nine

THE SUBSTANCE OF THINGS HOPED FOR, THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN

FALL 2007

“I know you wanted to get a copy of that deed,” she said.

Reverend Kennedy had arrived at the Laurens County Clerk of Court’s office, a beige industrial-looking building on Hillcrest Drive, to file some paperwork on behalf of his church. New Beginning owned, or in some cases had inherited, a slew of properties in the greater Laurens area—several parcels of undeveloped land, an old nursing home, a few vacant houses. It wasn’t unusual for the reverend to pop into the office as often as two or three times a month. On that particular afternoon, Kennedy had asked one of the assistants to pull a copy of his deed to the Echo theater for his files. The assistant, however, was visibly distressed.

“There’s two or three deeds on top of your deed,” she said, holding a small stack of papers in her hand.

Kennedy waved her off. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“But there’s two deeds on top of it. You need to pay close attention to that.”

Kennedy leaned forward and glanced at the papers she was holding, two additional deeds to the Echo theater, filed in 2006 and 2007, nearly a decade after he’d purchased the remainder interest from Michael Burden. He furrowed his brow. He hadn’t made any changes to his ownership status, hadn’t sold or even thought about selling his interest in the property.

“Rev,” the assistant whispered, “are you sure you the owner?”

Michael Burden’s comeuppance—a twelve-year prison sentence—should have been cause for celebration among the Klansmen he’d betrayed. Instead, it passed with little notice. By the time Burden was being shipped off to the maximum-security Kirkland Correctional Institution for reception and evaluation, Klan chapters all across the state were busy with troubles of their own.

In July, four members of Barry Black’s Keystone Knights had been arrested for threatening the life of a police officer at a small rally in Boswell, Pennsylvania. A month later, Black himself was arrested in Hillsville, Virginia, for burning a cross “with the intent to intimidate”—a violation of an obscure statute that nonetheless carried a five-year prison sentence. The case would spend years winding its way through the legal system (going all the way to the Supreme Court, where his conviction was ultimately vacated), but in the summer of 1998, Black’s future—and the future of his Keystone Knights—was anything but certain.

The Keystone Klan’s troubles paled in comparison, however, to those facing the Christian Knights. Two years after filing suit, the Southern Poverty Law Center was finally bringing its arson case on behalf of Macedonia Baptist church to trial. In his opening statement, Morris Dees pointed across the crowded courtroom at a stoic Horace King and described a man consumed by hate, a man who offered his followers “protection” from their crimes, only to cut them loose when they got caught. Gary Christopher Cox and Timothy Welch, the men charged with setting the fires, testified in exchange for slightly reduced sentences; both said they regretted having been driven to violence by the Klan. “We were told we would not go to jail,” Welch said on the stand. “We were convinced we were untouchable.”

It was a strong case on those merits alone—but the SPLC’s star witness turned out to be none other than Horace King himself. Dees played a video for the jury, taken at a rally in Clarendon County just a few weeks before Macedonia burned to the ground, in which King ranted and raved and shook with fury. “I tell you one thing,” he screeched into the microphone, “the county I live in and the neighborhood I live in, they ain’t no bubble-headed niggers livin in it…If you got a nigger livin on side of you, it’s your fault.”

And another, filmed during a rally in Washington, D.C.: “If we had this garbage in South Carolina, we would burn the bastards out!”

Video after video played to the stunned courtroom, revealing the ferocity of King’s rhetoric and the brutal truth of his intent. In the end, it was an easy victory for the SPLC. The jury deliberated for all of forty-five minutes before handing down the largest verdict against a hate group in U.S. history: $37.8 million in actual and punitive damages—$12 million more than even Macedonia’s lawyers had requested. Horace King was deemed personally responsible for $15 million, an unimaginable sum for a retiree in poor health living on little more than disability and Klan dues. His farm and his seven acres were deeded over to Macedonia, and investigators for the SPLC made it plain that any other assets, including future assets, would be seized in order to satisfy the judgment.

Dees called it a “day of reckoning.” The Christian Knights were officially out of business, and Klan-watchers hoped that fear of similar lawsuits might drive other groups farther underground. “It could very well make them much more cautious in terms of public appearances and statements,” Bill Moore, a political science professor at the College of Charleston, told the Associated Press. In South Carolina, the Klan was declared effectively dead.

