8

DECLINE OF THE WOOD COUNTY KU KLUX KLAN

The flames from the burning building “poured through the roof like the flames of a huge blast furnace, piercing high in the air.”¹⁹² The intensity of the blaze on September 29, 1926, forced Bowling Green firefighters to request assistance from fire departments in Tontogany, Perrysburg and even Toledo.

The conflagration that engulfed the Del-Mar Theater—a building once known as the Opera House—also resulted in the destruction of a newsstand, an auto dealership, a hardware store, a tire store and the Bowling Green interurban railway station. Estimates of the losses due to the fire and damage from falling debris to nearby buildings exceeded $150,000, an amount equivalent to perhaps $2 million in the early twenty-first century.

Yet the “tongues of red flame that shot through the roof” of the Del-Mar destroyed more than merely a half dozen thriving businesses. The Wood County Ku Klux Klan regularly made use of the Del-Mar Theater for meetings and events, undoubtedly thanks to the active participation in the Klan by theater owner and manager Clark M. Young.

Harvey Sherer, publisher of the Wood County Republican and a charter member of the Wood County Klan klavern, summed up the feelings that many Klan members likely shared after the destruction of their favorite meeting place. The Del-Mar, Sherer opined in an editorial, was “shrouded with a romantic past unrivalled by any other pile of stone or wood for miles around.”¹⁹³ Sherer mourned, among other events hosted at the Del-Mar, the numerous “home talent” minstrel shows produced at the theater. The Wood County Ku Klux Klan, as a result of the destruction of the Del-Mar Theater, lost its spiritual home.

The charred ruins of Del-Mar Theater in Bowling Green, 1926. Center for Archival Collections.

The fortunes of the Ku Klux Klan in Ohio began to show signs of weakening at the halfway point of the 1920s, mirroring a nationwide trend. In large measure, this was due to highly public scandals involving Klan leaders, not the least of which was the second-degree murder conviction of David Curtis “D.C.” Stephenson, the grand dragon of the Great Lakes region. The Ku Klux Klan lost a significant amount of member approval due to the criminal behavior of its own leadership.

Pro-Klan newspapers in Wood County offered little coverage of the Stephenson trial. The case brought a brief condemnation at the end of the editorial section from the Wood County Republican, which made efforts to describe the incident as the “isolated” work of a rogue Klan member. The North Baltimore Times simply said that an “ex-Klan leader has been found guilty of second degree murder with [a] lengthy prison sentence ahead of him.”¹⁹⁴

At the state level, internal strife and factional splits contributed to the decline of the Klan. Part of the internal fracturing of the Klan had its roots in the long-standing legal fight over control of the Klan between Joseph E. Simmons and Hiram Evans. The North Baltimore Times reported in January 1924 that Simmons sent representatives to the Buckeye State to gauge support for a new Klan-like fraternal organization. One envoy sent by Simmons, a man named H.A. Lutz, called the Ohio Ku Klux Klan “rotten to the core,” and he told two thousand assembled Klansmen that “either the Ohio Klan must be cleaned up, or it will shortly be faced by the organization of a new body in this state which will drive it out of existence.”¹⁹⁵

Internal strife even caused defections among Klan leadership in Northwest Ohio. The Wood County Democrat reported in early 1925 that a former Klan Kleagle responsible for recruiting in Wood County left the organization and engaged in a campaign of vilification against the Klan. W.E. Cahill spoke in front of a large crowd about the corruption in the Klan. Cahill claimed that he observed “such thievery and rascality [in the Klan] as will make your hair stand,” adding that he personally witnessed Klan members carrying machine guns in parades “by the order of high officers.” Cahill also hinted that Klan officials engaged in “white slavery” and that some members were willing to “cut the throats” of enemies, perhaps eerily foreshadowing the criminal trial of D.C. Stephenson later that year.¹⁹⁶

In addition, gradually improving economic conditions in some parts of the state certainly contributed to the decline of the Klan in Ohio. While rural Ohio never reached the economic heights of the so-called Roaring Twenties enjoyed by larger urban centers, the financial well-being of Ohio agriculturalists had at least somewhat stabilized by mid-decade.

