For a brief moment that spring, immediately following David Prichard Hunter’s decision to plow his van into the front of the Redneck Shop, there was in Laurens a certain sense of levity—a feeling, almost, of victory within reach. Even with all the drama and turmoil, residents seemed to be talking more, making active efforts to “fix” the way in which their town was being portrayed around the world.
Ed McDaniel, however, wondered aloud if Hunter’s actions—though lauded by many as nothing short of heroic—might have been too good to be true. In fact, he wondered, what if John Howard was in on it? “Could this be something contrived to get enough money to open his museum?” he mused to a reporter from the Associated Press.
Technically, the museum was already open—just small, relegated to the corridor in the back of the shop, not yet fully realized. Howard’s plan had always been to finish renovating the cavernous screening room and relocate the exhibits there. In fact, he insisted that the store was merely a means of financing the larger mission. “I’m just trying to tell the truth of what took place,” he’d said back in early March. “The good, the bad, and the ugly of it. I’m not trying to lift [the Klan] up.”
Still, McDaniel’s theory wasn’t exactly far-fetched. As part of Hunter’s preliminary hearing, Howard claimed nearly $15,000 worth of damage to the shop—more than $9,000 in losses to personal property, another $5,000 in damage to the building itself. The problem with that figure, as Hunter’s defense attorney Duffie Stone pointed out, was that a Laurens city tax assessor’s notice had pegged the value of the building and the land at just $5,200. “I don’t believe there is any allegation that the building was burned to the ground and the land scarred,” Stone said in court. “It appears to me that what Howard is doing is over-inflating the damage to the building.” Outside the courtroom, Stone’s dismissal of the charges bordered on outright sarcasm: “I can’t imagine that particular type of merchandise being worth fifty cents, much less ten thousand dollars.”
The Klan has always traded on fear and intimidation—or, at least, spectacle—as a means of gaining power. Howard, in particular, was a known provocateur. But even he hadn’t expected opposition to the shop—and to him personally—to escalate so rapidly. In a matter of days, Janet Reno’s team at the Department of Justice agreed to launch an investigation into possible civil rights violations by the Redneck Shop. According to the local papers, a Laurens bank had asked John Howard to close his account. Whatever the true monetary value of the damages, the shop was certainly a wreck. And now he had a County Council member accusing him, publicly, of insurance fraud.
“John was getting royally pissed off about it,” says Burden. For all his years in the Klan, Howard had never been up against this kind of public pressure. He had always served some larger, more notorious Klan figure, and he’d stayed out of serious trouble, in part, by goading his subordinates into action. So it wasn’t long before he started suggesting to Burden that something ought to be done about McDaniel.
“Well, he’s a councilman,” Burden replied, figuring there must be some kind of law against badmouthing one’s own constituents. “Why don’t you just sue the hell out of him?”
“How?” Howard asked.
“Easy. Get a damn lawyer.”
McDaniel had no way of knowing what sort of trouble might be coming his way. On the contrary, by early April it seemed as though he had plenty to celebrate. Two weeks after hearing his formal proposal, the Laurens County Council voted—unanimously—to pass his anti-Klan resolution, condemning the Ku Klux Klan specifically and organized hate groups in general. The official text made no mention of John Howard or the Redneck Shop, but McDaniel hoped its passage would be viewed by those both inside and outside of town as a significant step. “By your vote tonight,” he told his fellow council members, “you have sent a message about Laurens County. You may not know it, but tonight you have fired a shot that in the morning could be heard round the world. You have done something you can look back on and tell your children you were proud to do. You have taken a stand—not against a business, but a belief.”
Whatever wave of momentum the resolution might generate—however small—McDaniel intended to ride it. He immediately formed what he dubbed the Unity Ribbon Network and announced what was to be the first of many Unity Forums, invitation-only events meant to facilitate frank discussion about race relations. About twenty-five people, half of those invited, showed up for the first meeting, held in an auxiliary office complex about a mile northeast of the courthouse square. Each member of the group—which included the mayor, the sheriff, school district personnel, various religious leaders, and several members of the media—took his or her seat within a circle of chairs, and after a bit of prompting from McDaniel’s wife, the conversation turned deeply personal. Shannon Long, director of missions for the Laurens Baptist Association, remembered playing baseball as a child with kids from the neighborhood—black and white—until someone informed his mother, and that was the end of that. Gregory Fielder, the local business owner who’d phoned the police after Hunter plowed his van into the shop, shared his belief that America had always been a racist nation: “Ninety-nine percent of the history books are incorrect, and this is what we are teaching our children,” he said. McDaniel participated, too, reminding the attendees that “if you’re forty years old and honest, you’ll admit that there was at one time an unspoken rule that blacks didn’t look at a white man.” His focus, however, seemed to be more about finding common ground with the majority-white crowd than highlighting issues of systemic inequality. “Everybody’s been exposed to prejudice,” he said, rather charitably.