But they were wrong. Less than two years after the trial, a new faction—the Carolina Knights—sprang up in the Christian Knights’ place, led by a former acolyte of King’s, an eighty-year-old preacher named Charles Beasley. Charles Gladden, a fifty-one-year-old plumber and former rank-and-file member of the Keystone Knights, ascended to the position of Grand Dragon and announced plans to march in Wagener, Salley, and Charleston. In the fall of 2000, in the hamlet of Burnettown, near the Georgia border, he was joined by a longtime associate: John Howard. Despite having insisted to reporters for years that he was retired, Howard donned his robes, hoisted a Confederate flag, and crowed that there was “a place reserved in the fiery pits of hell” for those who refused to rub elbows with the Klan.

The scandal surrounding the Redneck Shop, like all scandals, had lost its potency with time, fading considerably from public view in the ten years following Rev. Kennedy’s acquisition of the remainder interest. Every so often, a reporter would nose around town, snap some photos of the “World Famous KKK Museum,” talk to locals about the Confederate flag or illegal immigration or the legacy of slavery, and write up an article about the state of contemporary race relations. (“Slavery was eons ago,” a Laurens bar patron once explained to a Vice reporter. “We’re past that.”) But for the most part, people just wanted to move on. Even the new mayor expressed a kind of resignation whenever she was asked to comment about the shop. “They’re in business just like anyone else.” The sigh was practically audible.

Actual goings-on at the Echo hadn’t generated much news since the spring of 1997. The mural painted on the back wall—the Klansman on horseback—was replaced with a more palatable tableau: a portrait of Jesus, arms outstretched, hovering above a single eyeball and three interlocking rings, symbols associated with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, a centuries-old (non-racist) fraternal order in which John Howard claimed membership.

Most residents had no idea the Redneck Shop had only grown more prominent among white supremacists, or that Howard was playing host to a far larger audience than a ragtag group of backwoods Klansmen. Beginning in 2002 or 2003, a Michigan-based neo-Nazi group chose the shop as the venue for its annual White Unity Christmas Party. At a 2006 gathering of the Aryan Nations—dubbed the Twenty-Fifth World Congress—more than 150 white supremacists of all stripes packed the meeting hall to hear speeches about the evils of blacks (“soulless mud people”) and the depravity of Jews (“Satan is their father”), interspersed with information about the benefits of “leaderless resistance.”

Virgil Griffin was there, telling those in the audience to “get every weapon you can get.”

He was followed onstage by a South Carolina–based Aryan Nations officer, sporting on his biceps the double lightning-bolt insignia of the Schutzstaffel. “You want to see blood in the streets?” he hollered. “I do!”

Afterward, attendees milled around the crowded lobby, where they could peruse the usual assortment of racist bumper stickers and T-shirts, as well as merchandise brought in specially for the event: Workbench AR-15 Project, for example, a how-to manual for assembling one’s own assault rifle and flouting federal gun laws.

The 2006 gathering was the rare occasion when a journalist, John F. Sugg of the now-defunct paper Creative Loafing, was allowed to document the proceedings. Through the windows of the lobby, mere moments after the conclusion of the day’s speeches, Sugg noticed a small black child, perhaps eight years old, ride past the Echo on a bright orange bicycle. John Howard, who had been sitting on a wooden stool behind the sales counter, sidled over to the front of the shop and waved his finger in the direction of the boy. “There’s a nigger I’d like to hang.”

The Klan wasn’t dead—in fact, it was growing. Between 2000 and 2007, the Southern Poverty Law Center observed a 50 percent spike in the number of hate groups operating in the United States, as well as increased cooperation among groups on the far right, a trend largely attributable to a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment. “If any one single issue or trend can be credited with re-energizing the Klan, it is the debate over immigration in America,” Deborah Lauter, civil rights director of the Anti-Defamation League, warned in a press release. The Klan was returning to its nativist roots. And just a few months after the Aryan Nations convention, the Redneck Shop would find itself in the news once again—this time for its association with a man named John Taylor Bowles, a neo-Nazi running for president of the United States.