Some of the “threats” to mainstream white American values identified by Klan organizers had also been addressed. The restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 put severe limits on the number of southern Europeans, Eastern Europeans and East Asians who could legally immigrate to the United States. These immigration restrictions were trumpeted by Klan leaders and other anti-immigration groups, and this sense of a “solution” may have diminished the urgency associated with Klan recruiting.

Sociologist Rory McVeigh argued that the decline of the second phase of the Klan was in part an outcome of the group’s initial successes. The 1924 election, argued McVeigh, demonstrated the political power wielded by the Klan, yet the Klan’s trumpeting of its electoral power conversely meant that “members had to be convinced that their participation was still needed.”¹⁹⁷ Klansmen, it seems, needed a sense of urgency to continue to remain dues-paying members, and the Ku Klux Klan simply failed to convey the atmosphere of impending crisis that it had been able to create in the past about supposed threats to “100 Percent Americanism.”

Hiram Evans, imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, celebrated the Klan’s electoral successes in 1924 in an editorial in the Klan newspaper the Kourier:

No incident during 1924 so aptly displayed the solidarity of our organization and its influence for Americanism as did the elections in November. From Maine to California, from Kentucky to Minnesota, native-born Americans who have high standards of Americanism and personal rectitude of life were swept into office. Those who sought office through combinations of un-American influences were hopelessly defeated.¹⁹⁸

The decline in the Ohio Klan additionally reflected local member discontent with expenditures by the state (Realm) officers of the organization. In its first few years of existence, the Ohio Realm collected as much as $10 million in dues from the local Klaverns with little in the way of charitable expenditures.¹⁹⁹ D.C. Stephenson claimed that in a two-year period he personally earned over $1.8 million as a Klan official, and Stephenson claimed that the national Klan offices raked in over $75 million in six years.²⁰⁰ Salaries of Realm officers were rather excessive by employment standards at the time, and the Ohio Realm never got around to producing a balance sheet or accounting statements that were made available to representatives of local Klaverns.

Membership statewide in the Ohio Realm fell sharply in 1926 in figures supplied to a New York Times reporter by Grand Dragon Clyde W. Osborne. The state Klan officials reported 206,783 dues-paying members, and this figure included approximately 60,000 members of the women’s auxiliary units.²⁰¹ Osborne, at the time, blamed the decline in membership on the elimination of “undesirable elements” from the ranks of local Klaverns, but the loss of approximately 100,000 members in less than three years cannot be solely blamed on local membership purges.

By 1928, the New York Times described the Ku Klux Klan in Ohio as being “almost negligible in politics.” The newspaper noted that most Klan-supported candidates for political office were “badly beaten” since the impressive victories racked up by Klan-sponsored politicians in 1923 and 1924.²⁰² Yet local elections into the 1930s in Wood County featured candidates who were either Klan members at the time or who left the Klan in the period from 1928–31.

In Wood County, the 1924 election of the Reverend Rush A. Powell to the Ohio State Senate was a significant political victory for the Klan. However, the new job for Reverend Powell meant that he would be away in Columbus a great deal, and the minister’s ability to work as a grass-roots organizer for the Klan was significantly reduced. Powell appears to have severed his association with the Klan by 1927, at least as a dues-paying member, and the organizational responsibilities of his position as regional administrator for the United Brethren Church likely meant that he would have little time even if he wanted to continue promoting the Ku Klux Klan.

KKK flyer, 1941. Center for Archival Collections.

The effects of anti-Klan agitation cannot be overlooked in the decline of the Klan at the local level. In Wood County, several local newspapers kept up regular attacks on the Klan (most notably the Wood County Democrat and the Daily Sentinel-Tribune), and even the pro-Klan Wood County Republican began to limit coverage of the group’s activities by the end of 1926.

Yet while the Klan in Wood County experienced significant membership losses beginning in 1926, the group did not fade as quickly as many other Klan chapters in the United States in the mid-1920s. Membership records show a faithful core of dozens of dues-paying members who continued to be active until the late 1930s.

In addition, numerous original members of the Wood County Klan joined a reformed Klan chapter that emerged in 1941. The group began collecting dues, organizing meetings and engaging in recruitment campaigns using some of the same tactics as used in the mid-1920s.

