By the time a young man named Michael Burden turned up in Laurens at the tail end of 1989, John Howard had been a Klansman for half his life. He was remarried by then, to a round, doughy woman with a mop of short brown curls, Hazel. His kids were grown. And for the better part of a decade, he’d been living on a secluded plot of land just off Highway 221, right on the border of Laurens and Spartanburg Counties, in the small town of Lanford.
Although “town” is a bit of a stretch. Lanford doesn’t even show up on most maps of the area; it’s little more than a deserted railroad community, a ghost town dotted with a few falling-down, turn-of-the-century structures that seem to sink deeper into the brush with each passing year. Howard’s property, eight-tenths of an acre bounded to the east by the old C&WC railway, was likewise overgrown and unkempt; rising from patches of gravel and thickets of scratchgrass were a dilapidated two-story frame house—white, with a rust-colored roof—two mobile homes, and a tin shack, out of which he operated his business, Plantation Concrete.
Since the Klan’s rebirth at Stone Mountain in 1915, high-ranking leaders have often tried to eke out a living on the backs of their members, usually by cobbling together a nominal salary (subsidized by membership dues) and hawking white supremacist and KKK-branded merchandise. Some of the more industrious have managed to live far beyond the means of their followers. Bessie Tyler, one-half of the publicity duo that transformed William Joseph Simmons’s struggling fraternal club into a national movement, built a palatial residence on fourteen acres of land in Buckhead, a ritzy section of uptown Atlanta. The UKA’s Bob Jones, a lightning rod salesman by day, very famously drove around in a shiny new Cadillac, which was gifted to him by fellow Klansmen in the winter of 1964.
John Howard never amassed that sort of wealth. Like most of the piedmont’s working poor, he’d taken a job in the mills as a young man. By the mid-1970s, as Howard entered his thirties and was elevated to the rank of Grand Dragon, he was still making little more than minimum wage working as an orderly at the Whitten Center, a state-run facility for disabled adults and children. As the decades rolled by and Howard’s health declined, his primary source of income became the family business. Privately, some Laurens natives have described Plantation Concrete as little more than a front for the Klan, but by all accounts Howard did manage to sell some stuff: cement birdbaths, fountains, planters, and other forms of “ornamental concrete.” For those who shared his political persuasions, he also offered a range of more colorful items, from cement skulls to miniature Klansman statues.
Exactly what Mike Burden was doing walking through such a desolate area isn’t entirely clear—most details of his upbringing aren’t, and to this day he isn’t particularly forthcoming. But the gist of the story, the story Burden tells when he is compelled to talk about his background, is that he got caught in a storm one afternoon, saw a light on in Howard’s shop, and asked if he might set down for a bit to get out of the rain. The details vary. In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, Burden claimed to have met Howard three years earlier, in 1986, shortly after he was kicked out of high school. In some versions of the story, he portrays himself as essentially homeless, sleeping most nights in an abandoned car. In other versions, he was living in a friend’s vehicle. Mike Burden has trouble with details. But the basic outline of the story remains the same: the men introduced themselves, and Howard’s face suddenly brightened with recognition. Apparently he and Burden’s parents had long ago been part of the same “organization.”
“He told me, ‘Son, I’ve held you when you was a baby and changed your diapers!’ ”
The coincidence struck Burden as unlikely. “You’re full of crap,” he said.
“No,” Howard shot back. “You were.”
Burden was a few months shy of twenty years old, thin and wiry—five foot eleven, 147 pounds—with an edginess about him. He was cagey, drawn in on himself. His brown hair, shaggy and unkempt, was usually shoved under a backward ball cap, and he held his narrow jaw in such a way that his bottom teeth—straight, if tobacco-stained—were more readily visible than his upper incisors.
