From Deep South (Paul Theroux) p96-8
The Klan in Philadelphia
I drifted west through the Black Belt via Demopolis, Alabama, and Meridian, Mississippi, past Collinsville, where I bought a drink at the Piggly Wiggly, noted Chunky Duffee Road and the crossroads at tidy Tucker, and drove toward Philadelphia, a place that had been on my mind for years.
In June 1964, near this small farming town, three civil rights workers were murdered by a lynch mob of the local Klan. The portion of Highway 19 that I would travel on was named the Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Memorial Highway, for those activists who’d been killed during the Freedom Summer —a season of voter registration and protest, of running battles and bloodshed. I had missed that tragic time. I drove on this highway almost fifty years later in a spirit of catching up on unfinished business, with a suggestion of atonement, because in that summer I had been so far away, in Nyasaland, preparing to celebrate the independence of Malawi.
Philadelphia had earned another, later footnote in political history. In August 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan flew there to give the first speech of his campaign, at Philadelphia’s Neshoba County Fair. It seems a wildly out-of-the-way place to kick off a presidential campaign: a small Mississippi town with one distinction in the history books, the site of a triple murder provoked by white supremacists.
But that was precisely why Reagan was there. He knew what he was doing, making a calculated, ingratiating speech to a large crowd at a county fair, and to white Southern voters in general, reminding them where he stood on the issue of civil rights. He stood squarely with the good old boys and the Klansmen.
He began by mildly mocking his opponent, Jimmy Carter, then he talked about the economy, and then he got to the point. He said, “I believe in states’ rights, and I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level.”
He then rubbished the role of the federal government in enacting laws that affected citizens at the state level. Speaking in a town that was the headquarters of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan, he was saying: I’m on your side. Race was a factor in the 1980 election, which Reagan won.
Reagan was “tapping out the code,’ as the New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote many years later. Herbert added a detailed list of Reagan’’s opposition to civil rights measures while he was president: “He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.
Philadelphia, like many towns in Mississippi, had an old, decaying town center of dusty streets and defunct and picturesque stores, surrounded on a bypass road by a scattering of shopping malls, fast food outlets, the usual Walmart, pawnshops, and gun retailers. It was the county seat, altogether a rather bleak place, much bleaker and nakeder in the glare of noon. On the sunny day that I spent walking its streets I was reminded that Philadelphia is still the headquarters of the Mississippi Klan. I easily found the headquarters and the free leaflets.
“The Original Knights of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a political activist organization,’ one of the leaflets explained. “We follow in the footsteps of our ancestors who were involved in the political process. It’s a Klansman’s responsibility to register to vote, campaign, and vote for conservative pro white candidates who will put America first and defend our nation’s borders.” On another page: “We the Ku Klux Klan have been fighting for the White Christian Race for over 150 years. We are the longest lasting and most respected White Civil Rights organization on Earth. We are no compromise and that’s why we continue to be a feared organization.”
“Feared” was indisputable, “most respected” was questionable, but it was obvious the KKK was a defiant group and, judging from the heavy inventory in the gun stores in Philadelphia, well armed. I was not there to reform anyone but only to listen.
“The Ku Klux Klan is … more than the embodiment of a tradition,’ Frank Tannenbaum wrote in an early and subtle analysis of the South’s hidden impulses, Darker Phases of the South (1924). Tannenbaum was an Austrian-born criminologist, sociologist, Columbia University professor, and political radical who, as a soldier in the US Army stationed in the South, looked closely at the Klan. “[The Klan] expresses a deep-rooted social habit —a habit of ready violence in defense of a threatened social status.” He explained the appeal, the grip, the danger of the Klan: “It seizes upon the monotony of a small town and gives it daily drama. It takes him who lived an uneventful life, one who is nobody in particular, and makes something of him. It gives him a purpose; makes him a soldier in a cause. The very existence of the Ku Klux Klan is proof of emotional infanthood, It would not be possible in a community where the people lived full, interesting, varied lives”
The Klan originated in the mid-nineteenth century, not with the poor whites but with the planter class, who used its terror to keep blacks working in the fields, to regulate labor, and to “perpetuate the Souths repressive plantation system,” in the view of the social historian Jonathan M. Wiener, in Social Origins of the New South (1978). But other historians have described how, after a period of relative inactivity, the Klan was revived at the end of World War One, growing rapidly after 1920, spreading north to Illinois and Iowa, because of the arrival there of new migrants, including Italians and Jews, whose religions the Klan abominated.
The Klan movement—its members convinced it was a stabilizing force — percolated through the classes of whites until it became a form of fantasy and “child’s play” for the poorest whites, who had little else to animate them. Tannenbaum speaks about the double life of a Klansman, an ordinary drudge during the day and a crusader at night, in secret, with robes and hoods and a fiery cross and arcane rituals. “Then there is the opportunity to pry into other peoples lives as a sacred duty.”
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