The Klan of the 1940s began to modify the tone of its messages to fit the changes brought about by the Second World War. The group identified Nazism and fascism as “Anti-American ‘Isms’” that were “new names for the old world schemes to destroy Liberty-Freedom-Individualism.” The Klan, according to the propaganda flyer, sought to lead the United States “back to the Constitution and the Republic it Guarantees.”²⁰³

The reformed Wood County Klan held its meetings at 8:30 p.m. on Friday evenings at the Odd Fellows Hall in Portage. A complete list of officers for the 1940s-era Klan has survived, and all positions except the office of Kladd (the officer in charge of new member initiation) were filled.²⁰⁴

It is unclear exactly how many members joined the 1940s-era chapter of the Wood County Ku Klux Klan. At least nineteen individuals paid dues to the chapter in 1940 and 1941, and it is unknown if there were additional members of the chapter who had unofficial or non-dues-paying status.

The Ku Klux Klan maintained at least a nominal presence in Ohio during the era of the American civil rights movement. In one newspaper account, the grand dragon of the Ohio Ku Klux Klan renounced violence in a 1966 interview. Flynn Harvey of Columbus told an interviewer that if a Klan member engaged in violence, he would hope that “the law throws the book at him.”²⁰⁵ Yet despite the fact that Klan members staged several cross burnings in Ohio in 1965 and representatives claimed chapters in five major Ohio cities, the FBI that year stated that Ohio was “not a state with significant Klan activity.”²⁰⁶

A 1941 list of Klan officers. Center for Archival Collections.

A 1977 Klan rally at the Ohio state capitol building in Columbus turned violent. Imperial Wizard Dale R. Reusch of Lodi, Ohio, was attacked by anti-Klan protesters who ran past the fifty Columbus police officers assigned to protect the rallying Klansmen. Reusch suffered “facial lacerations, was stripped of his hooded purple uniform, spat at, hit by eggs, and thrown to the ground” by enraged protesters.²⁰⁷

There does not appear to have been a particularly active Klan chapter in Wood County in the decades after the Second World War. While the possibility remains that postwar Klan records may one day be discovered by researchers, an exploration of non-Klan sources in the period from 1945 to 1990 has not demonstrated any significant Wood County Klan activity during the era of the American civil rights movement and afterward. A representative of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, told the Toledo Blade in 1988 that the SPLC “did not have any documentation of an established Klan group” in the area. Racist incidents documented by the group at the time appear to have been “perpetrated by people who hold the same types of sentiments as members of white supremacist groups,” said Pat Clark of the SPLC’s Klanwatch project.²⁰⁸

The decade of the 1990s, however, would prove to be otherwise.

MILLENNIAL KLAN ACTIVITY IN WOOD COUNTY

Like many other areas of the country, Wood County experienced resurgence in Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist activity toward the end of the twentieth century. While the number of dedicated white supremacists in the county is nowhere near the massive support the Klan received in the 1920s (and indeed is rather small by comparison), the county’s legacy regarding white supremacist activity is slow to disappear.

In the 1990s, there was an increase in activity by Klan factions and other white supremacist groups. By the middle of the decade, nearly a dozen organized Klan groups were active in Ohio, according to Klanwatch, with perhaps as many as one thousand active Klan members in the state.

Part of the reason for the rise in the millennial resurgence of the Klan, Klan-affiliated groups and white supremacists is technological in nature. The emergence of the Internet has provided hate groups with an invaluable tool for recruitment of new members and the dissemination of information. The white supremacist movement had been relegated to the extreme margins of American society by the 1980s, but as the millennium approached, white supremacist and white nationalist groups appeared with greater frequency and activity in the United States.

Map of known Klan chapters in Ohio, 1994. Michael E. Brooks.

The greater visibility of Klan and other white supremacist groups in the 1980s and 1990s also owed a debt to Klan operatives such as David Duke of Louisiana. The former grand wizard of the Klan became a media staple between 1975 and 1980, logging over one thousand appearances on television and radio programs in that time.²⁰⁹ Duke later surprised political pundits by winning a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1989, and his campaigns for the U.S. Senate (1991) and the U.S. presidency (1992) provided a great deal of additional media exposure for the Ku Klux Klan.

