When fascism came to Lenawee: The Black Legion: Night Riders
As the Depression deepened and with the threat of war again on the horizon, the competition for work and the struggles over scarce resources threatened the order of the Lost Cause and its Klan, some of whose members thought that Klan efforts didn’t go far enough. Neither did some industry leaders.
One of those disgruntled Klan members was Dr. William Shepard, the Grand Cyclops of the Bellaire, Ohio, Ku Klux Klan. Like Klan leader Simmons, Doc Shepard was a member of several lodges. He was also the beloved hometown doctor known as the “little doctor of the poor” and a vigilante leader who allegedly tarred, feathered, and ran people out of town, and was rumored to be the town’s abortionist who traded medical care for sexual services.
Sometime in 1924 or early 1925, he took matters into his own hands and created a new Klan subset, substituting black robes and hats, different insignia and rituals, including a terrifying initiation ritual. He called his group the Black Guards, and they came to be known under various names, some of which were the Wolverine Republican League (in Michigan), the Bullet Club, the Black Legion, and the Night Riders (English, “Under the Star of the Guard,” U of M Archives,1993).
Under the leadership of Virgil (Bert) Effinger, from Lima, Ohio, and Arthur Lupp, the City of Detroit’s milk inspector who ran the Black Legion in Michigan, they did their worst deeds at night, sometimes here in Lenawee in rural meeting houses and fields and going from there. Black Legion members explained these get-togethers as harmless fun, just a boys’ night out, not what you think, nothing to see. Night Riders.
The Black Legion was created to work secretly behind the scenes, as opposed to a public show of intimidation like the Klan. It infiltrated the highest levels of Michigan’s elected offices, from the governor’s office all the way down through the legislature and county, township, and municipal elected officials, law enforcement, judges.
Black Legion members infiltrated the labor movement in Flint and Detroit and acted as informants and enforcers for both GM during the 1936 sit-down strike and for anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer Henry Ford and his enforcer, Harry Bennett. The Black Legion is believed to be responsible for at least 50 murders, including WPA worker Charles Poole, UAW officer George Marshuk, and UAW organizer John Bialek, whose body was found near Monroe.
More: When fascism came to Lenawee: The lost cause and the Ku Klux Klan
More: When fascism came to Lenawee: The Klan in Lenawee
They attempted to assassinate elected officials, newspaper publishers, and labor lawyers, and they killed black men just for the thrill (English and others, incl. FBI files). Their goal was to create incidents that would incite panic and insurrection and overthrow the U.S. government, and to eventually assassinate President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In many cases, sympathetic prosecutors and judges, or one-man grand juries, would let arrested Black Legion suspects off on a technicality, and records of proceedings mysteriously disappeared.
The Black Legion tried to infiltrate, with some success, Detroit’s sports teams of the era. Tom Stanton’s non-fiction book, written from notes by historian Peter Amann and other contemporary reports, “Terror in the City of Champions: Murder, Baseball, and the Secret Society that Shocked Depression-Era Detroit” describes the power of the Black Legion, team owners, political and industrial leaders, and especially the Detroit Tigers’ Mickey Cochrane and the price he paid for trying to navigate among Detroit’s leading politicians, mobsters, industrial leaders, Frank Navin and the world of players like Hank Greenberg, Charley Gehringer, and Goose Goslin in pre-World War II Detroit.
English wrote that there were strongholds in Adrian, Napoleon, Hillsdale, and Jackson, and includes an incident involving Jackson prison guards who were also Black Legion members. Stanton traced the tentacles of the Black Legion as it moved into the Detroit suburbs and then outward into southeastern Michigan, including Lenawee County, and he also writes about a specific event near Adrian, near Ogden Station.
To be continued ...
— Pam Taylor is a retired Lenawee County teacher and an environmental activist. She can be reached at ptaylor001@msn.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: When fascism came to Lenawee: The Black Legion: Night Riders
