Faith Works: When the Ku Klux Klan came to church in Licking County
Exactly one hundred years ago, this newspaper and other Midwest publications started printing descriptions of church services in Newark and Licking County from the Sundays just before.
On January 21 and 28, in different locations around the area, groups of men in hoods and gowns silently entered after worship had begun, and left behind envelopes filled with money.
The Ku Klux Klan had come to town. This was what’s called today the “second era” of the Klan. The first was a guerrilla organization led by Confederate veterans which fought Reconstruction; after the shameful settlement following the Tilden-Hayes election of 1876, Union troops were removed from the Southern states for the most part, and by the end of 1877 segregation and legal discrimination returned to open politics, and the first Klan ended because secrecy was no longer needed. Klan leaders became governors and senators and other officials, exerting their authority out in the open.
The second Klan erupted in the wake of the first major silent film epic, “The Birth of a Nation.” The year 1915 saw a new rise in anxiety over maintaining Jim Crow in the South, and the Midwest was concerned about central and southern Europeans in general, and Catholicism in particular. Imagery out of D.W. Griffith’s movie inspired a rebirth of the Klan.
While the second era of the Klan launched in the Atlanta, Georgia area and was quite racist in rhetoric and activity, it was the Midwestern Klan that drove their numbers through the roof, especially after some sales-oriented organizers saw an opportunity in 1921 to turn a simple dues paying model for Klan membership into a form of mutual aid and insurance, and to sell commercially produced gowns and hoods and other regalia at a steep mark-up to new Klansmen, along with a growth model that was very much a multi-level marketing approach. Hate, and modern sales techniques, and soon some Grand Dragons and Imperial Wizards were getting rich in Atlanta and in Indianapolis.
We know the Ku Klux Klan was active in Licking County at some point in 1922 because on Jan. 18, 1923, crosses were burnt on high points visible to most of Newark, and in Hanover. They were signals for a mass meeting on the 19th which had around 500 in attendance, all of which points to some serious organization well before the first public cross burnings and church visitations.
As the year went on, events were staged at Sixth Street Park, the county fairgrounds, and other locations around the county with both hooded members and ordinary citizens massed to hear the speakers, who used some of the newfangled “public address system” technology to share their message of hate and exclusion.
What can be confusing if you mostly know the Klan from their post-Civil War, “Gone With the Wind” image, and “Birth of a Nation” simply a call-back to that era, or the third era Klan which emerged during the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the South during the 1950s and 60s, is that the 1920s Klan was biggest in the Midwest, and this second era Klan spat almost all of its bile at the Catholic Church. They presented themselves as protectors of Prohibition, and as opponents to bootleggers, and to the 20s Klan, anyone not in favor of Prohibition was a bootlegger, at least in spirit. They were racist, no doubt, but their public efforts were aimed largely at priests and parishes, arguing “Americanism” could not co-exist with Catholicism.
From 1923 to 1927, the Klan ran our county, politically and culturally, and much of the Midwest. Then it collapsed, and good people as well as guilty parties tried to pretend it never happened. I think we still need to confront and confess and deal with the wounds of that era; you’ll learn more about the Klan’s impact on churches and the community through this year.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s been studying the Klan’s Indiana & Ohio history for many years. Tell him about how you’ve seen the past as a place for present healing at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Faith Works: When the Ku Klux Klan came to church in Licking County