For one member of the group—Reverend Kennedy—McDaniel’s approach left much to be desired. David Prichard Hunter, after all, had resorted to violence because he believed the town wasn’t doing enough to root out racism; he claimed he was taking a stand against apathy. Having a closed-door, invitation-only chat, then, hardly seemed like the best way to demonstrate that Laurens was addressing its issues head-on. It also flew in the face of Rev. Kennedy’s personal message, which was that no one in Laurens could escape responsibility for the environment that had fostered the Redneck Shop. In the previous weeks, he had railed against religious leaders for being too passive, frequently telling the press that it would “take a lot more than prayer” to solve the town’s race problem. He distrusted most civil servants, who he claimed were “more concerned about economics than the devastating psychological impact the KKK has on an entire race of African Americans.” He had called on law enforcement to increase surveillance of the Redneck Shop—to “step up its pace”—a subtle jab at officers who had allowed the Klan to flourish under their noses.
After sitting in the meeting and listening to the first couple of speakers, he stormed out—only to return a few hours later and then storm out again. His second appearance, during which he claimed the group was not having a “true dialogue,” effectively and abruptly ended the event (a gossipy tidbit that didn’t escape mention by the local press). “There are a number of people who are in a rage because this could have been handled differently,” he said to reporters afterward.
Though both men were united in their opposition to Howard’s shop, the rift between McDaniel and Kennedy introduced into the larger controversy a question of ownership: Who owned the protests and marches, and the movement they produced? In the days immediately following Rev. Jesse Jackson’s appearance in Laurens, when press coverage focused more on Jackson’s celebrity status than the dark history of the Klan or the efforts of the community, Kennedy had been quick to reclaim the issue as a local one. “We don’t want to lose sight of whose fight this is,” he told the Clinton Chronicle. “We will ask [Jackson] to return when we’ve gotten some work done.”
When it came to local-level leadership, however, it wasn’t really clear who was in charge—McDaniel or Kennedy. Their styles could not have been more different. McDaniel was conservative and reserved, more interested in calming things down than riling people up. “He always had a passion for equality among the races,” said Jim Coleman, who served alongside McDaniel on the council for twenty years. “He would always bring that up, but he would do it in a very professional manner.” Kennedy, on the other hand, was the protest minister. He was loud, angry, unapologetic. He wanted people to look hard issues in the face. But even in the first weeks of the controversy, it must have felt as though whatever control he had of the situation was already being wrested away from him.
McDaniel’s Unity Ribbon campaign, for example, had received glowing press coverage. But while Kennedy’s initial rally had been largely praised, others were suggesting that the protests be moved away from the square, because Kennedy was generating undue attention for the Redneck Shop. “Some people in Laurens, they called it a disgrace,” he later recalled. “They blamed me for bringing top publicity to the place. You know, ‘The biggest problem in Laurens County is David Kennedy.’ ”
He knew it wasn’t uncommon for protesters to take more heat than the thing they were protesting. But Kennedy also believed that you generally had to make people uncomfortable to generate meaningful change. His version of the fight, then, would be the very opposite of a private meeting. It would have to be as public as possible.
With a small contingent of local ministers, Rev. Kennedy appeared before South Carolina’s Legislative Black Caucus and urged its members to condemn the Redneck Shop specifically—as opposed to racism in general—and stressed the importance of “militant nonviolence” as a strategy. It was a page out of Martin Luther King Jr.’s playbook. Time had already softened the sharpest edges of King’s most radical rhetoric, but the image of him as a crowd-pleasing pacifist—a “civil rights teddy bear,” as Rev. Jackson once observed—obscures the fact that he was polarizing and divisive in his time, and his methods deeply controversial. Ten days before his death, while speaking at the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly in New York, he professed his belief in the power of disruption: “I can’t see the answer in riots. On the other hand, I can’t see the answer in tender supplications for justice. I see the answer in an alternative to both of these, and that is militant nonviolence that is massive enough, that is attention-getting enough, to dramatize the problems, that will be as attention-getting as a riot, that will not destroy life or property in the process.” In his own way, Kennedy’s style—the antagonism, the willingness to offend—had also, always, been about disruption as a means of subverting the status quo.
