Faith Works 9-15-23

Faith Works 9-15-23
Jeff Gill

Who is included among "us"?
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Through this year I've been asking us to think about the modern implications of events taking place 100 years ago in Licking County, and the Midwest all around us in 1923.

With the rise of what historians call "the second era of the Ku Klux Klan," there is an assumption that the causes and motivations of the post-Civil War Klan's origins, and the "third era" Klan of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s & 60s down to today, are all of a piece.

But it's complicated by how the larger and more politically influential 1920s Klan was agitating against migrants and minority groups of its day, and claiming special status and exclusive rights for "white supremacy." Especially in the Midwest where the 1920s Klan was even more influential than in the South, and the hostility of the organization was primarily aimed at Catholics and Jews newly arrived from Europe (newly as in within the last century, since many of these migrants had come in the wake of social strife in 1848 across Eastern Europe). Some were revolutionaries, others simply displaced common folk caught up in an age of revolution from the Atlantic to the Urals.

Somewhat confusingly to modern eyes and ears, these peasant immigrants were called "black people." A nationally famous muckraking journalist, Ray Stannard Baker, after spending a few weeks in Newark following the infamous 1910 lynching on Courthouse Square, wrote in 1912 a picaresque novel where his narrator records a union organizer saying:

"And then the "black people" began to come in, little by little at first, and then by the carload. By the "black people" he meant the people from Southern Europe, he called them "hordes" — "hordes and hordes of 'em" — Italians mostly, and they began getting into the mills and underbidding for the jobs, so that wages slowly went down and at the same time the machines were speeded up. It seems that many of these "black people" were single men or vigorous young married people with only themselves to support, while the old American workers were men with families and little homes to pay for, and plenty of old grandfathers and grandmothers, to say nothing of babies, depending upon them.

"There wasn't a living for a decent family left," he said."

Baker's protagonist goes on to describe a strike for better working conditions that led to dire circumstances in a place very like what we know of Newark in that era, until:

"And presently the strike collapsed, and the workers rushed helter skelter back to the mills to get their old jobs "Begging like whipped dogs," he said bitterly.

Many of them found their places taken by the eager "black people," and many had to go to work at lower wages in poorer places — punished for the fight they had made."

After his effort at leading a strike for better pay and working conditions failed, the narrator had a realization:

"It was then that he began to see clearly what it all meant. He said he made a great discovery: that the "black people" against whom they had struck in 1894 were not to blame.

"I tell you," said he, "we found when we got started that them black people — we used to call 'em dagoes — were just workin' people like us — and in hell with us. They were good soldiers, them Eyetalians and Poles and Syrians, they fought with us to the end.""

This by a journalist who is not a Klan apologist at all, but is helping us understand what's going on in 1912 or so around the racial definition of "white."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's trying to make sense of how we understand who is included in what we call community. Tell him how you would draw that circle at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @knapsack77 on Threads.