Bowles, the party hopeful for the National Socialist Movement (NSM) in 2008, was a short man with a ruddy complexion and a youthful chubbiness about him. A Maryland native and thirty-year veteran of the neo-Nazi movement, Bowles had moved to Laurens earlier that year, making his campaign headquarters at the only place in the country audacious enough to host such an effort. For his running mate, he needed someone with bona fides, someone who could give his campaign legitimacy within the broader white supremacist crowd. He chose Wild Bill Hoff, who by then had left the Klan for the NSM and risen to the rank of “major,” in charge of East Coast operations.

Bowles’s presidential platform was absurdly ambitious. Upon his election, he promised free healthcare, free college education, low crime, low gas prices, zero-interest mortgages, a retirement age of fifty-five, and a 5 percent flat tax. His appeal to neo-Nazis lay in how he intended to pay for such promises: by no longer “wasting white taxpayer dollars on third world countries, no-win wars, and foreign aid to Israel.” He also advocated sending nonwhites “back to their respective homelands.”

“This,” he said to a curious reporter from the Columbia City Weekly, pointing to the swastika on his armband, “is coming back into style again.” He admitted that there were many different symbols his party could use, but that the swastika seemed “to do the trick.”

“Trick” is the right word for it.

The National Socialist Movement had been an obscure, little-known group on the far-right fringe since its founding in the mid-1970s, long overshadowed by more prominent neo-Nazi organizations such as the National Alliance and the Aryan Nations. Things started to change in 1993, however, when the group’s founder showed up at a Minnesota state legislative committee meeting in full Nazi regalia, a stunt that landed him on the front page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. A year later, twenty-one-year-old Jeff Shoep assumed control of the party and immediately began agitating for attention. It worked. By the mid-2000s, the NSM had become the largest—and flashiest—neo-Nazi group in the country. Members dressed in Nazi-style brown shirts (or Braunhemden), jackboots laced tight to the knee, and red armbands bearing the swastika. Every event they organized was designed to attract maximum unrest. The bigger the spectacle, the more intense the media coverage. The more intense the media coverage, the more prospective members sought the group out. A 2005 rally in a crime-ridden, gang-infested neighborhood outside Toledo, for example, drew as many as six hundred counterprotesters and quickly descended into a four-hour riot, which generated international press attention. Within months, the NSM, which before the rally had had fifty-nine chapters in thirty-two states, grew to eighty-one chapters in thirty-six states.

Bowles’s presidential campaign was just one more in a long line of publicity stunts. No one in his right mind—not even among the white supremacist crowd—thought Bowles would actually win the election. (According to campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, Bowles raised a little more than $3,500 between the fall of 2006 and the summer of 2008.) The point of the White House run was to further increase the NSM’s visibility and to bolster its membership ranks. The group’s largest event in 2007—at which Bowles announced his candidacy—was an anti-immigration rally at the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, followed by a three-day national meeting in Laurens, hosted by the Redneck Shop.

To anyone with even a cursory knowledge of John Howard’s forty-year career in the Klan, it would’ve seemed odd that he was suddenly palling around with neo-Nazis. This was a man who had preached about the legacy of William Joseph Simmons and the Klan’s supposed roots in American patriotism. Back in 1996, the Keystone Knights had actually banned anyone wearing neo-Nazi uniforms, emblems, armbands, or insignia from its public and private functions. Yet Howard seemingly had no qualms about his new friends, nor did he mind when the Nazis wanted to paint over the back wall in the shop yet again: the Odd Fellows mural was replaced with side-by-side portraits of George Lincoln Rockwell (founder of the American Nazi Party) and Hitler, their faces superimposed over the American and the Nazi flags, respectively.

Howard’s longtime friendship with William Hoff might have had something to do with it. More likely, however, is that he was looking to cash out. There were rumors in the larger white supremacy community that Howard, who was aging and in ill health, was looking to sell the Redneck Shop. (Despite the initial publicity surrounding Kennedy’s purchase of the remainder interest, no one in Howard’s circle seemed to realize that the shop was no longer his to sell.) When no one in the Klan ponied up, Howard turned to Nicholas Chappell, the treasurer for Bowles’s campaign, an eighteen-year-old who had just inherited a large sum of money after the death of his stepfather. In a package deal, Howard sold both the shop and the Lanford property to Chappell for a total of $25,000. Once again, however, Howard reserved for himself a life estate—the right to live in his home and run his shop for the rest of his life. He had found himself a new Mike Burden.