As it turned out, the members of the Black Caucus were likewise interested in disruption, in part because fighting the Redneck Shop could be turned into something of a referendum on the governor of South Carolina, David Beasley.
Only sixteen months into office, Beasley’s relationship with the caucus had already turned rocky. Not long after his inauguration, assembly members had voiced concerns that he was failing to appoint enough African Americans to key posts and positions. Then, in the summer of 1995, black lawmakers alleged that Beasley had threatened to veto their entire legislative agenda—some $7.2 million earmarked for welfare reform, programs at South Carolina State University, and African American studies at the University of South Carolina—if they didn’t vote with Republicans on issues coming before the General Assembly (a charge Beasley did not deny). By fall, the only African American woman on the governor’s staff, a legislative liaison named Wilma Neal, had resigned, citing ostracism and exclusion from even the most routine of meetings. Beasley needed to rehabilitate his image—and fast. In December, he announced the formation of a Race Relations Commission to “tear down [the] wall” of racial division, only to anger everyone all over again by declaring two weeks later, at a summit organized by the Palmetto Project, that race relations in South Carolina were “good.”
“Race relations…today are more tense, more filled with fear, frustration, and anger than they have been at any time in a generation,” Representative Ralph Canty, a Democrat from Sumter, said at a press conference. As he and other members of the caucus well knew, Beasley’s image problems and the arrival of the Redneck Shop were far from the only signs of trouble. Something was brewing. In the month of April alone, a white man had been arrested for spray-painting KKK on an African American couple’s property outside Charleston; the FBI had launched an investigation into a cross-burning in Canterbury, a mostly black neighborhood in southern Greenville County; and national condemnation poured on the state following the release of dashcam video depicting a white state trooper assaulting a black motorist. There were concerns, too, about a racially motivated wave of church burnings. In the previous eighteen months, fires had been reported at more than sixty predominantly black churches across the South, triggering widespread press coverage and a massive federal investigation.
After Rev. Kennedy’s appearance before the Caucus, state senator Maggie Glover called on the governor and both houses of the General Assembly to “loudly and unequivocally” condemn the Redneck Shop. Representative Joe Neal went after Governor Beasley more personally, calling him out for his silence: “Today there is no message from our governor that he understands how injurious the presence of the Redneck Shop is to racial harmony, and thereby to both the human and economic development of our people.” Rev. Kennedy, meanwhile, vowed to keep up the momentum at home. He announced plans for a second rally in the courthouse square, and invited the former pastor of Mount Zion Baptist, allegedly burned by the Klan in 1971, to speak. A new sense of urgency had been injected into his speeches and sermons. At a Wednesday-night community meeting, for example, he explained that Howard was using the shop “to recruit members to the KKK and his goal is to create a race war.”
It was around this time that Kennedy started bringing reporters down to the old trestle over on River Street. For weeks, he had been sharing the story of his great-uncle’s death with his parishioners and members of the community. Back in March, he had tacked a poster-size photo of the Puckett lynching to the front of his pulpit—the same photo that had circulated through town in the 1950s as a deterrent to integration. He had carried it with him at the first major rally against the Redneck Shop in an attempt to shock people out of complacency. “In order to understand why black churches are burning,” he explained to a reporter from the Associated Press, “you have to understand how racism happens. America would love to put all the blame on the Ku Klux Klan. But what creates this atmosphere that allows the Klan to become bold?”
For Kennedy, this fight was about more than a store, and the Redneck Shop was more than merely crass or distasteful. The Klan was recruiting. Without some kind of check against it, without a prolonged and continued fight, the shop’s presence, and its message, would be normalized. “As long as the Redneck Shop is there,” he told reporters, “violence is inevitable.”
Suzanne Coe was a thirty-one-year-old Greenville-based attorney who had risen to national prominence in 1995 after winning Shannon Faulkner admission to the prestigious—and previously all-male—Citadel military college in Charleston. Her law practice had an emphasis on individual rights cases with a mostly progressive bent. Locally, however, she was best known for a willingness to represent even the least savory of characters. Her client roster included a Lexington County hitman and a former state senator charged with tax evasion. A prominent anti-abortion activist had labeled her “a crusader for the weird and perverse.” Coe’s ex-husband, fellow attorney Rob Hoskins, once joked: “I honestly believe that she would defend the head of the Ku Klux Klan.”