By that time, Howard’s property in Lanford had become a crash pad of sorts for a revolving cast of veteran Klansmen. His second-born son, Dwayne, was in his early twenties and more or less living at home. Howard’s longtime friend and associate Charles Murphy made frequent appearances, popping over from the nearby town of Woodruff to attend meetings or strategy sessions. At some point, a rail-thin bespectacled Klansman in his late fifties, William Hoff—known to his friends as “Wild Bill”—just sort of showed up and never left.
In addition to the various old-timers stopping by or taking up residence, there was often a slew of youngsters running around, as Plantation Concrete was more or less operated by teenagers. (Kids of fellow Klansmen, mostly, sent up to Lanford by their parents—ostensibly to learn the value of a hard day’s work.) By the time the rain stopped on that first day, Howard had offered Burden a job, too. Instead of cash, however, the young man would be paid in kind: food to eat, clothes to wear, a roof over his head. For the next seven years, Burden’s primary place of residence would be a single-wide trailer on the edge of the Lanford property.
The Klan, like other white supremacist organizations, has a long history of pursuing young men and boys for recruitment—papering high school parking lots with racist literature, staking out concert halls and music venues, and infiltrating college campuses are all popular tactics. Disaffected young men and boys, in particular, make for especially prime targets. Bill Riccio, an Alabama-based neo-Nazi who rose to power in the late 1980s, readily admitted that he would comb local shopping malls and swimming pools in search of kids to lure back to his Birmingham-area headquarters. In interviews with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, a victim of Riccio’s alleged sex abuse put it more succinctly: “He would prey on kids with legal problems, emotional problems, and disadvantaged kids.”
There’s no evidence that John Howard actively sought out disadvantaged youth for his klavern, but Michael Burden certainly would’ve fit the profile. His biological parents divorced when he was five, and his father—again, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear—promptly severed all contact. “His exact words,” Burden says, “were, ‘I don’t want that little bastard around anymore.’ ” Burden’s mother soon took up with a new man, a welder, setting off a nomadic ten years during which the trio bounced from oil town to oil town across the Southwest. It was not a happy childhood. And in the way of male role models, Burden’s stepfather wasn’t much of an improvement over the one who’d split. He was, according to Burden, a drunk with a penchant for blowing his paycheck at the local watering hole rather than on, say, food for the family. By the time he turned sixteen, Burden had left—and wound up right back where he had started: in Laurens.
The miseducation of Mike Burden began virtually the moment he stepped foot on Howard’s property. Though his days were suddenly taken up with work related to the concrete business—accepting and filling orders, mixing cement, maintaining and repairing machinery—his evenings were largely free for socializing. Talk invariably turned to the Klan, a topic on which John Howard seemed to be a fount of wisdom.
The Anti-Defamation League once wrote of the UKA’s leader, Robert Shelton: “He has no hobbies, does not indulge in sports, and has no other interests” beyond the KKK. Howard’s identity, too, was bound up in being a Klansman. The ring he wore, which resembled a class ring with a red stone in the center, featured an embossed A—shorthand for “AKIA,” a 1920s-era password meaning “A Klansman I Am.” On the wall of his living room was a studio portrait, taken back in the mid-1970s, featuring a younger, thinner Howard in full Klan regalia. The second floor of his crumbling farmhouse had been turned into a meeting hall, appointed with several rows of folding chairs and a makeshift podium. Along the walls were framed snapshots of Howard cavorting with other state-level leaders of the KKK, as well as old black-and-white and sepia-tone prints of notable Klansmen throughout history: members gathered at the Imperial Palace back in the 1920s, a parade of Klansmen marching through the streets of Washington, D.C., headshots of William Joseph Simmons and Hiram Evans.
Ninety percent of what he had heard about the Klan, Howard assured Burden, was not the truth. He peddled a version of history—lifted almost verbatim from The Birth of a Nation—that painted the Reconstruction-era Klan as a necessity, a force for good in the otherwise devastated southern states. Burden eagerly lapped up the tenets of Lost Cause mythology: the belief that the Civil War was not about slavery; that northerners, intent on punishing the rebels for secession, had set out to destroy their way of life. Howard even offered proof that the Klan “wasn’t racist,” in the form of an old photograph of black Confederate soldiers in full battle dress, muskets at their sides, ready to march on behalf of the South.