Rev. Kennedy was stunned.

Sure enough, there were two deeds “on top” of his deed, staking claim to the Echo theater. The most recent, dated March 30, 2007, transferred ownership from Hazel Howard—John Howard’s wife—to Nicholas Chappell, reserving a life estate for John. It was basically the same deal as Kennedy’s 1997 transaction, only with his name swapped out for someone else’s, as if Michael Burden had never sold him the building all those years ago.

Kennedy flipped to the next page. The second deed—the older of the two, dated November 16, 2006—was even more troubling. This deed purported to transfer Mike Burden’s remainder interest to Hazel Howard. As he read through the paperwork, the story became clear: through a circuitous series of swaps, Burden and Howard had conspired to circumvent Kennedy’s rightful claim to the property. They had transferred ownership to Hazel; Hazel then transferred ownership back to John. And there was no doubt about Burden’s complicity: his signature was right there in black and white, notarized and witnessed by two parties.

Kennedy had heard rumors over the years that Burden had rekindled his friendship with John Howard, even though he was still incarcerated. The more pressing question was how two fraudulent deeds could have been filed in the first place. Kennedy tracked down a legal assistant named Donna Jackson—the same legal assistant who had prepared the fraudulent deeds for John Howard—who informed Kennedy that no one in her office had performed a title search to verify Howard’s right to sell the Echo in the first place. Apparently no one in the clerk’s office had vetted the deeds for legitimacy before recording them, either. Any number of steps might have prevented the error, but it seemed as though Howard had just gotten lucky. As for the incompetence, Kennedy was nonplussed. “That’s South Carolina for you.”

The discovery of those fraudulent deeds would mark the beginning of a years-long journey to understand what had happened, and to reassert his claim to the Echo. Kennedy hired a lawyer, but in the meantime he decided to pay a visit to an old friend.

Kennedy phoned the prison chaplain at Northside Correctional Institution—a minimum-security facility in Spartanburg County—and set up an appointment to see Michael Burden. But as he waited in the visitation room, a drab room lined with large windows, through which he could see prisoners shuffling single-file toward visits with their friends and family, he wasn’t quite sure what to expect—whether his former congregant would even agree to see him, let alone admit to the fraudulent deed transfer. And then, through the glass, he caught his first sight of Michael Burden in nearly ten years.

“I’m trying not to get tearful,” Kennedy said later, “but when I saw Mike coming…his hair had turned gray. It was like watching a movie—everything had gone by so fast.” Burden was then a few years shy of forty years old, still thin and lanky, but the boyishness had gone out of him. Tiny lines formed at the corners of his eyes. “I had to keep from breaking down,” Kennedy said, “because if he had stayed with us he never would’ve gone to prison.”

As Burden walked across the room, the reverend stretched his arms wide. “And he fell in my arms,” Kennedy said, “just hugging and squeezing.” They sat and chatted for a while as old friends, catching up about New Beginning and the members of Kennedy’s congregation. Clarence had since left and become a reverend in his own church, Wateree Baptist. Judy and her children, now grown, were living and working in the area; Kennedy sometimes took up a collection for her when money got tight. Finally, Kennedy brought up the subject of the deed transfer. “I said, ‘Mike, I have a paper from the courthouse, and there are rumors that you got back with John Howard. Did you join with him at any time to try and resell the Redneck Shop property?’ ”

Mike shook his head.

“I knew he was lying,” Kennedy said later, “because his name was on the paper.” And yet, as frustrated as he was by the deception, Kennedy still felt a measure of empathy for the man. Burden’s collusion, Kennedy understood, was at that point less about ideology than it was an act of total desperation. Without Judy and the constant support of the church, Burden was in many ways more vulnerable than he’d been on the outside. “It makes me think about all the children caught up with the Klan and other hate groups,” Kennedy said. “They just want to belong somewhere. They just want to feel a part of something, and unfortunately the wrong people nourish them and make them feel like they are important. So I always had to keep an opening for Mike. I didn’t beat him up—‘Oh, you lying.’ ”

Since Burden wouldn’t admit his part in the deed transfer, Kennedy had little choice but to take his case to court. In the meantime, he could only hope that Burden might change his mind and once again gather the strength to defy John Howard. “When people get to the root of it,” he later told the New York Times, “this is a horror story about what happens to young guys who are drifting and fall prey to the Klan.”