When the head of the Klan came calling, however, she had no interest in taking his case.
Coe, a petite woman with bushy brown hair and what the Greenville News once described as “can’t-sit-still” energy, had come to John Howard’s attention for her defense of a gentlemen’s club, Diamonds, which opened outside Greenville in the fall of 1994, to the great consternation of local residents. In response, the Greenville County Council adopted a zoning ordinance regulating the locations of adult entertainment businesses, and then went on to pass an outright ban on public nudity. The fight generated enough press that the Laurens County Council, one month before the Redneck Shop opened its doors, briefly debated adopting a similar ordinance.
Coe, however, had sided with Diamonds—as well as a local exotic dancer, Melissa Wolf—arguing that the ban on nudity was a violation of free speech. “I see it as, once again, the Baptists come out against dancing,” Coe said at the time. “[The club] is going to be there. They might as well get over it and grow up.” The case wound up going all the way to the State Supreme Court, where Coe won.
“She’s not afraid of controversy,” a former colleague once explained to reporters. Though the cases she took often exposed her to negative press and a fair amount of harassment, she had never been one to back down. Still, it took a bit of prodding before she agreed to meet with John Howard. “I was discussing it with my partner,” she later told the New York Times, “and he said: ‘Oh, I see. You only stand up for civil rights you believe in.’ ”
While Coe tried to wrap her head around the implications of representing a Klansman, John Howard got busy attempting to soften his public image. The boarded-up windows at the shop were replaced with glass, and the words JESUS LOVES EVERYBODY were painted beneath the name of the business. He pledged that the museum would be moved “out of sight”—that is, to the old screening room at the rear of the theater, which had always been his plan—and that the store would soon sell only Confederate-themed trinkets. He also commissioned a large Confederate flag, some five or six feet across, printed with the words HERITTAGE [sic] NOT HATE.
The slogan—a way of claiming southern pride without owning the legacy of slavery—had only recently been popularized, thanks to a man named Charles Lunsford, a leader of the largest Confederate heritage group in the States, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). The group’s original mission was to preserve history—specifically, a Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War. Its aim, according to its 1896 constitution, was “not to create or foster, in any manner, any feeling against the North, but to hand down to posterity the story of the glory of the men who wore the gray.” By the 1990s, however, there was division in the ranks. At issue: a shift from traditional pursuits, such as Civil War reenactments and the maintenance of Confederate gravesites, to a more militant focus on “heritage defense”—in particular, the right to display Confederate flags and symbols in public spaces. Traditionalists in the SCV felt as though the organization was being radicalized and politicized; more activist members, meanwhile, wanted to aggressively prosecute alleged “heritage violations” in court.
The flash point came in 1992, when Georgia’s governor, Zell Miller, proposed removing the “southern cross” from the official state flag. Lunsford, in his capacity as “chief of heritage defense” for the SCV, was invited to debate Miller on a radio broadcast of Larry King Live, where he expressed concerns that flag removal was the beginning of a slippery slope.
LUNSFORD: In 1986, the NAACP began passing resolutions in their national convention to bring about the eradication of everything Confederate….We began to see our street names change….We saw the clamoring to remove Confederate monuments….What I’m getting at here is this is seen by the vast majority of southern people as nothing more than widespread oppression against our culture….The vast majority of Georgians do not…see [the Confederate flag] as a racist symbol.
GOV. MILLER: Well, first of all, let’s get the difference between the official symbol of a state—which the flag is—and memorials. Georgia has got many, many memorials to the Confederacy. We’ve got over 1,100 historical markers all along our highways. We’ve got 400 monuments on our county and city squares. We’ve got three battlefields that are run by the federal parks system, and one battlefield by the state. I am not talking about doing anything with these memorials, because that is history. They are memorials. The flag is the official symbol of what a state is, and a flag should not be offensive to forty percent of its people.
LUNSFORD: Well, Mr. Miller, bear in mind that you may not be talking about those monuments, but somebody is….You may only be talking about the flag, but each of these monuments you go to throughout the country has their own little set of arguments, and when you look at them in their totality, we are under oppression, and people are beginning to resent that.
Lunsford went on to lament the way in which hate groups, including the Klan, had “co-opted” the flag for nefarious use: “The racists have always carried…the Confederate flag, because they are trying to win influence with the southern people, because the southern people love that flag,” he said. The slogan “Heritage Not Hate” (which Lunsford coined around the same time as the interview) became a way of reclaiming something lost, of restoring some “stolen” honor. But the slogan masks some uncomfortable truths.
