Bad News From Home: The White Knights Ride Again

By HAL CROWTHER

Sometimes coincidence and irony are so closely aligned that it’s almost possible to believe in an omnipotent stage manager somewhere, someone with a wry smile on his face who moves all the pieces around just to amuse himself and bewilder the rest of us. If you’re skeptical, I don’t blame you. But try this. Last week in Maine I picked up the Arts section of the New York Times and found, in the daily recommendations column, a play opening at the Flea Theater, an off-Broadway venue in downtown Manhattan. This play, titled “Sincerity Forever,” is described as a satire of the Ku Klux Klan in a fictional Southern town. The playwright, Mac Wellman, has long been one of the mainstays of experimental theater in the city, an avant-garde celebrity — “notorious” or “distinguished” according to your taste — whose 40-odd plays include “Seven Blowjobs” (1991).

The fictional Southern town where Wellman sets “Sincerity Forever” is named Hillsbottom, which scarcely caught my attention or provoked a smile when I looked up the play’s history online. (It was described as a satire on “the indestructible nature of ignorance.”) Two hours later, my email began to fill up with alarms and cell phone photos from neighbors in my hometown of Hillsborough, North Carolina. The trigger for their alarm, a spectacle quickly picked up by social and national media, was a Ku Klux Klan rally in front of the Orange County courthouse, two blocks from the house where I’ve lived for 24 years.

There they stood, twenty-odd authentic white supremacists, some of them actually wearing their robes and pointed hoods, lined up along Churton Street where we walk every day. Four of them were holding up a large bedsheet sort of sign that read, “Help Make America Great Again, join the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” That’s right—MAGA.

The embarrassment is intense, the personal response a major challenge. Of course a friend in Southern California emailed his sarcastic sympathy: “Are your neighbors planning a nice cross-burning for Labor Day?” A humorous reply didn’t seem appropriate. The challenge is to defend Hillsbottom — excuse me, Hillsborough — without sounding too defensive. North Carolina’s image has taken a beating lately, with our Republican legislators’ “bathroom” bill to fend off the transsexual menace, and Trump trolls in Greenville shrieking “Send her back!” to gratify the smirking president who stokes their incoherent aggression. Tar Heel country is no peaceable kingdom. Like most Southern states these dark days, we harbor a visible minority of Trump-loving, race-baiting white cretins who have been getting the signal that their hour has come. But a Klan rally just one firm five-iron from my front yard?

Sneer if you will, but a Klan sighting is no more common, no more predictable in Hillsborough than it might be in Jersey City or Palo Alto. Mac Wellman’s Hillsbottom is described as a “dirt-poor” Southern town. Our tasteful, “historic” Hillsborough, functioning capital of North Carolina during the American Revolution, is a low-profile community of old white frame houses, many of them dating from the 18th century, and old red-brick commercial buildings leased to restaurants and art galleries. Built along the Eno River where it crossed the Great Indian Trading Path, it was once a mill town, but the mills closed long ago. When it attracts attention, which is rarely, Hillsborough is noted as the home of an unusual number of writers, artists and musicians, as well as faculty from Duke and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. These residents tend to be liberals. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 3-to-1 in Hillsborough, and the village has elected a black mayor and a significant number of African Americans to local offices. Among the many historical markers along our main street are signs honoring the black jazz composer Billy Strayhorn and the emancipated slave Elizabeth Keckley, who became Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker and closest confidante. Social events, even in private homes, are noticeably integrated, at least since I moved to the village in the mid-’90s.

A hotbed of white nationalism and retro-racism we are not, and never have been. Our mayor Tom Stevens, a painter, quickly made it clear to gathering reporters that the Klansmen at the courthouse were not local—-they had driven down from Rockingham County, 50 miles away—-and not welcome. So why us, Loyal White Knights? Why were you practically standing on my lawn?

In modern North Carolina, sleepy old Hillsborough is nowhere near the epicenters of political controversy or media attention. But the history of our current collision with the Klan, as I understand it, is disturbing and symptomatic of life in a bipolar America where Neanderthals are never far away. White men carrying Confederate flags began appearing in Hillsborough several years ago when the village elders voted to remove the words “Confederate Memorial” from the local history museum. According to my neighbor Steven Petrow, writing in the Washington Post, the confrontation heated up when the local chocolatier offered free chocolates to anyone who would burn a Confederate flag. The chocolate maker received death threats, Petrow reports, and the racist Right has had Hillsborough in its rifle sights ever since.

