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By Root 1761 0

efforts of the Jews, the Catholics and the foreign-born, the Klan may expect the battle of its life. If actual bloodshed is desired, then the allies are prepared to do battle. If the war is a social and industrial one, then the allies are ready to meet that kind of warfare. The common enemy will drive the common allies together.” Still, they found it difficult to match their rhetoric with action in the rigged political machinery of middle America. In January 1923, the anti-KKK coalition petitioned Nebraska’s state legislature to outlaw citizens from holding public meetings while “in disguise to conceal their identities” and to require local police to protect individuals accused of crimes while in their custody. The bill easily passed the state house, sixty-five votes to thirty-four, but failed to garner the necessary two-thirds majority in the state senate, where Klan supporters ensured its failure.

By 1923, two to three million white Americans—including such rising politicians as Hugo Black of Alabama, and later Robert Byrd of West Virginia—had joined the Klan, and it had become a force in national politics. The secret organization ran its members in both the Democratic and Republican parties, holding the balance of power in many state legislatures and hundreds of city councils. Their significant presence led Garvey to extrapolate that the KKK was both the face and soul of white America. “The Ku Klux Klan is the invisible government of the United States,” he told his followers at Liberty Hall in 1922, and it “represents to a great extent the feelings of every real white American.” Given this, he reasoned, it was only common sense to negotiate with them, and so he did, taking an infamous meeting with Klan leader Edward Young Clarke. From a practical standpoint, the groups shared considerable common ground, with both the KKK and the UNIA opposing interracial marriage and social intercourse between the races. However, many prominent Garveyites directly challenged Garvey’s initiative, or simply broke from the UNIA in disgust. Even more members criticized their organization’s chaotic business practices such as the Black Star Line, condemning the authoritarian way it was run. Many former UNIA members rallied around the leadership of Reverend Eason, who now created his own group, the Universal Negro Alliance, and whose popularity in some quarters exceeded Garvey’s. Loyal Garveyites responded by isolating or, in some cases, eliminating their critics. In late 1922, Eason traveled to New Orleans to mobilize his supporters. After delivering an address at the city’s St. John’s Baptist Church, surrounded by hundreds of admirers, he was attacked by three gun-wielding assailants, shot in the back and through the forehead. He clung to life for several days, finally dying on January 4, 1923. There is no evidence directly linking Garvey to the murder; several key loyalists, including Amy Jacques Garvey, his articulate and ambitious second wife, were far more ruthless than their leader and may have been involved in Eason’s assassination.

Neither dissension within the UNIAʹs national leadership nor their leaderʹs erratic ideological shifts discouraged Louise and Earl. The young couple’s life was hard; they had few resources, and Louise had given birth to two more children—Hilda in 1922 and Philbert in 1923. Earl supplemented the family’s needs by hiring himself out for carpentry work; he shot game fowl with his rifle, and raised rabbits and chickens in their backyard. But his constant agitation on behalf of Garvey’s cause led local blacks to fear KKK reprisals against their community. Earl’s UNIA responsibilities occasionally required him to travel hundreds of miles; during one such trip, in the winter of 1925, hooded Klansmen rode out to the Little home in the middle of the night. Louise, pregnant again, bravely stepped onto her front porch to confront them. They demanded that Earl come out of the house immediately. Louise told them that she was alone with her three small children and that her husband was away, preaching, in Milwaukee.