Just what the title suggests; not a deep dive but an
overview of highlights.
“First Era” Post-bellum Ku Klux Klan
The so-called “First Era” Ku Klux Klan of the immediate
postbellum period is related to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan founded in 1915
only by the latter copying its name and in likewise being a terrorist group.
By all contemporary accounts, there was no organization in
Chattanooga in the postbellum period.
Nor was there in Hamilton County, except possibly in what was then
called Wauhatchie and is now known as Lookout Valley.
First, Hamilton County’s support had overwhelmingly been for
the Union in April 1861 (by a vote of 1260 to 854) even after Fort Sumter, and
that included most of the large plantation owners. Most of the 854 in favor of secession lived
in the City of Chattanooga, and a lot of those had fled south after the Army of
the Cumberland occupied the city in August 1863.
Second, many Union veterans had made their homes here (there
were five posts of the Grand Army of the Republic in the county to one camp of
the United Confederate Veterans). The
new leaders of the city (later merging with the old ones left or returned)
openly welcomed carpetbaggers into the city, even advertising in the North for
them to come to the city.
Third, the most likely source of resistance from which such
a group might have come were the gang of bushwackers known as Snow’s Scouts in
the Snow Hill area north of Ooltewah.
However, this had been dispersed by former Union Lt. (Co. D, 4th
Tennessee Cavalry, USA) Joe Ritchey’s personal war against its members. According to legend, Ritchey hunted them down
to wherever they fled, taking his vendetta across three states, last of all killing
their leader William Snow in Arkansas.
In his day, Ritchey was as notorious in the tri-state region of Southeast
Tennessee, Northwest Georgia, and Northeast Alabama as Jesse James was in
Kansas and Missouri.
Two incidents mentioned in newspapers in 1870 indicate that
there was some activity by the Ku Klux Klan in Wauhatchie, which at the time
meant Lookout Valley from the stateline to the Tennessee River. The only ways to get between there and
Chattanooga were the railroad and the Old Federal Road over the bench of
Lookout Mountain, the latter much abused by the passage of armies during the
war. Not until 1887 was Wauhatchie Pike
as such formally constructed.
Church burning in Wauhatchie, 1870
Farmer James Cummings, whose family owned a good portion of
Lookout Valley, leased some land for local freedmen to build a church upon, as
long as they built a fence around it. The
site was on Kelly’s Ferry Road about a mile away from what was then considered
the center of the village of Wauhatchie.
During a prayer meeting one night at the beginning of the third week of
March, a group of “masked marauders” drove out the congregation and set the
building on fire.
The lynching of Dan Tucker, 1870
According to a news article in the Knoxville Sentinel, on 24 September 1870, a band of 25-30 masked “night
riders” surrounded the home of a freedman named Dan Tucker living as a
sharecropper on the Cummings farm in Wauhatchie, what is now called Lookout Valley. The night riders dragged him from his home,
beat him, and shot him to death in place of his cousin Solomon Crooks of
Chattanooga, who was accused of molesting a 14-year old white girl of the
community.
Before attacking Tucker, the night riders dragged another
freedman, Hiram Crockett, from his home some 15 yards away, whipped him, then
forced him to witness the lynching.
“Second Era” Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan founded in 1915 was mostly
confined to Georgia until 1920. Its
mythology pretended direct descent from the postbellum Ku Klux Klan founded in
Pulaski, Tennessee, much the same way some in Freemasonry have claimed its
descent from the Knights Templar (the Military Order of Christ, Order of
Montesa in Spain, Imperial Order of Our
Lord Jesus Christ, and Vatican’s own Supreme Order of Christ do, in fact,
descend from the Templars).
In truth, it was founded on the basis of the anti-Semitic
Knights of Mary Phagan who’d lynched Leo Frank several months earlier. Its founders were cosplaying, mostly deriving
their regalia and ideology from D.F. Griffith’s 1915 blockbuster epic The Birth of A Nation, along with carrying
over many practices from the White Cap movement of the late 1880s to early
1910s, which had in its later years adopted the costumes portrayed in Thomas
Dixon’s popular play The Clansman,
upon which Griffith’s film was based.
The Birth of A Nation
became the first motion picture shown in the White House, courtesy of its then
resident, Woodrow Wilson, a big fan of both the original postbellum Ku Klux
Klan and its 1915 heavily reimagined imitation.
He subsequently segregated the Navy and the federal civil service,
restricting Afro-Americans in both to servant positions.
Knights of the KKK in Chattanooga
Shortly after the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan altered its
ideology to cast a broader appeal, dubbing the new version “Americanism”, Chattanooga
Klan No. 4 organized in 1921 as the fourth klavern (local group) in the ‘Realm’
(state) of Tennessee, under Exalted Cyclops Earl Hotalen. It met on Main Street. Cleveland Klan No. 12 and East Chattanooga
Klan No. 13 organized that same year (the latter under Exalted Cyclops George
Perry). The next year, Lookout Klan No.