When it came to the legacy of William Joseph Simmons and his “fraternal” Klan, Howard’s lectures took on a practically evangelical pitch. “He seen a vision in the sky when he was a young man,” Howard said matter-of-factly. (Simmons long claimed to have been inspired by a late-night vision of men on horseback, galloping across the horizon.) “God gave him a vision to create the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” How else could he have built a million-man movement from nothing? Howard regularly ticked off the names of great men—presidents, senators, governors—who had been members, and lamented that history was being “cleaned up” to erase their legacy. He made the Klan sound like a noble cause. It wasn’t long before Burden wanted to join—indeed, developed a kind of obsession. “I ate, slept, drank, and studied the Klan,” he told The State, a Columbia newspaper.
Under Howard’s tutelage, Burden became something of an expert in the Klan’s culture and history, or what’s referred to as “Klancraft.” He learned the pledges and oaths, as well as the ranks and titles of the various officers, from the Exalted Cyclops (the head of a klavern) to the Klaliff (vice president of a klavern) and the Kludd (or chaplain), who presides over weddings and funerals. He was taught how to light the cross, a ceremony that Klansmen insist is not in any way meant to be sacrilegious but is rather a symbol of their devotion and Christian faith. Burden also learned the significance of the Mystic Insignia of a Klansman (MIOAK), the red-and-white patch worn over the left breast on their traditional robes. “It looks like a cross from a distance, but if you look real close, you’ll see a little square in the middle of it,” Burden says. Place a piece of paper or your thumb over that square, and the “cross” becomes four K’s, representing the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. In the center of the patch is a red swirl, which Klansmen refer to as a blood drop, meant to represent the blood of Christ, the “purity” of Christ, or the blood to be shed in defense of the white race.
What Burden did not know, not for a long time, is that virtually every rite and ritual he learned was a contemporary reinterpretation, a cynical attempt to make the modern Klan seem more legitimate and more palatable. The MIOAK, for example, is a relic of the Simmons era, but the “blood drop” was not originally intended to represent blood, and certainly not Christ’s. It was one half of a yin-yang symbol featuring the dates 1866 and 1915 (representing the first and second Klans, respectively). Since the white half of the symbol didn’t show up well against the white background of the patch, however, it was eventually dropped, leaving a lone red swirl. Klansmen didn’t start calling the swirl a blood drop until the 1960s and ’70s, after the HUAC hearings had decimated their membership.
The cross burning, meanwhile, was merely a case of life imitating art: The Birth of a Nation depicted Klansmen setting crosses ablaze because director D. W. Griffith liked the visual. William Joseph Simmons then borrowed the visual when he revived the Klan at Stone Mountain. Perhaps the most famous of the Klan’s rites and ceremonies was no more than an invention of Hollywood.
As for Howard’s Civil War–era photograph depicting black Confederate soldiers—his “proof” that the Klan wasn’t racist—it was fake. The photo, a doctored image of black Union soldiers, has circulated among neo-Confederates and members of the far right for decades.
Despite John Howard's influence and tutelage, Burden’s first real brush with the hooded order at large, beyond the relatively limited interactions he’d had at Plantation Concrete, did not go the way he’d imagined. Upon arriving at an inter-Klan rally on Stone Mountain sometime in 1990 or 1991, he was surprised to find the place overrun by neo-Nazis.
In the world of white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and skinheads represent three distinct movements, each with its own dogma and doctrine. After the HUAC hearings and COINTELPRO investigations, however, these groups began to merge and coalesce, sharing a suspicion of centralized government and a mutual sense of victimization and persecution. By the time Mike Burden joined up, it wasn’t unusual to find Third Reich symbolism—swastikas, the double-sig rune of Hitler’s SS—at a Klan event, nor was it unheard-of to see robed Klansmen chatting it up with kids in Dr. Martens and suspenders. Yet Burden was prepared for none of that. He’d been reared on the gospel of William Joseph Simmons, but the skinheads cavorting around Stone Mountain were “all about ‘Sieg Heil’ and all that stuff,” he says, “and I was like hell no. That ain’t even American!”
