The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi : a History / by Michael Newton
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The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi ALSO BY MICHAEL NEWTON AND FROM MCFARLAND The FBI and the KKK: A Critical History (2005; softcover 2009) Mr. Mob: The Life and Crimes of Moe Dalitz (2009) The Ku Klux Klan: History, Organization, Language, Influence and Activities of America’s Most Notorious Secret Society (2007) Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology: A Global Guide to Hidden Animals and Their Pursuers (2005) The FBI Encyclopedia (2003) The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi A History MICHAEL NEWTON McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Newton, Michael, ¡951– The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi : a history / by Michael Newton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-4653-7 softcover : 50# alkaline paper 1. Ku-Klux Klan (19th cent.)—Mississippi—History. 2. Ku Klux Klan (1915– )—Mississippi—History. 3. Mississippi—History. I. Title. HS2330.K63N496 2010 322.4'209762—dc22 2009039298 British Library cataloguing data are available ©2010 Michael Newton. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Front cover: eyes at top Samuel Bowers led Mississippi’s most militant Klan faction in the 1960s (National Archives); Klansmen bombed scores of homes, churches, and other targets in the 1960s (HCUA) Manufactured in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com Table of Contents Preface 1 Introduction 3 1. Reconstruction and “Redemption” (1866–1877) 11 2. Hiatus and Revival (1877–1921)45 3. Invisible Empire (1921–1944) 73 4. A Closed Society (1944–1962) 102 5. “A Ticket to the Eternal” (1963–1969) 127 6. “Yesterday, Today, Forever” (1970–2007) 183 Chapter Notes 213 Bibliography 227 Index 235 v This page intentionally left blank Preface Since 1866 the Ku Klux Klan has been a force to reckon with in Mississippi. Endur- ing through repeated cycles of expansion and decline, Klansmen have rallied, marched, elected civic leaders, infiltrated law enforce- ment, and committed crimes ranging from petty vandalism to assassination and mass murder. Despite Mississippi’s 142-year his- tory as one of the Klan’s most persistent and violent realms, surveys of “Klannish- ness” in the Magnolia State have thus far been restricted to vignettes and footnotes within broader histories of Reconstruction or the long campaign for civil rights by African Americans. The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi intends to fill that gap in schol- arship, examining the Mississippi KKK, its allies, and its long-suffering victims in the context of their changing times. I owe thanks for assistance to the fol- lowing: Yvonne Arnold at the University of Southern Mississippi’s McCain Library and Archives; Laura Lipsey Bradley; Cindy Brown at the University of Mississippi Alumni Association; Sean Farrell at the Library of Hattiesburg, Petal and Forrest Early Klan costumes were often elaborate County; Christine Fletcher at the Mississippi (National Archives). State University libraries; David Frasier at Indiana University; Shaun Howard at the New York Public Library; Jerry Mitchell at the Jackson Clarion-Ledger; Mark Potok at the Southern Poverty Law Center; Peter Rinaldi at the Natchez Sun; Marianne Sweeney-Raley at the Natchez-Adams-Wilkinson Library Ser- vice; Linda White at the Clarksdale Public Library; and Christine Wilson at the Journal of Mississippi History. 1 This page intentionally left blank Introduction In spring 1866, six young Confederate veterans met secretly in Pulaski, Tennessee. Their purpose was to found a “hilarious social club,” to “have fun, make mischief, and play pranks on the public.” They called themselves ku klux—a corruption of the Greek kuklos (circle)—and added clan, spelled with a k for uniformity. In keeping with the lodge’s mys- tic name, they made up titles for themselves—grand cyclops, lictor, magi, night hawk— and persuaded their womenfolk to stitch up suitable regalia. Henceforth, life was never dull around Pulaski as the ghost-garbed Klansmen gamboled after dark, impersonating victims of the recent Civil War. Their antics were alleged to be no more than boyish pranks.1 That much is “common knowledge”—which should never be confused with truth. The order’s name and rituals were borrowed more or less intact from the wholly respectable Kuklos Adelphon collegiate fraternity—“Old Kappa Alpha,” the “Circle of Friends”— founded at the University of North Carolina in 1812 and dissolved sometime during the Civil War. Kuklos Adelphon, in turn, was heavily influenced by Masonic ritual. Pulaski boasted eight Masonic