![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/4.-KKK_rally-flyer.jpg\" "\\"4.-KKK_rally-flyer\\"")
<\/a>The biggest political gathering in North Carolina in the year 1966 attracted more than 5,000 people to Raleigh Memorial Auditorium on a hot day in August. It was so big that some 2,000 people couldn\u2019t get in and milled around outside, probably grateful to hear one of the featured speakers come out and talk to them.<\/p>\nThe meeting attracted attention statewide, but it was not a civil rights rally or a meeting of a chartered political party.<\/p>\n
It was a Ku Klux Klan gathering, and it was in a state that some in the organization called \u201cKlansville U.S.A.,\u201d which was not hyperbole. At the time, the United Klans of America presence in North Carolina eclipsed Klan membership in all the other Southern states combined.<\/p>\n
For a state that has historically been proud of its Southern progressive reputation, that was \u2013 and still is \u2013 a little hard to take. Newspaper editors, religious leaders and some state officials regularly called the Klan \u201cun-American\u201d and \u201crevolting\u201d and \u201cpoisonous\u201d to the state\u2019s interests. But they couldn\u2019t argue with numbers.<\/p>\n
Those numbers show that in 1966, Mississippi had 76 klaverns (or local units), Georgia had 57 and Alabama had 40. None of them could compete with North Carolina, which totaled 192 klaverns with between 10,000 and 12,000 dues-paying members.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re surprised by this, that\u2019s understandable. Most of the violence of the Civil Rights era was further south. Mississippi is where Medgar Evers and other civil rights workers were murdered, and Alabama is where Klan supporters \u2013 not convicted until years later — blew up a church, killing four young girls. Alabama is also where Gov. George Wallace stood in a schoolhouse door and proclaimed \u201csegregation forever.\u201d<\/p>\n
But in a sense, the Klan\u2019s hold on North Carolina is not surprising, says author David Cunningham, a professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. That\u2019s because North Carolina politicians, at least publicly, preached moderation and trying to get along with federal rulings on such things as school desegregation.<\/p>\n
And that didn\u2019t set with people like Grand Dragon Bob Jones, a Navy veteran and Rowan County awning salesman. He took on state officials such as Capus Waynick, a former ambassador to Nicaragua and Colombia and Gov. Terry Sanford\u2019s unofficial racial troubleshooter. And he bragged that he drove 100,000 miles a year organizing klaverns.<\/p>\n
Most of the Klan effort was in eastern North Carolina, where the fall of Jim Crow would be more damaging to white interests. But the Klan also operated in such places as Salisbury, Jones\u2019 hometown, and Greensboro, where its remnants would be involved in a murderous shootout with members of the fledgling Communist Workers Party in 1979.<\/p>\n
That \u201cGreensboro Massacre,\u201d for the record, is what first got Cunningham involved with North Carolina. He worked as an investigator with Greensboro\u2019s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, testified in several court cases, and still researches the causes and consequences of racial violence \u2013 as well as their legacy.<\/p>\n
We may think of the Klan as an \u201canachronism\u201d \u2013 Capus Waynick\u2019s word in 1963. And indeed, Jones\u2019 UKA has long since been bankrupted by lawsuits, infighting and federal investigations. But its leavings are evident today, Cunningham says, in such phenomena as the rise of the Republican-dominated South.<\/p>\n
\u201cUKA organizing in the 1960s shaped political orientations and augured remarkable shifts in electoral politics in the 1970s,\u201d Cunningham comments in his epilogue. \u201cRecognizing the UKA\u2019s role in these well-documented trends demonstrates how the past predominance of white hoods continues to matter to residents of the Tar Heel State \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Some warnings are called for. This book could not have been written without liberal use of the \u201cN-word\u201d \u2013 this is the Klan we\u2019re talking about. If that bothers you, please don\u2019t read the book. Also, don\u2019t expect to find a scintillating tale that will keep you on the edge of your chair. Cunningham is a sociologist, and his book is at heart a sociological study.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s fairly complete, going back to the Klan\u2019s origins in the 19th<\/sup> century, and retelling such horrifying stories as the Wilmington race riots of 1898. Cunningham has mined well the newspapers of the Civil Rights era in North Carolina. Indeed, I found the names of several former newspaper colleagues in the lengthy bibliography that is included here.<\/p>\n This book is subtitled, \u201cThe Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Era Ku Klux Klan,\u201d but the Klan\u2019s legacy remains. Jones\u2019 claim that the UKA\u2019s influence would ultimately be through \u201cballots\u201d rather than \u201cbullets\u201d has proved true, Cunningham says, and we won\u2019t discard that history easily.<\/p>\n \u201cThough the flames have dimmed,\u201d he says, \u201conly by telling \u2013 and listening to \u2013 the story can we forge a common path.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The KKK in North Carolina? White hoods and crosses may not be much in evidence these days, but Tom Dillon reviews a book that argues that the Klan\u2019s legacy is strong in today\u2019s political climate. Reviewed by Tom Dillon KLANSVILLE, U.S.A.. By David Cunningham. Oxford University Press. 337 pages, $29.95 hardback The biggest political gathering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,10,15,315],"tags":[469,470,471],"class_list":["post-1142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-history","category-contemporary-nonfiction","category-history","category-politics","tag-ku-klux-klan","tag-n-c-politics","tag-southern-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1142"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1145,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142\/revisions\/1145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}