Missouri ‘Kimmy Schmidt’ star no KKK queen, but her story is about systemic racism

It couldn’t be true: Left-wing Twitter lost its mind Monday afternoon at rumors that one of Kansas City’s favorite success stories — actor Ellie Kemper, star of “The Office” and “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” — had been “outed as a KKK Princess.”

No, it couldn’t be true, because it isn’t. Once again proving that internet nonsense is hardly the exclusive province of the right, it turns out Kemper played a tiny role in a long-standing St. Louis ritual with a complicated history. And while her publicist now has a case of heartburn that wasn’t caused by one too many Memorial Day hot dogs, the false story that unfortunate soul has to clear up has just enough of a kernel of truth to sound plausible.

Yes, in December 1999, 19-year-old Elizabeth Claire “Ellie” Kemper was the 105th young woman crowned “Queen of Love and Beauty” at St. Louis’ Veiled Prophet Ball. That’s a ceremonial title awarded by the Veiled Prophet Organization, which says it was “founded in 1878 to promote the City of St. Louis and enrich the quality of life for its citizens.” Today, it engages in charitable activities such as raising money for the Grand Staircase at the Gateway Arch. It also sponsors the annual Fair St. Louis, known until the 1990s as the VP Fair, one of the city’s biggest July Fourth celebrations.

But Veiled Prophets has a murky backstory that many of its members would probably prefer to keep covered up. As Scott Beauchamp explained in a deeply-reported 2014 story in The Atlantic, the group was created by moneyed white elites to steal the public’s attention from an emerging new cooperative movement among Black and white laborers in the city, who were raising awareness of dangerous working conditions. The Prophets started staging Mardi Gras-styled public events, presided over by anonymous masked blue bloods, and attended through the decades by Missouri luminaries such as Margaret Truman, as a way to entertain the masses and “reinforce the values of the elite on the working class of the city,” Beauchamp wrote.

Secret societies among the well-to-do always pique the interest of those of us who would never get an invitation. Channeling the goings-on at Freemason meetings or the annual Bohemian Grove confab in Monte Rio, California — which Bill Clinton once described as “where all those rich Republicans go up and stand naked against redwood trees, right?” — it’s easy to imagine all sorts of nefarious plotting.

Because the Veiled Prophets are so clandestine, it didn’t take any time for Twitter to assume the group’s membership overlaps with the Ku Klux Klan’s. There’s no evidence that’s the case, though secret racist cliques do exist. I’m still reeling from when a particularly beloved East Texas friend, several beers into college graduation celebrations, confided to me that he was a Klansman. “It’s not what you think,” he explained, and “you’d never believe how many other people you know are in it.”

Many of these furtive groups are about maintaining white Americans’ tight grip over institutional power. And regardless of how they may have evolved, origins matter. Planned Parenthood was established by a racist eugenicist. The crackpot founder of chiropractic treatment claimed a ghost taught him its techniques at a seance.

In 1878, the Emancipation Proclamation was just 16 years old. Black people in St. Louis had no path to Veiled Prophet membership, just as they had no access to good schools or jobs at the top of the banking, fossil fuel or manufacturing sectors that created the familial wealth that’s handed down generation after generation.

Ellie Kemper is the daughter of David Woods Kemper and great-great-granddaughter of William Thornton Kemper Sr. — as in Kemper Arena, Commerce Bancshares, United Missouri Bank. Her father David Kemper was chairman of Commerce Bank. Her journey to an honor from one of Missouri’s oldest and most furtive social clubs isn’t even a remote possibility for the vast majority of us, least of all those who are Black. African Americans make up 13.4% of the population, but own only 4% of the wealth. White Americans are 60% of us, and hold 84% of our wealth. Since they were freed from slavery, Black Americans have been systematically shorted in education, real estate, banking and more. The privileged have a vested interest in keeping us in the dark about that history. Raise your hand if you knew about the 1921 white terrorist massacre that killed and destroyed the homes and livelihoods of Black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, before congressional testimony from its survivors shocked the nation last month.

And that’s why all the Fox News wailing about teaching our kids critical race theory — teaching them, in other words, about the racial inequities woven into our justice, educational and financial systems — is so tragically misguided.

No, Ellie Kemper was not a teen Grand Wizard’s handmaiden. But she is the unimaginably lucky beneficiary of a heritage that gave her stepping stones that only a tiny few among us can even see in the water.

This story was originally published June 2, 2021 at 5:00 AM.