Feeling out of his depth and on edge, Burden proceeded to get into an argument with a Grand Dragon from the UKA, an exceedingly short man—no more than five foot four—with an outsized ego Burden found profoundly irritating. He wound up getting kicked out of the rally.
Next up was an event in North Carolina, this one organized by James Farrands of the Invisible Empire (yet another splinter group, not to be confused with Simmons’s or Scoggin’s earlier movements). Something about that rally made Burden feel more at home. Farrands had taken to calling himself a “new breed” of Klansman. He insisted that he wasn’t violent and didn’t “hate” anybody. Within a few years’ time he would banish neo-Nazis and skinheads in an attempt to rehabilitate the Klan’s image.
Of course, even in those days Burden could acknowledge the Klan’s legacy of violence. “There’s not a lot of good history,” he admits. “For every positive thing I found, ten negatives took its place. I mean, you got the massacre in Greensboro….”
The Greensboro Massacre was the November 1979 climax of long-simmering tension between the Klan and members of the Communist Workers Party, which had been organizing black textile workers in small towns across the state. On November 3, the CWP staged a “Death to the Klan” rally at Morningside Homes, a predominantly black housing project. Shortly before 11:30 a.m., a half hour before the rally was set to begin, a nine-car caravan of Klansmen and members of the American Nazi Party drove past the throngs of assembling protesters. Some of the demonstrators began to beat on the vehicles, and within seconds the confrontation devolved into a shootout. Five members of the CWP were left dead.
In the aftermath, a number of Klan factions across the Carolinas went dark. Howard watched as membership in his group plummeted to just forty. Starting in the summer of 1985, however, the hooded order began to make a very public resurgence, in part by requesting parade permits from city councils in the South Carolina towns of Blacksburg, Clinton, and Laurens. In interviews with the press, Howard’s longtime friend Charles Murphy announced plans to march in still more cities, attributing the sudden increase in visibility to new and “better” leadership. He was referring to a man named Horace King, Grand Dragon of the newly formed Christian Knights, who reported to a man named Virgil Griffin—one of the architects of the massacre in Greensboro.
Public authorities had by then grown skeptical of the Klan’s actual reach and influence. The chief of the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division insisted to the Greenville News that folks were “getting too smart” to join. “People are just not going to support [the Klan]. This is 1985,” he said. And for a time it seemed as though he might have been right. Only a handful of marchers showed up in Blacksburg, and officials in Clinton chose to deny the Klan a permit after receiving a slew of irate and threatening phone calls. The city of Laurens quickly followed suit, denying a permit on the grounds that violence and lawlessness were likely. “We had Greensboro on our minds,” Mayor Dominick said, explaining the decision to reporters.
The denials, however, had an unintended consequence: they triggered a wave of First Amendment lawsuits, all of which the Klan won. After that, the Christian Knights organized marches in Gaffney, Spartanburg, Fountain Inn, Mauldin, Woodruff, Greer, Greenville, and Anderson. In 1987, they hit Summerville and Charleston. In 1988, they rallied in Greenwood and Newberry. In the summer of 1990—the same week that Rev. Kennedy got into a public spat with the mayor in the wake of Bobo Cook’s death—the Klan obtained a permit to counterprotest.
It’s not clear if John Howard ever officially joined the Christian Knights, but by the early 1990s, his Keystone Klan and Horace King’s outfit had become the two largest factions in the state.