THE 1994 KLAN RALLY IN BOWLING GREEN

Nine members of the Ohio Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—two of whom were young children—staged a rally in Bowling Green on June 18, 1994. The Klan event—part recruitment drive and part public spectacle—took place on the grounds of the Wood County courthouse. Approximately 250 people, mostly anti-Klan protesters, attended the event, which occurred the same day as another Klan rally in Toledo.

Ohio Klan grand titan Vincent J. Pinette told the crowd that he wanted “all white people to stand up and be proud of their heritage.” Pinette said that he was “so tired of the Negroes saying that ‘white man is oppressing me,’” claiming that “the Negro gets everything from the federal government: free medical benefits, free food stamps, free public housing.” Pinette, taunting the crowd with racial stereotypes, argued that “in Africa, they’d still be living in shacks, and if they wanted to eat pork chops, they’d have to throw spears.”²¹⁰

Some violence occurred between participants at the 1994 Klan rally. The physical altercations that occurred at the 1994 Klan rally stemmed in part from the fact that police directed all attendees—pro-Klan and anti-Klan—into the same fenced-off area. A pro-Klan attendee from Sylvania, Ohio, had his Confederate flag T-shirt ripped off his body and torn to pieces.²¹¹

Several anti-Klan protesters were arrested by the police at the event. Marvetta Davis, a member of the National Women’s Rights Organizing Coalition, was charged with a single count of inciting to violence.²¹² Davis allegedly spit at a Klan supporter in the commotion. Others arrested as a result of the actions at the rally were identified from police photographs of people entering the security zone.²¹³

Davis told reporters from the Toledo Blade that she was innocent of the charges brought against her. “It’s sad that if you fight back against racism, you are the one that is prosecuted and not the people who are spouting the genocidal messages about killing blacks, Jews, gays, and lesbians.”²¹⁴

Wood County sheriff John Kohl noted that the event featured “loudness, spitting, ripping shirts off, slapping, pushing, and shoving.” The sheriff also observed that “I had to bring horses in to get the people off the fence to keep them from trying to get the Klan.”²¹⁵

Approximately five hundred law enforcement officers were brought in to maintain order at the 1994 rally. Many of the officers traveled from nearby counties to assist in the event, and the Wood County sheriff engaged in reciprocal arrangements with other cities facing costly staffing for Klan rallies held that year.²¹⁶ City officials from Bowling Green and Toledo estimated that the cost of providing security for the two rallies exceeded $100,000.²¹⁷

THE 1999 KLAN RALLY IN BOWLING GREEN

A different faction of the Ku Klux Klan petitioned to gather at the steps of the Wood County courthouse in 1999. The Knights of the White Kamellia notified Wood County that they wanted to stage a rally on July 19, 1999, to “inform the GOOD White people of Bowling Green that they still have a voice in America” and to “let people know that the Klan will always be here.” The Klansman who wrote the letter, James Roesch of Bellefontaine, assured commissioners that the rally “will be a peaceful, non-violent assembly.”²¹⁸

Steve Kirk, grand dragon of the group, predicted that “25 to 60 Klan members” would travel to Bowling Green for the June 19 rally to hear the group’s messages of “white pride, white rights, [and] white unity.” Kirk, in an interview before the rally with the Sentinel-Tribune, said that his group was particularly concerned with “race mixing,” which extended beyond interracial dating to include any interaction between people of different races.²¹⁹

Kirk claimed that there already existed members of his Klan faction active in Wood County. The Klan leader, however, refused to divulge names of Klan members or to provide an estimate of the number of Klan members in his group who were Wood County residents.²²⁰

Unlike the 1994 Klan rally in Bowling Green, attendees of the Klan rally in 1999 were separated into one of two “fenced-in spectator areas” in the 200 block of East Court Street near the courthouse. Sheriff John Kohl indicated that the decision to separate pro-Klan and anti-Klan spectators was a “safety-driven measure intended to reduce the threat of violence” between the two groups.²²¹

Kirk’s predictions of a large turnout by his Klan faction appear to have been overly optimistic. The Toledo Blade and the Daily Sentinel-Tribune reported that only twelve members of the Knights of the White Kamellia showed up for the Saturday rally, while only one pro-Klan supporter entered the Klan spectator area. Defiance County sheriff Dave Westrick, on hand to help secure the rally site, described the Klan rally as “pathetic.”²²² There were no injuries or arrests at this public Klan event.

