Pushing back on perceptions: Despite persistent rumors, Martinsville works on moving forward

People in Martinsville have heard the rumors for years. So much so they have taken on something akin to urban legend status.

I heard the KKK was founded in Martinsville. Did you know Martinsville is the KKK headquarters?

The rumors aren’t true. But their persistence — coupled with some high-profile incidents of racism — have dogged Martinsville for decades and created a perception that people of color are unwelcome and could even be in danger there.

“For whatever reason, things get attached to this community, and people who are from here get worn out with it,” said Martinsville resident Judy Bucci. “They don’t want to have to live in history that’s not even true.”

Historian: Martinsville was not KKK headquarters

For the record, there have been three iterations of the Ku Klux Klan throughout U.S. history, and none of them began or held significant power in Martinsville, Indiana.

“We were never the headquarters of the KKK,” said Joanne Stuttgen, a folklorist and former Martinsville historian.

Rasul Mowatt, an American Studies professor at Indiana University Bloomington who teaches about the history of the KKK, said he has never found any strong connection between Martinsville and the klan.

“There is no evidence specifically of Martinsville and direct klan involvement,” Mowatt said.

The KKK originated in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee. Civil War veterans in the South were capitalizing on fear of Black freedom and a desire to maintain white supremacist ideals after the war.

While the organization spread quickly across the South, the first klan’s power was stripped by 1871 after then-President Ulysses S. Grant issued and enforced federal legislation that allowed him to use tactics, including military force, to protect Black Americans from the KKK.

However, the group reemerged in 1915 after the release of “The Birth of a Nation,” a film that depicted the KKK as heroes of the South. William J. Simmons revived this klan at Stone Mountain in Georgia. The second iteration is considered to be the largest klan, with somewhere between 4 million and 5 million members.

KKK history in Indiana

Indiana’s own history with the KKK mostly comes from this time period.

Joe Huffington started the Indiana klan in 1920, but it was soon taken over by a charismatic man named D.C. Stephenson, Mowatt said.

Under Stephenson’s leadership, the Indiana klan became the most powerful in the nation. About 30% of white Hoosier men were members — including half the state legislature and the governor.

Stuttgen said Morgan County’s 27% white male membership makes it about equal with the rest of the state. Other places, including Indianapolis, were known for a higher than average membership percentage.

The Indiana klan was also more focused on anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiments than anti-Black sentiments, Stuttgen said, and most klan confrontations in Martinsville were likely against the city’s Catholic community.

“Even though the Catholic church was small in Martinsville, it was there,” Stuttgen said.

After just a few years of the KKK dominating the state, Stephenson led to the klan’s undoing when he was tried and convicted in 1925 for the rape and murder of state employee Madge Oberholtzer. This horrific event essentially ended the second wave klan in Indiana and eventually the rest of the country.

A third wave of the KKK emerged out of Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1950s as a response to the growing civil rights movement. This is the version of the klan that exists today.

But while there’s no proof the KKK ever staked a claim on Martinsville, Mowatt said other Indiana cities have had stronger, more concrete ties to the klan or white supremacy.

The Indiana klan powerhouse of the 1920s was actually founded in Evansville, although it still wasn’t a headquarters for the klan nationally. An active KKK group in Madison organized a “Kookout” just last year.

Matthew Heimbach and Matt Parrott, the founders of a white nationalist group called the Traditionalist Worker Party, have also gained attention for their attempt to build a separatist society for their group in Paoli.

“It’s like almost everything but Martinsville,” Mowatt said.

Then why do these rumors continue to circulate?

Martinsville's racist stigma

Martinsville has come to represent racism in Indiana so strongly because of high-profile incidents in the city dating back decades.

The most well-known case is the 1968 death of traveling encyclopedia salesperson Carol Jenkins.

Carol Jenkins murdered Sept. 16, 1968, on East Morgan Street in Martinsville. She was a 21-year-old encyclopedia saleswoman.

Jenkins, a Black woman, was visiting Martinsville for her job when she was stabbed in the chest with a screwdriver and left to die. Her killer wasn’t named until 2002, when Kenneth Richmond’s daughter turned him in after realizing she witnessed the murder as a child.

A 2017 story from the Indianapolis Star reported that Richmond lived in Hendricks County at the time and had ties to the klan.

Despite Jenkins’ killer coming from outside Martinsville, her death and the years of unanswered questions that followed cemented Martinsville’s racist reputation.

“That story would become fixed to this place,” Stuttgen said.

As time wore on, other incidents reinforced the way people viewed Martinsville.

In the late ‘90s, Martinsville High School was banned from having home games for a year by the Indiana High School Athletic Association after students in the crowd apparently shouted racist slurs at Black players during a basketball game against Bloomington High School North.

A 2001 letter-to-the editor from assistant police chief Dennis Nail made national news for its comments against non-Christian religions and the LGBTQ+ community.

Photos from 2013 surfaced last year showing mayoral candidate Kevin Coryell, who lost handily in the primary, in blackface.