As the months and then years slipped by, Howard and Burden developed a bond that, to outsiders, seemed an awful lot like a father-son relationship. (Not that it didn’t produce complications. Howard’s son Dwayne was a fellow Klansman, and his relationship with Burden—a mere three years his junior—slowly evolved from a friendship into a rivalry, and finally into a sometimes volatile dynamic fraught with jealousy and tension.) Upon closer inspection, however, Burden’s role at the Lanford house, in the Klan, and within Howard’s inner circle might have been less like that of a son and more like that of a soldier. “He could ask me anything,” Burden said. “He could wake me up in the middle of the night. He could tell me, ‘Go out there, set down and wait on somebody to deliver a load of concrete at two o’clock in the morning.’ I’d get up, no questions asked. No arguments or nuthin. Just get up and go do it.”
For his loyalty, Burden was rewarded. Sometime after John Howard and Barry Black merged their organizations in the early 1990s, Burden was made an Emperor’s Night-Hawk—in other words, head of Klan security. At rallies, he and a team of subordinates monitored the perimeter of the field or pasture, patrolled the parking lot, patted people down in search of contraband. “My unit actually had a wand,” he said. “We wanded you down for firearms or anything like that.” At the same time, he began to stockpile weapons—pistols, shotguns, an SKS semi-automatic rifle, a .30-.30 rifle with a two-hundred-yard scope—and acquire books on explosives: The Poor Man’s James Bond, The Anarchist Cookbook. When Howard met with other high-level leaders—Barry Black, Charles Murphy, Virgil Griffin, Horace King—Burden assumed the role of bodyguard.
The Klan has always been performative in nature. The hoods and robes, the cross-burning, the secrecy of the order itself—the theatrical elements—are in many ways just as intimidating (and effective) as the commission of violence. But as much as they perform for their victims, Klansmen perform for each other, too. Back in the early 1960s, for example, when the Klan was perhaps more fractured than at any other time in its history, the heads of various splinter groups met in Indian Springs, Georgia, to discuss a merger. Robert Shelton, then heading up a small Alabama-based faction, arrived with an eight-man security detail dressed in paramilitary garb. It was a performance—a show of strength—and it worked. By meeting’s end, Shelton had been named Imperial Wizard of the new UKA.
Performing—acting out the role of enforcer—made Burden feel powerful, too, as did his sudden proximity to so many leaders within the movement. He reveled in their stories of long-ago bombings and night rides. He emulated their tough talk and bravado.
But nobody could spin a yarn quite like “Wild Bill” Hoff.
A New York native, Hoff had arrived at a rally in North Carolina in the early 1990s, where he met and befriended John Howard. Several weeks later he turned up in Lanford, towing a U-Haul. “He came down supposedly to visit,” Burden says, “but he blew the engine in his car pullin his trailer.” Hoff’s “visit,” extended little by little relative to his car trouble, gradually evolved into a permanent trip. Nobody seemed to have the heart to tell him he’d perhaps overstayed his welcome. “It’s kinda hard to tell a sixty-year-old man, ‘You got to go.’ ”
Indeed, there was a fragility about Wild Bill—he was of slight build, hardly 150 pounds, with a receding hairline and Coke-bottle glasses. The moniker, however, was completely in line with the stories he told about himself, elaborate fictions meant to cultivate the image of a larger-than-life persona. Hoff told his fellow Klansmen that he’d served as a mercenary in Angola and Rhodesia; that he’d once mounted a run for Senate in the state of New York (and garnered an astonishing seventy thousand write-in votes); that his parents had been sent to a detention camp during World War II for being Nazi sympathizers; that while he was growing up, his mother would read selections from Hitler’s Mein Kampf to the children each night.
None of it was true. The real story of Hoff’s life, however, is just as wild—and far more tragic.
