstormed the Carolina countryside like an old-fashioned tent revival, holding a rally almost every night in a different town. It is this resurgence of the KKK that the SHP and SBI files chronicle so thoroughly. Merely within our congressional district— North Carolina’s First and the Klan’s “Province #1” (of 11)—the KKK’s state leadership held two dozen recruitment rallies between July and October 1966. All told, tens of thousands attended those events. Most nights, the rallies drew crowds from several hundred to a thousand, but attendance sometimes soared. In 1965, 6,000 spectators crowded a rally in rural Sampson County, and 5,000 attended a Klan wedding near the small tobacco market town of Farmville.

By 1966, the Klan had organized more than 100 “Klaverns” in North Carolina and had nearly 7,000 official members, by far the most in the United States. But membership lists did not come close to reflecting the Klan’s popularity. According to KKK records, only a tiny fraction of the people who attended public rallies belonged to the Klan. At a September 1966 rally near the tiny crossroads of Emul, in my native Craven County, state troopers counted only 11 robed Klansmen, three Klanswomen and 10 Klan “security guards” among a crowd estimated at between 500 and 600 persons. Many people who participated with enthusiasm never joined. Others sat in their cars or loitered on the outskirts, sizing up the proceedings that culminated in the fiery cross.

 

Coca-Colas and Souvenir Pins

A July 26, 1966, rally was typical of the KKK revival. According to an SBI report, that summer day a large crowd massed for an outdoor rally near Chocowinity, a small town about an hour’s drive from my home place. The occasion resembled a county fair or church revival. Reverend William Cox, a minister from nearby Blounts Creek, delivered an invocation and a sermon. Robed Klansmen and Klanswomen sung the National Anthem. Visiting dignitaries—Jack Davis, the Grand Dragon from Michigan, and Robert Shelton, Grand Wizard in Alabama—gave rousing speeches. Vendors peddled hot dogs, Coca-Colas, and souvenir pins. Children my age—I was six then—played games on the rally’s outskirts. Toward twilight, the organizers held fundraising events. The men auctioned off a television set, a barbeque grill, five quarts of motor oil, and 100 pounds of fertilizer. The ladies’ auxiliary raffled seven cakes and a pair of homemade table lamps. Then, with the coming of night, white-robed figures burned a 15-foot-high cross, and the crowd disappeared into the darkness.

Klan leaders spoke to the troubled souls in the flickering light of that flaming cross. This was farm country, and the people of the hooded order realized that tens of thousands of middle-class farmholders and tenant farmers were losing their land to agribusiness, mechanization, and government policies that forced farmers to “get big or get out.” Kennedy-era Democrats declared that the rising tide would lift all boats, but here a vast flotilla of rural people remained mired on muddy shoals.

Preachers worried as rural people moved away and church congregations dwindled. Parents could no longer expect sons and daughters to stay on the land. Those who remained had to work even harder, longer hours and had to squeeze more from family and hired labor. Frequently they had to add a factory night shift to a full day’s farmwork. While America’s mainstream boomed, our farm towns grew desolate. Even the better-off rural and small-town people felt profoundly uneasy about the epochal changes sweeping the region.

The legacy of white supremacy left us fatally ill-prepared to deal with this agricultural crisis. All efforts to address political issues, such as agricultural reform, through a bi-racial alliance that might divide white loyalties were cut off. White supremacy had stunted the vitality of our political life, to say nothing of what it did to our souls. With black protestors marching in every town by 1964, it seemed as natural to take out rising anxieties about the economy on black people as it was to pray for rain in a drought. Fear of agriculture’s demise and white supremacy’s downfall created an atmosphere in which the Ku Klux Klan thrived. Rural life had changed a great deal in North Carolina over the years. White supremacy was one of the few constants.

Kevin Phillips, author of Richard Nixon’s 1968 “Southern strategy,” taught the Republican Party that the art of politics was “knowing who hates who,” as he put it. Klan organizers did not write books about their own political strategy, but they depended on the same dynamic for their success. KKK leaders understood, in particular, how threatened most white Carolinians felt by the prospect of their children attending classes with black children. As local blacks and federal officials heightened efforts to end the separate schooling of black and white children, the Klan attempted to tap into white people’s deeply rooted fears of “social equality” and “miscegenation.”