lodges in the postwar years, and Klan founder James Crowe subse- quently served as Masonic Grand Master for Tennessee.2 In short, the fledgling KKK had all the makings of a stodgy social club. Unfortunately, Kappa Alpha and the Masons represented only part of the new order’s ancestry. Pulaski had been dominated in the years before secession by a faction of the xeno- phobic “Know-Nothing” movement, constituted as the Supreme Order of the Star-Span- gled Banner. Members of that order called their local chapters “clans,” and they were not confined to Tennessee. A Natchez, Mississippi, unit plotted an abortive invasion of Cuba in 1854, while Woodville’s Wilkinson Whig proclaimed, in June of that year, “Deride, scoff, malign and traduce; it will avail nothing. Ere many suns have sunk in the west, the ‘Know- Nothings’ will be the most powerful party in the land—the bodyguard of our liberties and rights.” Lafayette County alone boasted 1,200 members, and Know-Nothing candidates swept Vicksburg’s municipal elections in 1855, confirming William Percy’s later observa- tion that “of all things hated in the South, more hated than the Jew or the Negro or sin itself, is Rome [Catholicism].”3 Not that the cause of white supremacy was overlooked, by any means. The Klan was racist from day one, playing its “pranks” exclusively on blacks. One of its founders later told congressional investigators that “the impression sought to be made upon” freedmen “was that these white-robed night prowlers were the ghosts of the Confederate dead, who had arisen from their graves in order to wreak vengeance on an undesirable class” of peo- ple. The ghostly raiment and tactics—extending skeletal hands to be shaken, guzzling buck- 3 4 Introduction ets of water with aid of funnels and bladders—were borrowed with little or no alteration from antebellum overseers and slave patrols. Indeed, most of the Klan’s nocturnal behav- ior echoed that of the dreaded “patter-rollers” who had terrorized southern blacks before emancipation. Slaves described patrol members as “the worst fellows that can be found; as bad as any you could pick up on the wharves,” and “nothing but poor white trash.... [I]f they didn’t whip some slaves, every now and then, they would lose their jobs.” Prewar observers noted that patrols “armed with arbitrary power, and frequently intoxicated, break into the houses of the colored people, and subject them to all manner of outrages.” Mis- sissippi’s patrols, established long before secession, became increasingly violent after slaves were accused of plotting to burn Natchez in 1861.4 The KKK and antebellum slave patrols resembled each other so closely, in fact, that some freedmen could not differentiate between the two. Several ex-slaves, interviewed long after the fact, claimed contact with a Ku Klux Klan before the Civil War, while others cited raids by “patter-rollers” during Reconstruction. The Klan’s young, affluent founders in Pulaski were almost certainly slave patrol veterans, and historian Wyn Wade suggests that some local patrol units may have joined the KKK en masse. Whatever the case, their spirit lived on in the Klan, as described by one Alabama Klansman whose Greensboro den raided black communities “in regular old style.”5 From such beginnings sprang an instrument of terror, but the Klan did not immedi- ately turn to violence. It took time to grow and shed the trappings of a social club. Mean- while, the war-torn South was changing too. Presidential Reconstruction President Abraham Lincoln, sixteen months before Appomattox and Ford’s Theater, had announced a program for readmission of secessionist states to the Union “with malice toward none.” That plan’s only conditions of forgiveness were acceptance of the new Thir- teenth Amendment’s ban on slavery and a loyalty oath pronounced by 10 percent of 1860’s registered electorate. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was even more lenient, offer- ing readmission to any state wherein “that portion of the people ... who are loyal” produced a constitution and established a new government. On 13 June 1865 Johnson named Vicks- burg unionist William Sharkey as Mississippi’s provisional governor, directing him to call a constitutional convention that would formally abolish slavery and nullify the Magnolia State’s Ordinance of Secession. Johnson also suggested (but did not insist on) extension of suffrage to literate freedmen, while ordering a general election for state officials to be held in October 1865.6 Governor Sharkey dutifully echoed that plea for black suffrage at the August conven- tion, where it fell on deaf ears. Instead, the delegates grumbled at federal demands and quar- reled ad infinitum over precise wording of the ban