William Hoff wasn’t raised to hate. He’d grown up in the heavily mixed ghettoes of South Brooklyn in the 1930s and ’40s, where he was exposed to—and appreciated—a variety of customs and cultures. He played basketball with black and Latino kids from the neighborhood, learned snippets of Italian from the wannabe mobsters and Yiddish from the Jewish immigrants. But then he dropped out of high school, enlisted in the navy, and got himself dishonorably discharged after a violent altercation with a black sailor. After that, things for Wild Bill fell apart. In the 1960s, during the same period when his brother Donald became a Methodist minister and a member of the NAACP, Bill turned to political extremism, joining up with the American Nazi Party, the States Rights Party, and the Ku Klux Klan. In 1968, he was arrested in New York City for plotting to blow up a roomful of “active leftists” and draft resistors. His family was baffled. “I never knew Billy to be anti-Negro, anti-Jew, or anti-anything until he came out of the Navy,” Donald explained to the Elmira Star-Gazette in a 1969 interview. “I think he found something that gave foundation to his fear and confusion, his sense of injustice.”
Hoff ultimately served six years at Attica Correctional Facility. (The rare true detail in his otherwise outrageous stories was the fact that he’d been present for the 1971 Attica riots.) But he rejoined the Klan after his parole ended, rising as high as Grand Dragon in New York. Then, in a truly bizarre twist, he took a job as a receptionist at a black-owned employment agency, Third World Personnel Services, which specialized in helping minorities find jobs. Hoff’s coworkers had no knowledge of his criminal history or his ties to the white supremacist movement; on the contrary, they described him as mild-mannered, even avuncular. Hoff fled south only after being outed as a Klansman by the Jewish Defense Organization, a militant outfit with its own history of violence.
Sociologists have long understood that ideology is not always the primary motivation among people who join white supremacist and organized hate movements. “It’s not the racist beliefs of groups like the Klan that are so appealing to men like Burden,” Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Social Conflict at Northeastern University, said in interviews with The State. “It’s the need to belong, the need to feel important. [Burden] sounds like the perfect recruit.” Kathleen Blee, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of three books on organized racism, explained to the University Times that most of the Klan members and neo-Nazis she has studied or interviewed over the years were not particularly racist when they joined. “If you met these people when they were getting involved, they wouldn’t really strike you as off the charts in their racism,” she said. “But once they are in it for a while, that worldview really deepens.”
The more Burden slipped into his role of bodyguard, the more stories he absorbed about committing violence with impunity, the more he began to parrot Howard’s rhetoric and vitriol, the more committed he became to the cause. “I was led to believe that was family,” he later told reporters. “That was my life. That was my destiny. And I done the best I could to live up to it.”
By the time John Howard purchased the old Echo theater, the crime and drug use that so troubled Rev. Kennedy in the mid-1980s had worsened. In the smallest towns, the collapse of the textile industry had proved devastating: the Riegel mill, an eighty-year-old plant in the nearby hamlet of Ware Shoals, laid off 850 workers back in 1982, a figure equivalent to more than one-third of the town’s entire population. Two years later, another 900 people were put out of work. As mill after mill across the Upstate shuttered—thirty-one of the region’s manufacturing plants closed in 1983 alone—the effects rippled outward. In Iva, roughly forty miles southwest of Laurens, the proprietor of a local restaurant estimated to reporters that nearly half his business had come from mill workers. For municipal governments, the collapse meant a significant loss of tax revenue. In the village of Lockhart, reporters predicted that the closing of the Milliken mill, in 1994, would wind up being a “death bell.”
As the county seat, Laurens had fared a little better (Watts Mill was still operational), but not by much. Revenues at the downtown businesses had been dropping for the better part of a decade, amid competition from shopping centers and strip malls out by the highway and the offerings of more prosperous towns, especially Spartanburg and Greenville. Over time, the historic town square had grown more and more deserted. The Echo, in particular, was a shambles. “We walked in there and it was completely rotted,” Burden said. “I mean, we had to put in floors, ceilings, walls, everything. We basically rebuilt that thing from the ground up.”
From the start, Burden had been on board with Howard’s plan to open a Klan museum and some sort of gift shop, and the two spoke often about their shared vision for the space. Exhibits curated from Howard’s extensive personal collection would include the very items Burden had found so fascinating as a lost and lonely nineteen-year-old: old photographs, charters, and publications from the Simmons-era Klan, mainly. Somewhere in the rear of the building, out of view from prying eyes and passersby, they would set up a working Klan lodge, turning the old theater into a headquarters for the Keystone Knights. They talked idly about the stir such a store would cause in Laurens, and fantasized about how much money they might make. Beyond that, a shop in the middle of the town square would give them a huge leg up when it came to recruitment.