KKK leaders tried to make it easy for us to like them. How, after all, could a group that raised funds by auctioning off ponies and homemade table lamps seem sinister? In public, Klan proclamations spewed racial bigotry but within a political rather than a terrorist program. If you did not know how Klansmen spent their nights, you might allow yourself not to see the truth. According to SBI intelligence reports, KKK leaders consciously sought to foster a nonviolent image. On September 22, 1966, Sybil Jones, the Exalted Cyclops of the KKK’s Ladies Unit #1, told a local rally that the Klan “is not a hate organization, instead it stands for just and right.”

Klan activists emphasized that theirs was a Christian organization. They chastised the Lions, the Moose, Masons, and American Legion for gambling and serving alcohol. Publicly, Klansmen and women disavowed violence and supported political activism against the civil rights movement and the Great Society. They encouraged their listeners to petition local officials, write to congressmen, and attend PTA meetings. They endorsed and campaigned for candidates squarely in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. This, at least, was not mere rhetoric. “There is strong evidence,” SBI Director Walter Anderson reported in an October 1966 memorandum, “that the KKK is engaging in an all-out effort to make their influence known in the election.” Bolstered by the success of this campaign for respectability, KKK activists longed to escape the social ignominy of the cornfields. They planned to hold more public meetings in courthouses, schools, and auditoriums, including Dorton Arena in the state capital of Raleigh.

 

The Pillars of the Community

The Klan drew its strength from our rural and small-town middle class. If Klansmen did not widely include “the pillars of the community,” to quote a confidential interview with a Martin County Klansman (owner of a 1,200-acre farm), they consisted of “at least good foundation stones.” Klan activists who appear in SHP and SBI documents were most often small businessmen, family farmers, and skilled tradesmen. Coastal KKK leaders included the owners of two hotels, several restaurants, a gas station, a pool hall and a seafood company. Farmers who joined the Klan tended to work their own land, unlike the large majority of local white farmers who in that day still sharecropped, tenant farmed, or labored on somebody else’s farm. Many had sizable holdings. Klan orators, in fact, harshly berated the poorest whites. They called them “white trash” and other derogatory terms that they usually reserved for blacks, Jews, Communists, and President Lyndon Johnson.

A sign of their public acceptance was that many Klansmen no longer hid behind cloaks. Their violent acts remained shrouded in mystery and a Klansman could still count on anonymity if he wanted it. But frequently an individual’s membership in the Klan was an open secret, widely known and even boasted. Klan activists posted signs all over towns announcing recruitment rallies and advertised them in the Greenville Daily Reflector and the Kinston Daily News. Roadside billboards like “Welcome to Smithfield: This is Klan Country” mark an enduring childhood memory for those of us who passed by that town once a year on our way to the State Fair or the beach. At the town limits of a Downeast fishing village, a plain, hand-lettered sign minced fewer words: “No niggers allowed after dark.” That sign stood for years. Nor did local Klaverns try to conceal where they held their private meetings. The Belhaven Klavern met almost directly across from city hall. And who in Vanceboro did not know that the Craven Fellowship Club, a concrete-block building right off Highway 17, was the Ku Klux Klan’s headquarters?

The Klan found important supporters among our political leaders. SBI records indicate that at least two county sheriffs and a mayor sympathized openly with the KKK. So did a number of lesser local police, judicial, and municipal leaders. Other politicians recognized in the Klan a constituency that they could not afford to antagonize. Our 1st District Congressman, Walter B. Jones, for instance, was a racial moderate who often supported civil rights legislation, but many in New Bern still recall his public appearances at Klan gatherings. Other political figures had murkier motives for their involvement with the Klan. Sheriff Marion W. Millis of New Hanover County and six of his deputies joined a local Klavern—he later explained to Congressional investigators—“to keep an eye on the Klan.” He later acknowledged that “some of [his deputies] got a bit enthused.” His second-in-command, in fact, got himself elected state KKK vice-president.