For one thing, the SCV has long done business with white supremacists. Its leader during the civil rights era, William McCain, was an avowed segregationist. While president of Mississippi Southern College (now the University of Southern Mississippi), he worked to block the admission of Clyde Kennard, a black Korean War veteran, in 1956, 1957, and 1959—two, three, and five years, respectively, after passage of Brown v. Board of Education. A year later he made a speech in Chicago, sponsored by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, in which he claimed that southerners “insisted” on living in a segregated society and did not support the rights of black men and women to vote. “The Negroes prefer that control of the government remain in the white man’s hands,” he said.
As for Charles Lunsford, he was ousted from the SCV in 1994 after giving a speech to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist outfit classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. He later joined the Atlanta-based Heritage Preservation Association, which has its own troubled history with issues of race. (In 2003, the president of the HPA’s Atlanta branch, Linda Sewell, personally accepted a “certificate of appreciation” from the Klan.)
Criticizing “hate groups” for co-opting your message while at the same time eliciting their support is plainly hypocritical. But in a world where up is down and down is up, it becomes that much easier to peddle outright falsehoods and half truths. After all, most of what Mike Burden learned about southern history—and the history of the Klan—is not so different from the version peddled by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Only by normalizing Confederate iconography does it become possible to patronize a shop operated by an avowed Klansman in the name of “heritage.”
And yet one wonders why John Howard even bothered to soften his image. Because no matter what he said to the press about “preserving history,” the outgoing message on his own store’s answering machine told a far different story. It was a four-minute-long racist rant—a recording made by none other than Michael Burden—billed as a Klan “hotline.” (The phone number was printed on the shop’s business cards.) The heart of the message was a recruitment plea: callers were asked if they were ready to turn over the country to “militant blacks” and “nigger hordes” who “want to breed with your beautiful, young daughters [to] produce a society of…welfare recipient mongrels,” thereby turning America’s cities into “jungles.” A local reporter caught wind of the message, but John Howard denied any involvement and began referring all calls to a spokesperson.
That spokesperson turned out to be Barry Black, Howard’s Pennsylvania-based Imperial Wizard. As spokespersons go, he was an odd choice—Black had been even more antagonistic with the press than Howard. Not long after the shop opened, for example, he had promised to pull the Klan out of Laurens entirely—so long as residents banded together and purchased the Echo for “a million dollars.” With Black at the helm, the Redneck Shop’s public image would only get worse. In an interview with Vibe magazine, he boasted about a recent acquisition at the shop, an old black-and-white photo from 1913. “It was a black person hung for raping a white woman,” he said. “That picture’s worth—in a Klansman’s eyes—$1,000. We’ll probably have copies made and sell them at the store for $5 apiece. Maybe make postcards out of them.”
He was talking, of course, about the photo of Richard Puckett—the same photo Rev. Kennedy had used in his protests. And the postcards (unlike his pledge to leave Laurens) were a promise Black made good on. By summer, reprints were available for sale, and sometimes given away as a “free gift with purchase.” Black could hardly claim credit for the idea, however. Commemorative photographs and picture postcards of lynchings had been extraordinarily common in the early part of the twentieth century, sold as souvenirs and sent through the mail as casually and as frequently as greeting cards. Black was merely resurrecting one of the ugliest (and most effective) forms of white supremacist intimidation.
And still the customers came.
Teddy Craine of Enoree stopped in to buy a T-shirt for his four-year-old son. “This is part of my past,” he explained to the Greenville News. “My great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy. The United States stands up for people’s rights. That is why we are here today. I don’t think our heritage should be put in a back room.”
Roger Stow, a carpenter from Greenville, bought a Klan cap. “I see nothing wrong with selling Klan stuff because it is part of our proud heritage, whether blacks and white liberals like it or not.”
Stephanie Wilke, twenty-two, told the Washington Post that she had no qualms about supporting the Klan or asserting her rights as a white person. “The blacks wear Malcolm X T-shirts,” she said. “These words are our heritage. It’s the South, it’s the rebel flag.”
Would they have continued patronizing the shop had they known what Mike Burden was up to?