Renovations began sometime in late 1992 or early 1993 in what had been the lobby and concessions area, a modest-sized room facing West Laurens Street. The rear of the building, or what had once been the actual screening room—a cavernous space, with thirty-foot ceilings, a sagging floor, and a leaking roof—would require months of labor. The repairs were tedious and slow-going, however, as Howard had neither the money nor the inclination to hire a general contractor; the project was funded in fits and starts, largely from incoming membership dues.
While progress at the store may have been slow, Burden’s status within the Klan continued to rise: sometime in 1993 or 1994, he was promoted again, this time to the position of Exalted Cyclops. Burden relished his position as head of the klavern, the sense of power and control it gave him. “If you were in my lodge and I didn’t prefer a thing that you said or done,” he once explained to a reporter from The State, “I’d say, ‘Sit down, Klansman. You out of order.’ ” He loved the ceremony of Klan rituals: gaveling weekly meetings to order, reciting the sacred language of the Klan’s 1920s-era rulebook, written by Simmons himself. One of his favorite activities was the initiation of new recruits.
The process, referred to as “naturalization,” is considered a sacred ritual, though in truth it bears more resemblance to college fraternity hazing. There are variations from klavern to klavern, but the ceremony centers on proving one’s loyalty and trust. To do that, new recruits are typically blindfolded, then they might be placed in a row—each Klansman’s hand positioned on the shoulder of the man in front of him—and led through a wooded area or over a patch of rough terrain while being intimidated by sudden shouts and sounds, like the not-so-far-off report of a rifle. Alternatively, they might be ordered to stand stock-still and refrain from flinching while someone pokes or prods them, or startles them with the whirring of a revolver wheel.
“During our initiation,” Burden says, “one of the things that we always told ’em was, ‘Never tell anybody what the blood drop means’—the blood drop means purity. So during the initiation we’re constantly bombardin ’em with the word purity. And how significant it is.” Burden and his fellow officers would shout rapid-fire questions at their initiates: Will you be loyal to your oath? Do you pledge to stand up for the white race? After a while, someone would suddenly ask: What does the blood drop mean? And invariably, some poor recruit would call out, “Purity!” When that happened, Burden was there to administer a little shock—a kind of negative-reinforcement therapy, the way one might train a dog with an electric anti-bark collar. Burden, however, used a cattle prod.
“One of the best ones I had—the guy was every bit of 250 pounds. He had twenty-something-inch arms. I mean, this guy was huge. He looked like John Cena. He’s standing there with his back to me, and I got this cattle prod, and he shouts ‘purity’ and as soon as he did I come up between his legs, barely caught him in the middle section between his groin and his butt, and that guy goes ‘Yeowwww!’ I couldn’t handle it. I just busted out laughing. I was rollin on the floor.”
If his new recruits had a problem with the prodding, they didn’t say much. “Afterwards we’d all get together and we’d cut up and joke and stuff like that. And they’d get to do it next time.” Initiation also marked the beginning of a series of payments: the initiation fee itself, plus the procurement of a hood and robe and monthly dues of fifteen or twenty bucks. In a blighted town like Laurens, that kind of financial commitment was no small thing.
A year or so into renovations at the Echo, Burden and his team had made enough progress that a portion of the old screening room in the back of the theater could be converted into a makeshift lodge. A temporary wall was erected to split the space in half, and the ceiling above the still-unfinished section was covered with a tarp (repairs on the roof would stretch on for many more months). Howard, meanwhile, signed a lease with his Imperial Wizard, Barry Black—on Keystone Knights letterhead—granting him “full authority” of the lodge for a period of ninety-nine years. Howard would retain exclusive rights to the museum, which would be housed, at first, in the corridor behind the lobby.