There have also been claims that Martinsville is a sundown town, or a community that kept out Black people through the law or other forms of intimidation. Stuttgen said she has never found any evidence to corroborate these claims.

These stories have created expectations for what Martinsville is like and how people from Martinsville will behave, Stuttgen said. It’s also became worse with the internet, as the stories have been able to travel farther without being checked.

Another major source for the reputation, local historians say, is Indiana University.

Stuttgen said students talk about Martinsville like an urban legend. They hear the KKK rumors or someone tells them about a racist incident that happened to a friend of a friend, and they begin to believe it’s all true.

The rumors even make it to the professors.

When Mowatt began teaching at IU about 14 years ago, he decided to move to Indianapolis instead of Bloomington because of the college town’s proximity to Martinsville, he said.

He was from Chicago, but he already knew the reputation Martinsville had — that it wasn’t safe for a Black man like him to stop for gas or get lost. He didn’t want to stay anywhere even close to a place like that.

But it’s impossible to avoid a town situated between where you’re living and working for a decade and a half.

Mowatt’s car has broken down twice in Martinsville, and he said he’s never felt unsafe because of the color of his skin.

People stopped by the side of the road, got out of their own vehicle to check on him and offered to take a look at his car, he said.

While Mowatt knows his experiences don’t mean racism doesn’t exist in Martinsville, he said he sees the city is more than just its past.

Stuttgen said the legends are so strong in Martinsville she doesn’t know how the city will ever get rid of the reputation it carries.

“It’s like trying to catch mercury or trying to catch vapor or something,” Stuttgen said. “It’s just so elusive and just so slippery that I don’t know that we can stop it or counter it.”

How are residents addressing Martinsville’s reputation?

For decades, groups and individuals in Martinsville have tried to dispel the rumors and change what people believe about the city.

People Respecting Individuality and Diversity in Everyone, also known as Martinsville PRIDE, began in the late 1990s as a way for Martinsville citizens to combat the stereotypes of their city.

Bucci, who was involved with Martinsville PRIDE during its approximately 15-year run, said the group became a supportive community presence while it was active.

Group members would attend sporting events to make sure people felt welcome, help with diversity education and host an annual dinner honoring Albert Merritt, a Black resident in the early 20th century, when the town’s storied history with health spas was at its height. He established a boys’ club and worked with children for decades. A local youth center is now named after him.

Politicians, educators and business leaders would come to the dinners every year, and guest speakers over the years included Holocaust survivor Eva Kor.

Bucci, who grew up in another small town in Indiana with a racist reputation, said she understood Martinsville when she moved there more than 25 years ago. Throughout her life, people have judged her based on where she was from.

People from Martinsville have to deal with rumors that a quick Google search could easily prove are not accurate, Bucci said.

Although there wasn’t enough organizational support to keep PRIDE going, she said people supported the mission.

However, Bucci said Martinsville’s reputation with race is holding it back from becoming more diverse and truly changing.

“When people keep talking reputation, reputation, reputation, it doesn’t help us become more diverse,” Bucci said.

After PRIDE ended, other efforts have popped up through the years to continue the conversation.

Former Martinsville Mayor Shannon Kohl, who could not be reached for this story, held a ceremony in 2017 with Jenkins’ family and dedicated a memorial to her outside City Hall as a way to openly address the city’s past.

“We tried not talking about it for all those years, but we need to acknowledge it — for Carol’s family to heal, and for us to heal and get some closure,” Kohl said at the time.

Then after the death of George Floyd in May, resident Joe Thomas has spearheaded a local movement called New Legacy.

On top of protests supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, New Legacy is also working with local officials to create a task force that will help implement ways to change Martinsville’s reputation.

Thomas, who is Black, said Martinsville may have its problems with racism, but he’s never felt his life was in danger because of where he lives.

Instead, he believes in Martinsville’s ability to change and thinks other people should know it’s not the racist sundown town they’ve been lead to believe it is.

“I’ve lived there for 14 years,” Thomas said. “I’m proof that it’s false.”

Thomas said he did face some pushback when trying to organize the Black Lives Matter protest in June. He said counter protesters showed up that day, and other people told him not to do it before it happened.

“If you don’t think we need it, then we need it,” Thomas said. “That’s how I felt about it.”

Support for a task force from city leadership, including Mayor Kenny Costin, has allowed Thomas to continue his activism past a single-day event.

It will focus, like PRIDE did, on education and long-term change in addition to rallies or marches.

Costin said he wanted to work with New Legacy so that the movement could come from within Martinsville itself.

“If you take a grassroots group that has the interest of Martinsville, a diverse group, I think we will have a better process of getting things changed than bringing a PR firm in,” Costin said.

For Thomas, the city’s involvement is a sign that Martinsville is willing to listen to people of color and Black citizens who are actually affected by racism.

“Hopefully,” Thomas said, “we can change the view of the people.”

This article originally appeared on The Reporter Times: Martinsville works on moving forward despite rumors, perceptions