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By Root 1687 0

the Klan rarely claimed responsibility for violence. Yet throughout the spring of 1964, telltale terrorism—the disappearance of five black men, the flogging of blacks in a bayou, the bombing of local heroes’ homes—convinced everyone in Pike County that the Klan was rising again. In the ninety years since its vigilante violence had “redeemed” the state, the Klan had rarely been strong in Mississippi. Whites there saw little need for a Klan. Blacks knew “their place,” and whites knew enough of terror to keep them in it. Only in the 1920s, when “Ku Kluxism” spread across America, did the Klan return to the Magnolia State, but courageous Delta planters had exposed its corruption, leaving the KKK dormant for decades. Then during the civil rights movement, the Klan resurged, and not just in Mississippi. By the summer of 1964, klaverns were meeting all over the South. North Carolina’s Klan had seven thousand members. A “Razorback Klan” raged in Arkansas. Fiery Klan rallies sparked violence in St. Augustine, Florida, and the Klan was spreading “like wild-fire” in Louisiana. Mississippi, as its legacy of lynching proved, had plenty of vigilantes—all summer, the random beatings, threats, and other mayhem were mostly perpetrated by ordinary citizens not affiliated with any klavern. But it took the Klan’s deadly mix of religion, eugenics, and paranoia to turn freelance bigotry into a holy war. Several months before Freedom Summer, a new Klan offshoot began infecting the “Sovereign Realm of Mississippi.”

The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi had a mission as righteous as that of their ancestors. The mission was explained by The Klan Ledger, a pamphlet distributed that Fourth of July. “We are now in the midst of the ‘long, hot summer’ of agitation which was promised to the Innocent People of Mississippi by the savage blacks and their communist masters,” the pamphlet began. The Ledger went on to denounce “the so-called ‘disappearance’ ” of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. Any fool “so simple that he cannot recognize a communist hoax which is as plain as the one they pulled on Kennedy in Dallas” was urged to read J. Edgar Hoover’s treatise on communism, Masters of Deceit. The White Knights, the Ledger said, had taken no action—yet. Klansmen were “NOT involved” in the disappearance—“there was NO DISAPPEARANCE.” However . . . “We are not going to sit back and permit our rights and the rights of our posterity to be negotiated away by a group composed of atheistic priests, brainwashed black savages, and mongrelized money-worshipers, meeting with some stupid or cowardly politician. Take heed, atheists and mongrels, we will not travel your path to a Leninist Hell. . . . Take your choice, SEGREGATION, TRANQUILITY AND JUSTICE OR, BI-RACISM, CHAOS AND DEATH.”

Bombs and floggings were the hallmarks of the Pike County Klan, but the Neshoba klavern had other ways of making its presence known. From the day after the “so-called ‘disappearance,’ ” the Klan was a secret shared all over Philadelphia, Mississippi. Locals speculated on which tight-lipped farmers, which hot-tempered businessmen, which brutal cops, had joined the klavern. Though Klansmen were supposed to change meeting locations and park their cars at least a block away, the same volatile white men were regularly seen entering the Steak House Café near the Neshoba County courthouse. Locals called them “the goon squad.” In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, the Steak House Café became a private club with white sheets draped over windows. Other suspected Klan haunts included certain downtown barbershops, diners, and drugstores. In the white community, suspicion spread when the FBI repeatedly summoned some lean, leather-necked trucker—or his uncle—to the Delphia Courts Motel. Across the railroad tracks, blacks heard whenever a maid found white robes in her boss’s closet. But Klansmen alone knew just how the Klan operated and where it would strike next.

A Klansman’s weapons were as blunt as dynamite and as cheap as gasoline, but Mississippi’s White Knights had four explicit tactics