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By Root 1069 0

Charles Payne, had grown up on his family’s farm in Olathe and had gone to work for the Sinclair Oil and Gas Company as a bookkeeper and later as district clerk in Augusta. (The name Rolla, which rhymes with “wallah,” is said to have ranked among the top five hundred most popular boys’ names for a time near the end of the nineteenth century. Rolla Payne, however, did not love it. He went by the initials R.C. or simply Payne, the name by which Leona addressed him.) A veteran of World War I, R. C. Payne appears to have met Leona McCurry in Independence, where they were living and working. They received a marriage license in December 1921, and their first child, Madelyn Lee, was born on October 26, 1922, in Peru. By the time Charles and Margaret Arlene were born several years later, the family had moved to Augusta, another former farming community transformed by oil, eighteen miles southwest of El Dorado. By the end of World War I, there were three refineries in Augusta and ten thousand people living within a five-mile radius—from the families of oil company executives to laborers on the oil leases and a small community of Mexicans employed by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway and living in an enclave bounded by the Walnut River, South Osage Street, and the Santa Fe tracks. A two-lane brick highway to Wichita opened in 1924, the year a twister roared into town, tore a corner off the high school, and demolished a Catholic church. Jon Payne, the youngest of the four Payne children, who spent his entire childhood in Augusta until his parents moved during his senior year in high school to a tiny oil-field community called Thrall, said he had never met a black person until he went away to college at the University of Kansas.

Butler County was almost entirely white and Christian when Madelyn Payne was growing up in Augusta and Stanley Dunham in El Dorado in the 1920s and 1930s. Recruiters for the Ku Klux Klan moved into the county in the early 1920s, billing the Klan as a patriotic Christian benevolent association. Roxie Olmstead, who grew up in Butler County and later did some research on the Klan, found that the organization advanced north from Oklahoma, recruiting what it called “native born, white, Protestant, Gentile, American” citizens. Klan chapters met in churches, held initiation ceremonies in robes and on horseback, and burned crosses. The focus was moral issues, Roxie Olmstead reported in a paper available at the Butler County Historical Society, such as “faithless husbands and wives in Augusta.” There was a Klan parade in Augusta in September 1923; a meeting in El Dorado in August 1924 reportedly attracted three thousand people. The name of the Kaffir Corn Carnival was changed, for 1924 only, to the Kaffir Korn Karnival. William Allen White, who had been editorializing against the Klan since 1921 in The Emporia Gazette, ran as an independent candidate for governor in 1924 on what for much of the campaign was an anti-Klan platform. He came in third out of three, but historians say his campaign weakened the Klan. The following year, the state supreme court banned it from operating in Kansas.

For much of Madelyn’s childhood, the family lived in a single-story wood-frame house owned by the Sinclair Oil and Gas Company, and next door to the office where her father, R. C. Payne, worked. The house had three bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a screened-in back porch, where Charles sometimes slept on a cot. Space was tight. Aunt Ruth McCurry, the teacher, came to stay every summer, bunking in the girls’ room. Stanley Ann, as an infant and toddler, lived there during World War II while her father was in the Army and her mother commuted to Wichita for work. Out back, there was a pipe yard and a net for “moonlight basketball.” Baseball was played in a nearby vacant lot. Jon Payne remembered helping his mother wash the laundry in a couple of round Maytag washers equipped with wringers and watching the sheets freeze in winter. It was an easy walk along the tree-lined brick streets into