Other local political leaders had little sympathy for the Klan, but they remained silent and rarely pursued Klan lawbreakers aggressively. Few district attorneys prosecuted Klan terrorists. Several county sheriffs deserve credit for their quiet efforts to keep Klansmen within bounds, and a handful earned reputations as ardent enemies of the KKK. According to SBI records, Klan leaders held Greenville police chief Henry Lawson in special contempt; he not only spoke in black churches but allegedly challenged a Klansman to a public duel. We may never know what atrocities they nipped in the bud. But few cracked down hard on the Klan, and it is easy to understand why. They realized that they were not dealing with inconsequential folks. In an April 12,1966, memorandum, an SHP corporal frankly referred to Klansmen as “generally good citizens [who] present no problems for future violence.”

To complicate matters, some law officers that despised the KKK had friends and family in it. This closeness often helped in intelligence gathering. Prior to a June 4, 1966, rally in the bustling tobacco market of Wilson, for instance, an SBI agent reported that local detectives “conferred with . . . Klan members they considered friends” in order to assess the potential for violence. Other times local police used their influence to steer KKKers away from civil rights marches. Such relationships, on the other hand, may also have contributed to a reluctance to suppress the Klan.

State political leaders acted no better. By 1964 or 1965, undercover agents provided good informants on the state Klan at its highest levels. The SBI monitored the state-level KKK closely, and it would not be surprising if the FBI, possibly with the cooperation of the SBI, sowed dissension within Klan ranks. Certainly it happened in other places. But, solicitous of the Democratic Party’s right wing, many of whom, like Jesse Helms, would soon become Republicans anyway, state leaders neither provided moral leadership nor pursued all of the available legal options for curtailing Klan terrorism. In speeches, they grouped the Klan with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other civil rights groups, including those based in black Christian churches, as “extremists.” They allowed the Klan its annual booth at the State Fair. And neither Governor Dan K. Moore nor the General Assembly held special hearings into Klan violence or led campaigns to discourage public sympathy for the KKK.

In the summer of 1966, however, a maverick Democrat named Malcolm Seawell, chairman of the governor’s special Law and Order Committee to investigate “extremist groups,” accused the SBI of withholding surveillance records. Seawell had first made his reputation prosecuting Robeson County Klansmen in the early 1950s. He believed that the SBI documents might give the state the necessary evidence to revoke the Klan’s legal certification, an important symbolic act, and possibly to prosecute the Klan for violating concealed weapons laws. Gov. Moore and SBI officials repeatedly denied Seawell’s allegations. Seawell and the Committee’s special counsel resigned in protest. The SBI later acknowledged that it had indeed withheld key documents from the Committee.

 

A Savage Heart

Evil often wears respectable garb, and the soul of the Ku Klux Klan revealed itself most plainly away from the public rallies and their hordes of curious spectators. This can certainly be seen in the county where I lived. By 1965, the Ku Klux Klan had organized at least three Klaverns in Craven County. They held open air rallies on the outskirts of New Bern, our county seat, as well as the small town of Vanceboro and the rural communities of Jasper, Ernul, Dover, and Cove City. According to SBI and SHP records, the crowds ranged from 350 to 650 persons. The Klan had its headquarters first in an old building near Vanceboro, then built a new facility on the town’s outskirts. Local leaders included a restaurant owner, two night club operators, and several family farmers. Klan sympathizers included a small-town constable and a police chief.

The Craven County KKK was not as violent as some Klan groups in the South—but it had a savage heart. In New Bern in February 1965, KKK terrorists bombed St. Peter’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the historic mother church of the southern A.M.E. Zion, and two automobiles. The blast nearly assassinated the Rev. Leon Nixon, a local leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and attorney Julius Chambers, now chancellor of North Carolina Central University in Durham. Another explosion that day ripped apart Oscar’s Mortuary, a black-owned business in the Pembroke area. The Klan later bombed the Cool Springs Free Will Baptist Church, apparently to silence a white minister who had criticized the KKK. A member of that same Klavern shot a state trooper. Another stoned a school bus. Others paid nighttime visits to parents, grandparents, and teachers sympathetic to school desegregation, showing a marked preference for harassing the elderly and infirm. Craven County Klansmen burned a cross and torched an outbuilding on Vanceboro Mayor Royce Jordan’s front yard and repeatedly attempted to assault him. And, in a trademark case of Klan viciousness directed at the weak, in January 1966 Klansmen harassed and threatened a mentally retarded white youth for having black friends. Local Klansmen traveled widely in our section of the coast, participating in attacks on civil rights marchers in Plymouth and Williamston and threatening to drag black teachers out of a formerly all-white school in Onslow County.