The cost of providing security for the 1999 Klan rally in Bowling Green was estimated to be as much as $25,000. Costs included overtime payments to Bowling Green police and Wood County deputy sheriffs, the rental of chain-link security fencing, special uniforms and food for the officers on duty.²²³

In both the 1994 and 1999 Klan rallies, an alternate form of local anti-Klan resistance emerged. For both rallies, a group known as the Unity Day Coalition formed to “reclaim our community from the hatred brought to our town by the KKK rally.”²²⁴ The coalition urged residents to ignore the rally and engage in positive, family-oriented activities such as visits to the park or zoo, going bowling, visiting the art museum or cleaning out the garage.²²⁵ For each rally, the Unity Day Coalition held a candlelight vigil the night before and then led a “reclamation” ceremony the day after.²²⁶

The coalition’s efforts may indeed have paid off in 1999. Attendance at the 1999 Klan rally was much lower, and the near absence of violence perhaps attests to the power of a unified, nonviolent opposition to the views of the Ku Klux Klan.

POST-2000 KLAN ACTIVITY IN WOOD COUNTY

Ohio continues to remain a state with active Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist groups. The state is noted for the organization known as the Brotherhood of Ku Klux Klans (BOK), which is headquartered in Marion, Ohio. The group was the second-largest Klan organization in the United States, with thirty-eight chapters as recently as 2010, though the defection of a major Klan leader to the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations likely has reduced the power of the BOK.²²⁷

Organized activity by the Ku Klux Klan and affiliated white supremacist groups in Wood County, though, has been comparatively quiet in the years since the start of the new millennium. Several Wood County residents participated in the white supremacist rallies organized in Toledo, Ohio, by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) in October and December 2005, but the anti-racist group Southern Poverty Law Center is currently monitoring only one hate group in Wood County (a Christian Identity operation in Fostoria, Ohio).²²⁸

While organized Klan and white supremacist activity in Wood County has dwindled in comparison with the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, it would be overly optimistic to make the claim that the county is free from racism and other forms of intolerance. There have been a number of racist incidents in the county in the past several years, and residents in the county continue to grapple with issues related to bigotry and religious intolerance.

In September 2012, an arsonist set fire to a golden-domed mosque known as the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo, which is located in Perrysburg. The blaze caused significant water and smoke damage throughout the facility, forcing extensive renovations to the mosque.²²⁹ Police later arrested Randolph Linn of St. Joe, Indiana, in the crime, and after pleading guilty, Linn received a sentence of twenty years in prison.²³⁰

In October 2012, a group of teenagers in Bowling Green drew swastikas and the words “White Power” on the driveway and sidewalk of an African American family.²³¹ The teenagers happened to select the home of Louis Orr, the men’s basketball coach at Bowling Green State University, a fact that brought significant national media attention to the event.

The day after the incident involving the home of Louis Orr, the automobile of another African American resident of Bowling Green was targeted in an apparent act of racism. A twenty-four-year-old BGSU student named Chad Franklin found watermelons smashed on his vehicle along with a “racially charged” note.²³²

White patrons of a Bowling Green nightclub apparently became upset after a group of African Americans entered the facility in April 2013. Several people accessed the social media platform Twitter and issued inflammatory tweets, labeling the African Americans as a “chocolate ocean” and using overtly racist language to describe the black patrons.²³³

In response to the recent series of racist incidents, the city of Bowling Green and Bowling Green State University joined a national initiative known as “Not in Our Town.” The goals of the campaign are to “to affirm their commitment to social justice, equity and inclusion as well as embrace and celebrate diversity.”²³⁴ Perhaps the “Not in Our Town” campaign and other related efforts will further reduce the likelihood that the Ku Klux Klan will ever reemerge in Wood County as a disruptive force in the community.