Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [74]
On tour in North Carolina, the singer Bessie Smith formed her own anti-Klan league. One of her performers went outside during a show and found six Klansmen trying to collapse the tent—in the South, black artists traveled on their own trains and performed in their own tents, rather than in public halls, from which they were banned. Hearing what had happened, Bessie came out and confronted the men, one hand on her hip and shaking the other at them. “What the fuck you think you’re doin’? I’ll get the whole damn tent out here if I have to. You just pick up them sheets and run!” The Klansmen would not move at first, but as Smith continued to scream obscenities at them they faded into the night. She turned back to the watching prop boys: “I ain’t never heard of such shit. And as for you, you ain’t nothing but a bunch of sissies.”
In October 1921 one former Klansman from east Tennessee, Henry Fry, revealed his experiences as a member of the Ku Klux Klan to the New York World. Over the past twenty years, Fry said, he had joined the Masons, the Knights of Pythias, the Odd Fellows, the Red Men, the United American Mechanics, the Royal Arcanum, the Woodmen, the Elks, the Eagles, the Owls, and the Theatrical Mechanics’ Association. In January 1921 he had added one more society to his list: the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
At first Fry found his fellow Klansmen normal, churchgoing, prosperous family men, but he quickly noticed that the Klan gave them a license to lawless behavior which he could not condone. “The mere fact of being a member of an organization that can go abroad in the land white-robed and masked is a suggestive force that encourages men to take the law into their own hands.” As time went by, he began to realize that the organization was less fraternal than political, masking its profit-making objectives with badly written, pseudo-religious ritual and seeking to achieve its aims locally by stirring up prejudice and hatred.
After watching a local Klan leader, a doctor, make a speech attacking blacks, Jews and Catholics, and urging the Klan to “organize and arm itself for the purpose of protecting the city” from the “murderous” designs of the Catholics, Fry resigned his membership. He found the rhetoric overblown and deluded. Not only were there very few Jews or Catholics in his area, but the black population was hard-working and well respected. Klan assertions that white supremacy was a “sacred constitutional right” sat uneasily with him.
Fry listed a series of Klan crimes to the New York World. These included, at random: “April 1, 1921—Alexander Johnson, a Negro bell boy, of Dallas, Texas, was taken out by masked men, whipped, and the letters ‘K.K.K.’ burned on his forehead with acid. He was said to have associated with white women . . . April 26, 1921—At Houston, Texas, J. W. McGee, an automobile salesman, was whipped by masked men for annoying high school girls…July 12, 1921—At Enid, Okla., Walter Billings, a motion-picture operator, was given a coating of cotton and crude oil, after being whipped by masked men.”
In all, the World reported that “four killings, one mutilation, one branding with acid, forty-one floggings, twenty-seven tar and feather parties, five kidnappings, forty-three individuals warned to leave town or otherwise threatened, fourteen communities threatened by posters, sixteen parades of masked men with warning placards” had taken place during the period from October 1920 to October 1921.
The World also exposed the corruption at the head of the Klan, revealing very un-Klan-like behavior on the parts of Edward Clarke and Bessie Tyler. Clarke’s previous investigation for embezzlement was revealed, as was his having abandoned his wife for Tyler and their having been arrested together by the police for disorderly conduct. Loyal Klansmen in Atlanta bought all 3,000 copies of the World in an effort to prevent the story from spreading. The Klan’s own weekly newsletter declared that the attacks upon Tyler showed that America’s pure womanhood was “unsafe from the millionaire