By the time Rev. Kennedy filed suit against John Howard, Michael Burden, and Nicholas Chappell in order to resolve the cloud on his title to the Echo theater, tragedy had struck the NSM. One day after announcing Bowles’s and his campaign for the White House, William Hoff was killed in a car accident on a rural stretch of Highway 146, not far from the Lanford property. Though he had five brothers and sisters, the only survivors mentioned in his obituary were “two special and close friends,” John and Hazel Howard, and an “adopted grandson,” Dwayne. Not long after his death, Hoff’s brother Sheldon publicly revealed their family’s biracial heritage, which he’d discovered some fifteen years earlier when he got interested in genealogical research. (In the 1910 census, his father’s family is listed as black.) Sheldon had learned about Hoff’s death while surfing the Internet. “We don’t have his ashes,” he later told a reporter from GoUpstate.com. “We don’t even have a button from his clothes. [The neo-Nazis] stole him in life, and they’re stealing him in death.”

Bowles tried to make political hay out of the situation by insinuating to reporters that Hoff’s death was suspicious, but the grandstanding eventually cost him. After publicly accusing the leader of the NSM of mismanaging funds and failing to support his presidential campaign, Bowles was booted from the organization. He promptly formed his own splinter group, the National Socialist Order of America, which failed to attract many members and later disbanded after Bowles suffered a massive heart attack. (Upon his recovery, Bowles joined up with the American Nazi Party.)

As for the young Chappell, he refused to acknowledge Kennedy’s claim to the Redneck Shop, telling a reporter from the Canadian National Post, “Blacks think that they own everything. That’s part of their nature, part of their mindset. I could claim I own any building I want but that doesn’t mean it’s true.” Not long after the collapse of the National Socialist Order of America, however, Chappell packed up and left Laurens. Once again, day-to-day operations at the shop fell to John Howard. And for the next three years, as Kennedy’s civil case wound its way through the court system, Howard continued to sell his wares and “educate” people about the history of the Klan, cheerfully leading customers through the shop and pointing out photos and placards and bits of memorabilia like some kind of macabre museum docent.

Sometimes videos of Howard’s proselytizing made their way to YouTube. In a clip posted to the site on August 24, 2010, Howard points to a framed snapshot of a man in a black cowboy hat, standing in front of a green pickup truck, holding a sign printed with the words PRAISE GOD FOR AIDS. “He’s the one that killed those niggers down there in Birmingham, Alabama,” Howard says. “All those kids at that church? He’s the one that blew ’em up.” Slick as a used-car salesman, Howard suddenly switches gears and starts to hawk his merchandise. “These stickers are not but two dollars each…You can get ya a Nazi sword—whaddaya call them damn things? Bayonets? Daggers? Fifteen dollars.”

As the years ticked by, however, Howard’s health began to decline further. By the time Kennedy’s civil case finally made its way to court in the fall of 2011, the Redneck Shop was open for business only one day a week.

Howard’s defense at the non-jury trial was to plead ignorance. In sworn depositions, he admitted that he had heard Kennedy claim to own the theater, but that he’d brushed off the claim as implausible, if not ridiculous. “I figured it was Reverend Kennedy just raving up and down the streets: I’m gonna close him. And I ignored it…I figured the man was crazy.”

Michael Burden, meanwhile, denied having any knowledge or memory of signing over the deed to New Beginning, and claimed that he’d been struggling with addiction issues back in the 1990s. “I was drinking and doing drugs at the time,” he said in his deposition. “My memory back then was fogged with drugs and alcohol and I had my own problems….My memory’s vague—very vague back then because of what I was doing and the problems I was having myself.”

“Nonsense,” Judy said later when she heard about Burden’s testimony. “Mike drank like two or three beers and he would be puking. He’s not a big drinker. Never has been. And on drugs?”

“You couldn’t get that man to take a Tylenol,” Stacy said.