My community’s response to the Klan rally might be described as truly inspiring: A week later 700 citizens joined in a March Against Hate, parading down King Street to the courthouse in intense late-August heat to hear a biracial slate of speakers denounce the White Knights and all they stand for. I wouldn’t have expected anything less. But depression lingers. Even in a backsliding country where various flavors of “alt-right” bigotry pose as patriotism and conservatism, the Ku Klux Klan with its long loathsome history of murder and terrorism remains a special case. To see men in Klan hoods waving a banner with a slogan copyrighted by the president of the United States is terrifying. To see them waving Confederate and American flags side-by-side, as they did in Hillsborough, would be hilarious if it wasn’t so ominous. Do any of these hooded morons understand that the men who flew the Southern Cross and the Stars and Bars were traitors, passionate committed traitors, to the Stars and Stripes? You can’t mix those flags. How have our schools failed anyone so badly that we can still produce pseudo-Confederates and Klansmen in 2019?

I guess we don’t need a Yankee smart-aleck like Mac Wellman to tell us that ignorance is toxic and eternal. But I imagine I’ve seen more Klan rallies than Wellman has — I’ve seen two or three — and they were memorable for the mixture of emotions they provoke. Anger and fear, of course, but also pity. The last time I saw the Klan march, maybe 20 years ago in the college town of Chapel Hill, it was a pitiful spectacle. Their fearsome ranks amounted to a dozen bedraggled adults, who according to one reporter (me) seemed to have about 20 good teeth among them, and an auxiliary of four or five half-starved children. You’d feel very sorry for them, if they weren’t armed and dangerous racist idiots. At the risk of class condescension, I’d classify these Klan warriors as the kind of rock-bottom perennial losers who define “the elite” as people with jobs. Imagine a life so empty of accomplishment or satisfaction that you find nothing to be proud of but your skin.

The Republican Party, which owes most of its recent electoral success to the loyalty of these incorrigibles and unteachables, no longer recognizes the term “white trash,” which in the old South was an epithet every bit as stinging as the “N-word.” The Klan, of course, has always had its own definition of “white.” It’s not just African Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans who fail to make the cut—-Jews and Catholics aren’t quite white enough either. The United States has such a rich racist tradition that it’s kind of disingenuous to profess shock and horror when a few undernourished Klansmen take to the streets. The glorification of the “Nordic” race, complete with the pseudo-science to prove its superiority, has a fancy pedigree in America. Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler both professed their admiration for the relentlessly anti-Semitic Henry Ford and for the blueblood eugenicist Madison Grant (1865-1937), author of the bestselling “The Passing of the Great Race” (1916). This upper-class racism was very much mainstream in their day. It’s wise to avoid the personal letters of some of your favorite writers from those generations. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Adams are two who recently disappointed me.

It’s easy to see why poor white people feel marginalized and alienated, and furious when sober voices point out their pathetic, illogical allegiance to a party controlled by a billionaire class that ruthlessly sucks up every last nickel of America’s wealth. It’s not so easy to see why their bitterness and wrath is so easily redirected toward minority scapegoats, and anyone whose race, culture or religion is different from their own. This is where the ancient pathology begins. What exactly are Klansmen marching for, what are they trying to say? In my profession there’s a profound and necessary commitment to the First Amendment, and I’m uncomfortable when college censors of the liberal persuasion cite student “safety” as an excuse to ban crazy ultraconservative speakers. I think a campus evening with Richard Spencer or Ann Coulter might serve as a valuable class in abnormal psychology, and provide a few guilty laughs as well. But pure racism, the raw snarling kind practiced by the Klan, doesn’t mix with free speech. It’s mental illness. It rules out dialogue. What can anyone say to damaged people whose religion is hatred?

What the fat fool in the White House has been saying to them, loud and clear, is “I’m with you.” They wear their MAGA hats. What the fool doesn’t understand—-along with history, psychology, constitutional law and climate science—-is the destructive potential of those fires he’s feeding. When a committed white nationalist like Steve Bannon can run a presidential campaign and serve as “chief strategist” for the president, the fragile membrane between “civilized,” ideological, think-tank racism and the violent kind that breeds Klansmen and mass killers is wearing very, very thin. Four decades ago in North Carolina, I watched a news video of Klan killers shooting left-wing demonstrators at point-blank range. Five of them died, including two Ivy-educated physicians. None of the killers were ever convicted.

That wasn’t in Hillsborough, but in Greensboro, just 40 miles down Route I-40. They called it the Greensboro Massacre. We’ve come a long way since then, I thought until recently. Please don’t come to Hillsborough for the cinematic thrill of seeing Klansmen in their robes. We’ve scared them off for now, I think. But most of the freaks you need to be afraid of don’t wear hoods and robes. Look around carefully. Some fires are burning out of control.

Hal Crowther’s latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards in New York in June, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. His essays were awarded Pushcart Prizes in 2014, 2018 and 2019. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2019

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