This litany of crimes in the public record includes only a fraction of Klan outrages in Craven County. Several oral history projects, including one that I direct at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have recently interviewed large numbers of local black citizens who lived through the KKK revival. Undocumented Klan atrocities emerge in nearly every interview. Newspapers almost never mentioned these racial attacks nor did law enforcement agencies investigate them. They represented the real Klan that tens of thousands of my fellow North Carolinians crowded to see and hear.

Then we woke up like out of a nightmare. Attendance at KKK rallies plummeted in 1967. Many people walked away from the fiery cross never to return. State Klan leaders soon found it difficult to find local people willing to lease them land for a rally. Wreckers and oil companies grew reluctant to erect or light the crosses. Well-founded rumors of corruption, disunion, and cruelty soured the Klan’s quest for respectability. Many local whites learned that the world did not end with school desegregation and plunged forward to make the best of the new day. Other whites found they no longer needed the KKK. They channeled their racial anxieties into the South-wide rebirth of the Republican Party, George Wallace’s American Independent Party, or the segregationist campaigns of local and state politicians. And they could allay their worst fears about race mixing by sending their children to the all-white private schools springing up in every county. At the same time, a heartening number of ministers, editors, and county sheriffs who had been silent began to speak out against the Klan.

Another compelling reason behind the KKK’s declining popularity was that black Carolinians no longer allowed its sins to remain in the shadows. By 1967 the civil rights movement had emboldened black residents to stand up for themselves. Black communities like Rose Hill in Duplin County understood that the business class controlled the Klan. They went for the jugular: the black citizens of Rose Hill boycotted downtown businesses until the Klan halted open air meetings.

The days when Klan night riders could terrorize a black community without a fight had also drawn to a close. Blacks understood only too well that they could not count on white sheriffs and judges to protect them, so they increasingly took matters into their own hands. Now Klan terrorists encountered riflemen guarding civil rights leaders and the roads out of black neighborhoods. When Klansmen shot at four youngsters at the rural crossroads of Middletown in Hyde County, they quickly found themselves surrounded by 125 blacks, many of them Vietnam veterans armed with hunting rifles and shotguns. The ensuing shoot-out drove the local Klan back underground. Similar clashes occurred throughout North Carolina.

 

The Frailty of our Souls

A historian never knows what will emerge from the shadows, and God help them who are afraid of the dark. The unblandished prose of police ledgers and government surveillance reports make it difficult to evade unwanted ghosts, and I must confess that I am now haunted by what I have discovered about this place that I care for so deeply.

As I drive along our two main roads, Highway 17 and 70, every mile I see landmarks unnoticed by other motorists. I pass a local farmer and I cannot forget that he allowed Klansmen to run an electric line to their loudspeakers. I drive by an elderly woman’s home and wonder why such a kind lady allowed the KKK to lease her pasture for a rally. I pass a Shell filling station and remember how the manager used to supply kerosene for the Klan’s crosses and torches. I visit my favorite barbecue restaurant and recall how the proprietor stuck a shotgun in the belly of a civil rights protestor and nearly killed her. Everywhere I go I recognize names of people that the SBI or SHP listed as attending Klan rallies—on rural mailboxes, billboards, downtown stores, law offices. I drive along quiet country roads that for me now echo with bomb blasts, shots fired, and torches crackling in the night. And when I stroll the beautiful, colonial-era historic district in New Bern, a place I used to love to visit, I can only think now of the town’s silence before the Ku Klux Klan revival in its midst.

There is another, bone-deep way that uncovering the KKK documents has affected me. When I am back in Craven County I scrutinize more closely the faces I pass on the street, the men and women I see at the grocery store, Wal-Mart, and my doctor’s waiting room. Knowing what I know, I cannot help but wonder what other hidden sins still await discovery on the dusty shelves of some distant archive. And—for what is the difference?—I cannot help but wonder too what unrecorded sins remain locked away within their hearts. Now I find myself searching my neighbors’ eyes for previously unsuspected iniquities. I feel surrounded by unspoken failings. Can hands that I have watched grow weathered with the labors of steadfast grace and unrelenting good have also lit the fiery cross? The thought makes me shudder at the frailty of our souls. And, at that instant, I have never felt more kinship with them.