Circuit Court Judge Frank R. Addy Jr. wasn’t buying it, either. In his December 9 ruling, he wrote that “the evidence demonstrates that Mr. Burden was lucid, mentally sound, and not under the influence of any intoxicant at the time of the conveyance [to New Beginning]….Despite contentions that Mr. Burden was impaired because of years of substance abuse, the record indicates that [he] was of sound mind and understood the legal ramifications of his actions….I also find credible the testimony that, at the time of the conveyance, Mr. Burden had developed a spiritual relationship with [Rev. Kennedy], which also contributed to Mr. Burden’s motivation for the transfer.” The judge ruled both the 2006 and 2007 deeds invalid, confirmed Rev. Kennedy’s ownership of the remainder interest, and ordered Howard and Burden to pay Kennedy’s legal fees.

In the wake of the trial, John Taylor Bowles attempted to downplay the significance of the ruling. In remarks posted to a variety of white supremacist websites, he explained that Howard’s original life estate was still valid. “As long as the Redneck Shop is alive and [Howard] can operate his business in the building, the American Nazi Party can hold its activities there as well. The sky did not fall and the ground did not open up.” In reality, however, the trial severely damaged his reputation within the movement. The message boards at WhiteReference.com, a now-defunct white supremacist website, lit up with posts about how Howard and Bowles had duped the young Nick Chappell. “In this matter Nick Chappell is the one who really got screwed over,” one user wrote. “Bowles [and Howard] should learn to be men for once in their lives and actually give that young man back his money, or at least attempt to start paying him back like a real Aryan would do.”

There’s no evidence, however, that Chappell ever got his money back. In emails purportedly written by Chappell and posted to WhiteReference.com, he claimed that he spent virtually all of his $263,000 inheritance on Bowles’s presidential campaign, the Redneck Shop, and donations to other organizations within the movement. “My youthful ignorance proved to be a great weakness of mine,” he lamented. “I don’t associate with Bowles or any other organization at the moment.”*

John Howard, meanwhile, had been dealing with an array of personal issues. Even before the completion of the trial, he and his wife, Hazel, divorced. Soon after, he reportedly suffered a stroke. Within months of the ruling, in May 2012, he vacated the property. After sixteen years, the Redneck Shop finally closed its doors for good.

Later that fall, roughly ten months after winning his lawsuit, Kennedy received a late-night phone call from the Laurens County Fire Department. He jumped in his car and sped off down the Highway 127 bypass, a thick plume of black smoke already visible above the trees. By the time he arrived on the scene, New Beginning had burned nearly to the ground. The official cause of the fire was ruled to be an electrical issue, though Kennedy was understandably suspicious. He will always wonder if the fire was actually an act of retaliation by the neo-Nazis who had gathered at the Redneck Shop, or some disgruntled members of the Klan.

Given all that had happened, given the loss of his church, the dwindling size of his congregation, the protracted fight for ownership of the shop, and the fact that he is often still ostracized in Laurens, it would be easy to think that his extraordinary kindness in taking in Michael Burden was somehow not worth it.

Burden’s collusion with John Howard, however, was short-lived. After getting out of prison, he found a job at the Anderson plant in Clinton, manufacturing hardwood floors. Before long, he started working toward getting his trucking license, the job he’d always wanted and never before been able—or ready—to pursue. For the first time in his life, Burden gained a modicum of financial stability, a way to support and provide for himself. The trucking job enabled him to finally leave Laurens, and John Howard, for good.

“I can’t never change the fact that I did what I did,” Burden said later. “That’ll be there forever. I do feel remorse. I do feel pity and shame for it. But everything’s a lesson in life. If I hadn’t been through that, I wouldn’t be the person I am now. I do not support the Klan, and I do have remorse for some of the stupidity I was encompassed in. It took me a long time to find that inner peace, for the turmoil and the hatred and everything to dissipate. But it has.”

In time, he was able to reconnect with Judy, but as friends. “We’ve talked once or twice,” she said, “and I wished him all the luck in the world. That’s how I found out that he was a truck driver now, and I said, ‘Well, good.’ ’Cause he really wanted to do that back when we were together. He really wanted to do that.”

Judy believes that Burden’s brief collusion with John Howard was largely based on fear.