Ed McDaniel might have been a nuisance, but his activism against the shop had been relatively tame. Rev. Kennedy, with his advocacy in the statehouse and warnings of an imminent race war, was far more dangerous. Or at least that’s what Burden came to believe. The day Hunter plowed his van into the shop, for example, mere hours after Burden had finished boarding up the windows, a sudden earsplitting crack—like the sound of a gunshot—sent nearly everyone inside diving for cover. It turned out not to have been a gun at all, luckily, just the sound of a fishing reel slamming into the boards, tossed at the shop by a group of mischievous kids. But the incident left everyone a bit shaken. And Howard had been quick to lay the blame at Rev. Kennedy’s feet, suggesting over and over again that the reverend was responsible for the escalation, that tensions were bound to get worse, that next time it really would be a gun.
“We were told more or less that our lives were gonna be…taken care of,” Burden said later. So when John gave him a new assignment, he took the job very seriously. For the next several weeks, when Burden wasn’t at the shop or spending time with Judy, he was doing reconnaissance on the reverend—trailing him around town, watching, waiting. “I knew where he lived,” he says of Kennedy. “I knew where he worked. I knew where he went. I knew what stores he liked, his favorite restaurant…” At some point Burden considered driving to a secluded spot on Kennedy’s regular route and faking car trouble, figuring that a reverend would surely pull over in order to help a stranded motorist. There would be no witnesses, as he later explained in interviews with The State, and the attack would look like a robbery.
“The Klan has a saying,” Burden explained. “It’s Non silba sed anthar. ‘Not for self, but for others.’ ” The motto is a mix of Latin and Gothic, a holdover from the second Ku Klux Klan of the early twentieth century, and it had been drilled into him since his earliest days with John Howard. Why do Klansmen take security at rallies and other events so seriously? Non silba sed anthar—to protect their brothers in arms. Why was the Klan’s mission so important? Non silba sed anthar—it was in the service of the white race. Burden and his fellow Klansmen spoke the words often, almost like a passcode or private greeting. A little placard bearing the motto was tacked up next to the register in the Redneck Shop. And in Burden’s mind, stalking the reverend was just another way that he was putting the safety of his adopted family before his own needs. It was about defense and protection. It was honorable.
In the days leading up to his second major rally, Rev. Kennedy led his church in a frenzy of activities: prayer vigils, community meetings, a silent ride through the center of town, and a bonfire gathering at New Beginning, all intended to raise awareness and encourage community participation. By Saturday morning, however, it was clear that his movement was losing ground. Just six weeks earlier, four hundred people had packed the square at his invitation. Now he was looking at a crowd of about fifty—a good third of whom weren’t protesters at all, but rather law enforcement officers and members of the media.
“We could have had others come,” he told reporters, putting a spin on the disappointing turnout, “but we wanted to mentally prepare our people that there will be times when only a handful will be there to carry the load. It’s going to be a long, hot summer. We will not be intimidated.”
With characteristic brashness, Kennedy blasted community leaders for not having done enough to address the Redneck Shop, and went so far as to call Governor Beasley a “liar” for suggesting that race relations in South Carolina were “good.” He threatened to bring his protests to the door of the statehouse, called for the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to join the fight, pleaded for more and stronger support from white citizens. “We can’t solve the problem with one race,” he said.
But the plea wasn’t working. Local business owners were already tired of the disruption from so many protests. They didn’t care for Kennedy’s style, nor see much point in his antagonism—the shop wasn’t going anywhere. More than a few blamed him, publicly, for “blowing things out of proportion.” There was one person, however, with whom Kennedy was not losing momentum, but rather gaining ground. That was Judy.
At first, she had been plenty suspicious of Rev. Kennedy. She’d heard an earful from Mike and John, after all: that the reverend was supposedly behind the instances of random vandalism at the shop, that he was goading blacks into violence and jeopardizing her boyfriend’s livelihood. After she’d gotten a glimpse into the inner workings of the Klan, however, she hadn’t exactly been impressed with John Howard, either. Judy had always been told that she was part Cherokee, so when the inevitable chatter about the inferiority of nonwhites came up—when Howard launched into one of his tirades about the blacks or the Mexicans or the Chinese—she decided to confront him. “If you’re gonna hate the blacks because of the color of their skin, then why do you want me to be in the Klan?” she asked. “I come from Indian. You hate me ’cause I got Indian in me?”