15 was also established in the city under Exalted Cyclops Phil Hays; it met at
Ninth Street and Georgia Avenue.
Later in 1922, Exalted Cyclops Hays of Lookout Klan No. 15 was
expelled (Zeke Witt took his place); he and other members of the Lookout Klan, along
with some dissidents from Chattanooga Klan No. 4, formed a chapter of the new
insurgent National Association of Klansmen (or National Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan), which later changed its name to National Association of Clans to further
distance itself from the Simmons group.
In the municipal elections of 1923 in Chattanooga and
Memphis, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan ran their own slate of candidates. At both locations, they even campaigned in
black communities, assuring residents that their targets were now not
Afro-Americans, but Jews, Catholics, Communists, Socialists, trade unionists,
and immigrants.
As you may imagine, they lost badly in both cities. One effect in this city was that membership
rolls fell to the point that the two local klaverns had to merge in 1924 as Chattanooga
Klan No. 48 under Exalted Cyclops Charles Hood, only to flounder the next year
due to dissension in its ranks. A tiny
remnant met annually to elect officers and put on a couple of parades.
Klan No. 48 and the CPUSA
In the Great Depression, the Knights of the KKK nationally
allied with the anti-Roosevelt American Liberty League, and so too did the
remnant in Chattanooga and Hamilton County.
Also during the Depression, Chattanooga was a stronghold of
the Communist Party USA. At first,
organization was purely local but it soon became the seat of the party’s
District 17 (Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama), as well as operations center of
the entire Southern Region. However, the
only time at which the two organizations came into direct conflict was in 1935
when the party planned to hold its regional party convention here and the Klan
No. 48 revived enough to conduct a march downtown that convinced the party to
relocated its meeting to Highlander Folk School in Summertown, midway between
Monteagle and Tracy City. Two years later,
however, the klavern was virtually nonexistent and CPUSA was able to hold it
party conference in Memorial Auditorium.
The two antagonistic organizations also intersected in another
unexpected way. Almost as soon as the CPUSA
organized in Chattanooga, the party established its regional paper for the
South, Southern Worker, which ran
from 1930 to 1937. Ostensibly it was
published in Birmingham, but in reality it came from Chattanooga. The company which printed it was located just
across the stateline in Rossville, Georgia; the big joke here is that the owner
of that printing company was kleagle of Rossville Klan No. 103 in the ‘Realm of Georgia, Knights of the KKK’.
Former McCallie School student named J.B. Stoner revived
Chattanooga’s Klan No. 48 in 1942 and allied with the local chapter of Liberty
League front group Crusaders for Economic Liberty, which had an armed element
called the White Shirts patterned after the Black Shirts of Italy’s Fascist
Party and the Brown Shirts of Germany’s Nazi Party.
Klan No. 48 dissolved when the national organization shut
down in 1944, but Stoner remained a Kleagle (organizer) for the surviving
Tennessee “Realm” of the defunct national organization.
“Third Era” Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Organizations of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan arose after
the Second World War, but they didn’t really take off until the Civil Rights
Era, and especially after Brown v. Topeka
Board of Education in 1954. Only
this time, instead of a single national organization, there were several mostly
regional groupings with scores of Imperial Wizards.
Association of Georgia Klans
This group was organized in fall 1945 by Samuel Green of
Atlanta, Georgia, and included several Klans in Tennessee, including, from the
outset, Chattanooga Klan No. 305 and Rossville Klan No. 311, both under Exalted
Cyclops (and Kleagle) Walter Arp.
J.B. Stoner, meanwhile, left the Klan to found the Christian
Anti-Jewish Party and later played a part in founding the National States’
Rights Party. In Atlanta, he headed up a
group called Confederate Underground, which was responsible for a number of
terrorist incidents in the city, including a synagogue bombing.
In 1949, Green abolished Klan No. 305 because of its pattern
of widespread violence that included floggings and raids on black churches and
other targets of their ire. One of the
more notable was a raid on a suspected gambling house on Scenic Highway by 75
masked men in December 1948.
That incident was far surpassed in notoriety by an April
1949 Knights of the KKK raid into Hooker, Georgia, in conjunction with the Dade
County Sheriff’s Office, in which a mob of a hundred in robes, hoods, and masks
abducted seven black men (one from Hooker and six from Chattanooga, all but one
veterans of WW2) from a house in Hooker, Georgia, and took them to a secluded
area where they were flogged with branches and belts.
That action resulted in indictments by a federal grand jury
on charges of violations of civil rights under the 14th Amendment from a
federal grand jury against Sheriff Lynch, four of his officers, and several local
and regional Klan officials, including the pastor of Olive Street Baptist
Church in East Chattanooga, who was the AGK’s Great Titan of the local ‘province’
(district of several counties) in United States v. Lynch (1950). Newspapers at the time celebrated the fact
that the 14th Amendment rather than the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 could be used
against violators of civil rights.