“He really done a number on Mike, he really did. I’m so thankful that he was able to get out of here.”

As for her relationship with the reverend, she believes it’s not an exaggeration to say that he saved her life. “I don’t know what me and my kids woulda done back then if it hadn’t been for Reverend Kennedy.”

For several weeks after the church fire, Rev. Kennedy operated out of his vehicle. He and his wife delivered food to needy families, as the Soup Kitchen was temporarily closed. They hosted Sunday services at their home, packing the den with thirty or forty people each week. But it wasn’t long before he got a call from a local businessman, Harry Agnew, who wanted to help the church get back on its feet. “New Beginnings does so much good in the community, and Rev. Kennedy has reached out to so many people,” Agnew later told reporters. “I was honored to help.” Agnew and Kennedy spent several weeks visiting properties around the county until finally settling on an industrial building on a quiet stretch of Route 76, between Clinton and Laurens, which Kennedy purchased with insurance money and private donations. In lieu of pews, the sanctuary was filled with rows and rows of chairs—donations from Ryan’s, the same steakhouse where Kennedy and Burden had shared their first meal some twenty years earlier, gifted to New Beginning when the restaurant went out of business. The Soup Kitchen is housed in an adjacent property, and on most days there are more visitors to the pantry than to the church. Yet Kennedy is thankful. “It was a tremendous blessing,” he said of the new building. “All that came together to allow it to happen was an incredible blessing from God.”

The reverend is in his sixties now. He still protests all manner of injustice in Laurens, still rankles people with his fiery rebukes, still challenges people to reckon with the past—and remains a deeply controversial figure in Laurens. Yet he is surprised when people express awe or disbelief at his church’s willingness to take in the Burdens.

“I never saw anything great in what we did,” he admits. “Nothing phenomenal. It’s what we do. If you can’t be moved to see about the human condition, then something is wrong with you.” He quotes the theologian Howard Thurman, author of the classic religious treatise Jesus and the Disinherited. “He wrote about fear, hatred, and hypocrisy—the three hounds of hell. They will track you and destroy you. They kill the spirit.” Thurman, an African American writer and educator, is most famous for providing a religious framework for the leaders of the civil rights movement. His philosophy of nonviolence profoundly influenced Martin Luther King Jr. By invoking him, Kennedy continues in a long tradition within the black church of confronting injustice without succumbing to hatred.

He preaches less often than he used to, choosing instead to guide and train the next generation of ministers. When he does ascend to the pulpit, however, he speaks with the same passion and fire he had in the spring of 1996, demanding from his parishioners a commitment to fighting intolerance. At a recent service, he challenged his tiny congregation to examine their own good works.

“I wanna know,” Kennedy thundered, “is your work speakin for ya? Have you fed the hungry, clothed the nekkid? Have you visited the sick? Have you visited those who are incarcerated? Have you taken in strangers that you did not know? Have you given water to those that are thirsty? Remember what Jesus said: whatever you did not do for the least of these, my brethren, you did not do for me.”

Afterward, members of the small congregation milled around the sanctuary, discussing the upcoming youth retreat and making plans for Sunday supper. Reverend George Dendy, one of Kennedy’s associate pastors and a recent addition to the New Beginning family, was eager to share a few anecdotes—from his childhood in the days just after integration, to the casual racism he still experiences every day, to the fights his pastor continues to wage in the name of injustice. “If anyone has a right to hate, it’s Reverend Kennedy,” he says. “But he doesn’t, because the love of God has come in, and I am glad about it.” He wants people to know about the sacrifices Kennedy has made in order to help so many others. It’s why he joined the church in the first place.

“I came because I like what they do in the community,” he says. “I wanna serve, so the soup line, the dinners? I just like being a part of that. And I’m amazed at the church not having but a few members, but yet feeding fifteen hundred people. I’m amazed that they got a food bank. So that let me know that God is doing some great things here, even if there’s not great numbers.” That’s what keeps Kennedy’s church going, despite everything that happened in Laurens, and despite all of the work that remains to be done. Dendy points to a verse from Hebrews 11: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

He believes good things are in store for the church, and especially for Rev. Kennedy.

“He’s overdue for a blessing,” he says.