Whatever his true feelings, John neglected to share them. “He couldn’t give me an answer,” Judy says. “So I thought, ‘Mm-hmm. Okay.’ ” In the meantime, she continued to push Mike. “I would challenge him, you know? ‘All right, I went to a Klan meeting. Now let’s go do my thing.’ ” Usually that meant driving out to KC’s, a run-down honky-tonk out on Highway 221, to hear her favorite band play. And for a brief period, she seemed to be winning Burden over—they went out together, away from the Klan, nearly every weekend. But then some new “job” would come up, some new errand Mike was supposed to run for John, some new mission to fulfill. “I would tell her, it’s my duty,” Mike said later. “I’ve got to do this.”
By the time she found out that Mike was essentially stalking the reverend, Judy was desperate. She had long since stopped going to meetings, socialized less and less with the few female members she’d gotten to know during initiation. And when she wandered into the courthouse square during Kennedy’s second rally, something clicked. “I was like, ‘This makes sense now,’ ” Judy explained. “Now I understand why John Howard doesn’t like him.” The more she listened to the reverend’s calls for nonviolent protest, for a coming together of the races, the more she understood that her boyfriend was on the wrong side. “I kinda understood where Reverend Kennedy was coming from,” she says. “And I thought, ‘You know, that’s right. What he’s sayin is right.’ ”
A day or two later, Rev. Kennedy met with more disgruntled churchgoers—this time a young African American couple. “I know what you’re getting ready to say,” Kennedy told them, having at that point counseled quite a few young people who’d come by to discuss the relative merits of just blowing the place up. This couple was different. They were headed to the square, they said, where they intended to take care of the problem themselves—no more protests.
“I said, ‘Give me your word that you ain’t gonna do nuthin like that,’ ” Kennedy remembers. He told them he was tired and frustrated, just as they were, but violence would only make things worse. He gave his standard exhortation about fighting back peacefully—he told them they couldn’t lower themselves to John Howard’s level, couldn’t mimic the Klan’s ideology and forsake the teachings of the Bible. But as he watched the man and woman climb into their car and drive away from the church, Kennedy figured he’d best follow them over there. “Sometimes when you fed up like that, when you tired…,” Kennedy said, shaking his head. This time, he feared, his words might not have done very much good.
It was dusk by the time he pulled into one of the parking spaces on the north side of the courthouse. The streetlamps had come on, and the lights from inside the shop cast an orange glow across the whole of West Laurens Street. The couple, as promised, was outside raising hell, shouting epithets in the direction of the store and calling for the Klansmen to come out. Kennedy quickened his pace just in time to see John Howard step out onto one of the twin fire escapes above the marquee. He hadn’t, however, seen what happened seconds earlier: John hollering at Mike to get upstairs, and Mike, armed with a Makarov .380 pistol and a .22 in his pocket, ascending to the roof.
Kennedy had almost closed the gap between himself and the couple, trying to conjure some strategy to defuse the situation, when he heard Howard suddenly call down to him. For all the time they had spent trading barbs in the press, it was the first time either man had ever spoken to the other. Full of false bonhomie, in a kind of singsongy lilt, Howard invited the reverend to come on inside. He suggested Kennedy might like to have his picture taken while wearing a Klansman’s robe.
One floor above, Mike was crouched behind the redbrick parapet at the front of the roof. Down and to the right, he could see the top of Howard’s head, or at any rate the top of the Confederate-flag ball cap John usually wore to cover his bald spot. Mike curled his finger around the trigger and sat at attention, waiting for a sign or a signal. “I didn’t care about the consequences,” he said. “I will defend what’s mine at all costs. I had the shot lined up and everything. I had him in my sights.”
Down on street level, Kennedy had the distinct impression that he was being goaded, that Howard was trying to provoke him into a more direct confrontation, a feeling with which he was not entirely unfamiliar. “Any kind of reaction from a black man is a sin,” he said. “You can’t be reactionary to them. You have to make them react to you. This is the thing about fighting back—I even tell my kids this. There are reprisals, there are consequences whenever you take a stand, but the consequences are worse when you’re black. Because in their minds, the nigger oughta be in his place.” Instead of engaging with Howard, then, Kennedy focused on the couple. And instead of reiterating the conciliatory message he’d given in his office—since it hadn’t worked the first time—he took on the persona of a football coach giving a pre-game pep talk. “I’m gonna stick ’em with protests!” he shouted, pointing at the shop. “Back to back! We will not be intimidated! You intimidated?”
The couple exchanged glances. “No.”
“I said, you intimidated?”
“No!”
