New England and the KKK
Religious News Service Photographs, RNS RG 1, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, PA; 1981, Meriden, CT
As I started working on my new novel Skunktown—about racism in New England in the sixties–I thought back to my first college teaching job. It was 1981 in the mountains of western North Carolina. Moving there from Denver, I was shocked by both the casual and blatant forms of racism that still existed. I’d have thought that with the Civil Rights movement, social protests, and riots of the sixties, such examples as separate hospital rooms for Whites and Blacks, the flagrant use of colored and even the N-word in conversation, and having no person of color on the faculty at the university I was going to teach at would have been things of the distant past, relics of a bygone Southern culture. But I felt as if I’d entered a time machine that brought me back to the Jim Crow south of George Wallace and To Kill a Mockingbird. What shocked me even more, however, happened one night while I was watching the national news. A reporter stood in front a field of tobacco with a ramshackle building in the distance and dozens of police in riot gear ready for violence. He was covering a major Klan meeting. Given what I had already experienced during my short time in the South, I was prepared for this. What I wasn’t prepared for was that this scene wasn’t taking place in North Carolina or Alabama or Mississippi. It was happening in Connecticut, and more shocking still, in my own hometown!
As I started to do research for the novel, I began coming across references to the presence of the KKK in New England in the latter part of 20th Century. One of the first articles I found was by a Hartford Courant reporter named Dick Lehr. As in Spike Lee’s movie Black Klansman, Lehr went underground and pretended he wanted to join the KKK: “It was the fall of 1979, and I was a first-year reporter at The Hartford Courant,” Lehr wrote, “when David Duke launched a recruiting effort in, of all places, Connecticut. His ‘Klan calling cards’ and his newspaper, The Crusader, started appearing in factory parking lots, restaurants, high schools and college campuses.” Lehr was able to join the Klan and eventually went incognito to a meeting in Danbury, Connecticut, where he came face to face with David Duke, the Grand Wizard himself. Duke showed the film Birth of a Nation to a small gathering of Klan members, using it as a recruitment tool. https://theconversation.com/as-a-young-reporter-i-went-undercover-to-expose-the-ku-klux-klan-101415
For those who don’t know about the film, it was after the 1915 premiere of D.W. Griffth’s racist production, that American saw a dramatic rise in KKK membership (to be a subject of another blog post).
As I dug deeper into the subject of the KKK in latter-day New England, I saw reports of meetings and marches by the Klan in nearly a dozen Connecticut towns, including my own town of East Windsor. An article from Connecticut History.org by Andy Piasck had this to say about Klan activity in Connecticut: while it “proved virtually nonexistent for five decades until the early 1980s . . . the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of a myriad of splinter groups, formed. The Invisible Empire established a chapter in and around Meriden (CT) and held a series of actions in that part of the state over the next two years.” The article also stated that “flyers appeared in Orange, Connecticut in 2012 and Milford, Connecticut, in 2013.” https://connecticuthistory.org/the-ku-klux-klan-in-connecticut/ The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that one Klan faction, the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the largest Klan organization in American, still exists today in the state of Connecticut.
Klan Rally, Scotland, CT, Sept. 1981, RELIGIOUS NEWS SERVICE PHOTO (Reproduction Rights Not Transferable) (A-SCO-9C-80-JH)
While most of the more recent Klan activities in Connecticut were neither large nor particularly violent, they do prove that New England was never immune from such overt forms of racism.
Please watch my blog site for more on the history of racism in New England.
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