In the summer of 1949, the Association of Georgia Klans reorganized
as the ‘Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’, and Samuel Green, up till then
using the title Grand Dragon of Georgia, was elected its first Imperial Wizard.
At the time, he was a lieutenant colonel
in the Georgia National Guard and aide-de-camp to Gov. Herman Talmadge, having
been made so as reward for organizing the terrorizing of the state’s registered
black voters into not voting in November 1948.
Green died of a heart attack two weeks after his election
and elevation to Imperial Wizard. During
his time, he initiated a campaign of infiltrating various law enforcement
agencies, especially targeting the Atlanta Police Department and the Georgia
Bureau of Investigation. After his death,
his successor as Imperial Wizard of the Original Knights of the KKK, Samuel
Roper, resigned as second director of the GBI to take up the post. He also reinstated Chattanooga Klan No. 305, but
it soon went defunct.
The Original Knights of the KKK itself ended in a threeway
split in 1964 after the resignation of its then Imperial Wizard, Roy Davis, and
discovery of the massive misappropriation of funds.
U.S. Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc.
When U.S. Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was chartered
in 1955 in the wake of the Brown v.
Topeka Board of Education (1954) decision by the Supreme Court of the
United States, which struck down segregation in public schools under the
principle “separate is inherently unequal”, Chattanooga Klavern No. 1 organized
in East Chattanooga.
By 1957, Klavern No. 1 had gotten such a bad reputation for
violence among their fellow Kluxers that the U.S. Klans, which at the time was
the largest such body in the South, expelled them. Their members, who probably included former
members of Chattanooga Klan No. 305, had already committed sixteen floggings,
several shootings, and at least one bombing.
Dixie Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Upon their expulsion, former members of Chattanooga Klan No.
305 reorganized as the Dixie Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, with their
klavern hall being the former Hamilton Trust & Savings Bank building
(1922-1928) at 2507 Glass Street (probably the same they’d been using
before). The new group, allied (in at
least some things) to the J.B. Stoner’s National States Rights Party,
eventually spread into northwest
Georgia, northern Alabama, Virginia, and Mississippi.
J.B. Stoner and his Confederate Underground were involved in
the 1958 bombing of Bethel Street Church in Birmingham
The Dixie Knights originally
included the klavern (chapter) in Neshoba County, Mississippi, that later committed
the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael
Schwermer in 1964, until it joined the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the
organization to which belonged Medger Evers assassin Byron De La Beckwith, who
later resided in Walden, Tennessee.
Jack Brown, the
Dixie Knights’ Imperial Wizard, was a suspect in the bombing of the 16th Street
Baptist Church of Birmingham, Alabama, on 15 September 1963 that killed Addie
Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Carol Denise
McNair (11).
From 1957 to 1960, the Dixie
Knights committed seventeen bombings of homes, buses, an integrated YMCA, and
Howard High School, two shootings, a beating, an arson, countless floggings, and
several cross burnings, (including one in Avondale in 1959 in which Klansmen
were reportedly escorted to the site by two motorcycle cops from the
Chattanooga City Police Department), a record more than ample to earn them the
designation of domestic terrorist organization.
They were brazen enough to field a team in the local amateur baseball
league with their organization’s name blazoned across their uniforms. Along with all these activities, the leaders
were constantly in court defending against suits filed by the U.S. Klans as
well as filing counter suits against them.
Overt violence more or less ceased after 1960, roughly at
the same time the court actions by both factions were dropped. The Dixie Knights continued at the Glass Street
site at least through 1964, the year city government discovered the group had
been mistakenly given a tax exemption in 1960 and wanted to collect back taxes. The group affiliated with the National Association of the Ku Klux Klan in
1965, but was defunct by 1970.
Justice Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan
A large part of the
reason for the demise of the Dixie Knights was a fraction led by William Church
breaking away to form the Justice Knights of
the Ku Klux Klan in 1968.
By the late 1970s,
Church’s son of the same name led the group, as well as the team which
perpetrated the armed intimidation of the denizens of the Ninth Street district
that ended with the shootings of Viola Ellison, Lela Mae Evans, Katherine O.
Johnson, Opal Lee Jackson, and Mary Tyson on 19 April 1980. The acquittal of Church Jr. and his cohorts
by an all-white jury that summer led to several nights of rioting and a strict
7:30 pm curfew that lasted at least a week.
Having found no justice in the criminal courts, the five women sued their
attackers, and in 1982 won.
The case, Crumsey
v. Justice Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (1981), was brought by the Center
for Constitutional Rights on behalf to the five victims under the Klux Klan Act
of 1871, seeking damages and an injunction against Klan members entering the
black community. The court granted the
injunction, and a judgment of $535,000.
This example, the first time that legislation had been used to pursue a
civil rather than criminal case, set a precedent which groups like Southern
Poverty Law Center used to take down Klan organizations all across the country
in the next decades.