With the museum and meeting hall slowly coming together, Howard and Burden decided to focus on the shop at the front of the building, as they would need the proceeds to pay for additional repairs—and there was good reason to think they’d find a market for the sale of Klan memorabilia. Back in 1992, the owners of a 130-year-old farmhouse in Freemont, Michigan, discovered a treasure trove of 1920s-era Klan artifacts. They didn’t know what to do with the hoods and robes and letters and faded documents, so they held an auction. They had no way of knowing the event would attract hundreds of curious neighbors as well as serious collectors, or that the total haul from the sale of roughly 250 items would approach $30,000.
Over the coming months, Howard and Burden traveled up and down the East Coast, searching for relics and tokens from that same era: rings, watch fobs, official Klan charters, membership cards. If they couldn’t find a particular item, they made it themselves: white bedsheets, for example, could be stitched into an “official” Klan robe—manufactured for next to nothing and sold for more than $100. The rest of the shop’s floor space would be filled out with generic “southern pride” knickknacks: Confederate-flag license plates, decals, flip-flops, bathing suits. Then there were the other items: silk-screened T-shirts with the likeness of Martin Luther King Jr. in the crosshairs of a rifle scope, pickaninny figurines. “I think probably the worst thing we actually had in there…,” Burden said, thinking. “We made a doorknocker. I had seen an image of it, and I’ve always done woodwork, so I made a black gingerbread man that screwed to your door. And he was painted with his overalls, painted black. Then you had a Klansman standing there, and I painted the robe and everything. You pull the string at the bottom of it, he’d swing a bat, crack the black guy in the head knockin on the door. That was probably the meanest thing we actually had in there.”
The further along they got in the process, the more Howard must have started to sense the potential of his new asset—and perhaps the chaos and controversy he was about to unleash in his own hometown. No doubt he was familiar with a string of recent lawsuits then plaguing Klan groups across the country. (Farrands’s Invisible Empire had just been sued into bankruptcy by the Southern Poverty Law Center for pelting protesters with bottles and rocks during a civil rights march; the faction lost the deed to its headquarters as part of the settlement.) So he decided that keeping the shop safe would require a somewhat counterintuitive approach: He’d need to sell it. Or sell part of it, at least.
“Life estates” are deeds that split ownership of real property between two (or more) parties: the life tenant, who retains exclusive rights to the property during his or her lifetime, and the remainderman, who takes possession of the property upon the life tenant’s death. Life estates are most often used in estate planning—a parent can “give” his or her child the family home, for example, without giving up the right to live in it. In the case of the Redneck Shop, however, Howard had something else in mind. He figured a dual-ownership situation would make it harder for an outside party to somehow wrest control of the shop away from him. “It was his way of protecting it,” said Burden. “He wanted to make sure that if something came up, nobody could sue for the shop. He would be able to use it forever.”
Howard could have chosen his son Dwayne to be the beneficiary—Dwayne was, after all, a fellow Klansman. But instead he chose Michael Burden.
Signing on to the deed was, for Burden, a total no-brainer: now, no matter what happened in the future, he’d always have the shop to fall back on. It was the first time he’d ever owned what might be described as an asset—it was the first time he’d ever owned anything, really. And as the shop’s grand opening drew near, Burden realized that he was the most content he had ever been in his life. He’d been plucked from abject poverty and given a sense of purpose, a leadership role in what he thought of as a storied organization. He’d found for himself a new family. There just wasn’t much more that he needed—that is, until one afternoon in the winter of 1995, when he encountered something it hadn’t even occurred to him to want.
He was up in the rafters at the Echo, repairing some rotted ceiling joists, when he noticed the petite brunette standing some forty feet below. “She had on a pair of little white Daisy Duke shorts,” he said later. “Hair down past her shoulders, and this little pink tank top. I just sat there, transfixed. I forgot what I was doin.”
Her name—Burden already knew—was Judy.