From his perch on the roof, Mike felt something akin to confusion. For weeks, he’d anticipated some kind of covert attack. He had followed Kennedy back and forth across town, trying to glean some insight into his plans, collecting intel on the man he considered the greatest threat to his shop and his person. But Kennedy, loud as he may have been—he was shouting about protesting and leading call-and-response chants and singing that ridiculous pump-it-up song—was actually moving the protesters away from the building. “He was down there sayin, ‘Y’all need to back up. This is the wrong way to do it. We can protest peacefully,’ stuff like that,” Burden recalled. “I think that was mainly the reason I didn’t fulfill the mission. He was no longer a threat.”
Later that night, Burden arrived at Judy’s trailer with a kind of sheepish grin on his face. He paced back and forth in her tiny kitchen, then finally plopped onto the sofa and put his head in his hands. “You’ll never guess what I almost done.”
Judy sighed. “What have you almost done now?”
By then, Judy was well aware of Burden’s unnaturally close relationship with John Howard. She’d seen the way Mike seemed to hang on John’s every word; in fact, she was convinced that Mike was afraid to defy him. She knew, too, about the abuse Mike had suffered as a child. She knew that John had taken Mike in when he had nowhere else to go. But it wasn’t until Mike began to tell her about aiming a gun at the reverend that she understood how deep it all went.
“What are you doin this for?” she said. “Because John Howard can’t stand to be around him? You’re gonna give up your whole life—and me and these kids. You’re gonna go to prison for the rest of your life. Do you think John Howard is going to be there for you then?”
The more she pushed, the quieter Mike got—a personality trait to which she had long since grown accustomed. “When Mike gets real quiet and just sets there and looks at you? He doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, ’cause you done hit a nerve.” Finally, she scooted over to him and put a hand on his knee. “Listen, I love you,” she said, “but you have got to break away from this.”
Mike was not yet ready to renounce John Howard, but there was no denying that things were different now. He was no longer an orphan with nothing to lose. He suddenly had people who loved him—really loved him, without asking for anything in return. The sudden vulnerability was no less than terrifying. In love letters to Judy, written in small, blocky script and decorated with hearts and flowers, he poured out the emotions that he struggled to express in person. “The feelings that are with me do scare the hell out of me,” he wrote. “I’m supposed to be as strong as a rock, now this rock is crumbling.” Just a few months ago, he would have lashed out at anyone who dared challenge him or the Klan. Now he had to wonder if that sacrifice was worth it.
“I think he was coming to me to talk it through,” Judy said later. “You know, ‘This is what I done. Is this right or is it wrong?’ I mean, he couldn’t even think for his own self. John had him so brainwashed.”
From then on, she worked to replace John in that capacity. She struck up conversations challenging Mike’s ideology, and she started imagining for them both a different kind of life. Mike had talked idly about wanting to be a truck driver—some distant uncle had apparently been trucking for years—and it seemed like a good fit for him. He didn’t feel particularly comfortable cooped up inside or working in a factory, and anyway, there wasn’t even much factory work left in Laurens. A trucker’s salary might provide real financial stability; as it was, Judy was teetering on the brink of eviction. She just had to get Mike away from the Klan, and away from John Howard. Maybe away from Laurens altogether. “I kept pressuring him,” she said. “Let’s walk away from it. Let’s get out of it.”
Little by little, it seemed to be working. “I had nothin in the world before I met Judy,” Burden says. “I had nothing. I didn’t have no cares. I didn’t care about anybody’s feelings. I was a very angry person. But Judy once told somebody that she saw a side of me nobody else seen. She was what made me think. Because I was a soldier. I mean, I do what I’m told and drive on. But her, she would make me sit down and we’d talk and it’d be like, ‘Well, you’re right. You’ve got a point there.’ She was my conscience.”
One night that spring, Judy and Mike went back to the bar on Highway 221 to hear the same band play—the White Buffalo Band, a Greenwood-based southern rock cover band. Mike had gotten friendly with some of the members. “I went up, talked to that lead singer, told ’em what I was gonna do,” he said. “Grabbed that wireless mic…”
Over at the bar, Judy turned around and realized she had no idea where her boyfriend was. “All of a sudden, he disappears.” She swiveled in her chair and hopped off her stool. Then suddenly she heard his voice come through over the loudspeaker.
“Judy, I love you. Will you marry me?”
Mike had climbed up onstage and dropped down on one knee. Whoops and cheers rang out from the crowd. “I was in love with him,” Judy said later. “And I thought, ‘Well, he really loves me and my kids. He’ll go along. He’ll shy away from the Klan.’ For a while there, I thought he had.” So she said yes.