KKK lynched over 4,000 after Civil War. So what if they were once accused unjustly
In 1943 I had no idea journalism was in my future, yet even as a fourth-grader I loved to scan the Tulsa World. Awake early one day, I popped out on the front porch to collect the paper and discovered a contraption of lumber swathed in charred fabric reeking of kerosene.
I ran inside to wake my dad, August Hammer, who swiftly dragged the strange apparatus — just a couple of 2-by-4’s nailed together — to the backyard and broke it up. Somebody had burned a cross in our front yard, then, probably disappointed that no one was even awake to see it, tossed it onto the porch.
Dad figured the Ku Klux cross-burners hated him because he was a German immigrant. He said we should just keep quiet about it. By then an American citizen, father had come 15 years earlier from that world-historical monster nation just then savaging humanity with the cruelest war in human history.
The U.S. population then included more than 1.2 million persons born in Germany, 5 million with two native-German parents, and 6 million with one German parent (me included). Out of America’s tiny population of Japanese origin, we incarcerated 113,000 people but only 11,000 ethnic Germans, not including my father. Did we go easier on Germans because of their white skin?
I have a friend whose birth name was Snyder. She suspects it was once “Schneider,” the German occupational name for a tailor, literally “cutter.”
America being a nation almost entirely made up of foreigners and nevertheless suspicious of them, we often conceal our identities.
But can any nation on earth equal us for sheer variety: white and Black and brown and tan and gay and straight and trans, Europeans of many skin colors, Asians and Africans similarly diverse, plus countless religions. Nations fought each other to the death for freedom to practice those religions, but not here, thanks mainly to the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
But, gee, what about individuals who possess several of these identities, white and trans, Black and gay, plus to add complication, Catholic or Buddhist or Muslim or Hindu or Unitarian or Anglican or Methodist? On which basis may we discriminate against those with multiple selves?
One afternoon when women were in surplus and men scarce at a Johnson County tea dance, some attendees felt uneasy watching two ladies dance with each other. Soon two sets of women were dancing together.
Then a tall heroic fellow stepped forward to cut in as the arrangement coalesced into a circular hands-holding swirl, someone shouting in celebration: “One guy dancing with four women!” Just a bunch of Americans, older Americans, defying rules of identity to enjoy the 21st century.
Turns out that even the “Ku Klux” outbreak in 1943 was not as bad as we thought. My childhood best friends were four brothers, one of whom, became a Kansas City weather forecaster.
When my wife and I moved here in 1958 with no friends, my friend invited us to water ski behind his power boat. He was often kind to us. Then he was killed in a tragic commercial plane crash.
Not long after, his younger brother dropped in at our house to recall our happy childhood together in Tulsa. Probably he had never heard about the cross-burning in the Hammer front yard, but he began to joke about his brother’s long-ago high jinks.
“You know, the dang fool got to burning crosses around the neighborhood, just for the fun of it, like Halloween. But nobody paid attention. Nobody even called the sheriff.”
His brother was disappointed, the younger brother said.
So it was just my friend, not the Klan. All those years I was telling that story, being unfair to the Klan. Their members after the Civil War led in 4,084 racial terror lynchings, most in the South but including 60 in Missouri and 19 in Kansas. Often the KKK members chopped off the victim’s toes or ears to keep as souvenirs. They stifled Black voting and took over state governments throughout the South. But in repeating that tale of Tulsa cross burning, I was so unjust to that ignorant, rotten, murderous lynch mob — the Ku Klux Klan.
I apologize.
Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.