The KKK in Chattanooga and Hamilton County: A Very Brief Account

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.