Faith Works 7-21-23

Faith Works 7-21-23
Jeff Gill

Klans, concerns, and lasting questions
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Back in February & March I wrote a series of columns marking the hundred years since Ku Klux Klan activities in Licking County and Ohio made the front pages of papers like the Advocate.

I tried to set the stage by noting two things: clearly the size of some of the public events and mass rallies meant the Klan had been quietly working for some time, so January 1923 is kind of an arbitrary date, and the Klan of the 1920s was different in some very confusing ways from the post-Civil War Klan in the South during Reconstruction, and the Klan some of us remember in resurgence responding to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s & 1960s.

Historians refer to the "second era" of the Klan, which I think is accurate, in the sense that it was a very distinct sort of movement from the Klans which arose, or lurked, before and after the period of Klan activity in the 1920s. Nathan Bedford Forrest led a Klan in the 1860s & 70s which was a resistance movement, rooted in terror and assault and murder, against giving civil rights to people formerly enslaved, and Confederate officers led the group in a secretive, underground organization. The anti-Civil Rights Klan of the 1950s & 60s was a more decentralized movement, also highly secretive, also deeply invested in both psychological and physical terror, along with murder on many occasions.

The 1920s Klan was, well, more public. Yes, they wore hoods, which their literature called "helmets" and on some occasions they would hear the order "visors up" and the face of the hood might be pulled aside for parades. Their surprise appearances in church services were almost always fully masked, but there were times the Klan would strategically unmask to show off their support. Either way, they loved public events and staged their cross burnings with theatrical care.

And they ran for office. Which is where this ongoing centennial is going, and why I continue to think there are relevant issues for us in 2023 about what we said to ourselves and others about this community in that perhaps not so long ago era.

Rallies and parades and programs and statewide gatherings called, inevitably, Klonklaves, were aimed at building up membership and support towards political control of communities. Ohio and Indiana were arguably the core of this second Klan; the headquarters nationally were in Atlanta, but the Midwest Klan had the biggest numbers and the state organizations reported in the early 1920s to Indianapolis, and the Grand Dragon there, D.C. Stephenson.

After my earlier series ran, in April a book was published by noted journalist and author, Timothy Egan, titled "A Fever in the Heartland." For the Midwestern context of the second Klan, there's no better single read to get your head around the reality that, as Stephenson said before his fall in 1925, "I am the law." The Klan, Egan notes, owned the state, and Stephenson owned the Klan. He's talking about Indiana, but Ohio was in his hip pocket.

In the fall of 1923, the Indiana governorship was contested between Republican and Democratic candidates, but both were Klan endorsed: Stephenson couldn't lose. In a number of other states, Klan endorsed candidates won; in Ohio, the Klan choice for governor failed, but in dozens of cities and counties their slate won, including Newark and Licking County.

Having a rally for the state Klan, a Klonklave, at Buckeye Lake, with as many as 75,000 Klan members in attendance that July of 1923, certainly helped ensure the outcome three months later at the ballot box.

To what end? That's what I will come back to next week.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been hearing stories about the Midwest 1920s Klan his whole life, and is still trying to make sense of them. Tell him what you've heard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.