(Plus, one piece of hearsay.)
When I was in high school, I remember a day I came into the school hall and saw my friends gathered around my boyfriend Virgil.
Virgil
“What’s up?” I asked someone.
“Someone put a Klan flyer in Virgil’s parent’s mailbox!”
“No way,” I said, and I joined the line of teenagers waiting to view the flyer. Virgil was holding on to it like a sixth-grade boy with porn and we filed past just as curiously. We all knew the Klan was a shameful organization, possibly illegal even, and in particular we wanted to know what Virgil’s parents had done to make the Klan think they wanted or needed this flyer.
“I think everyone in the subdivision got one,” he said. (In an odd aside, Gary’s parents are still in that same subdivision. I’ll have to see if Virgil’s defense of his parents holds water.)
I read it as long as it took me to find the typical Klan rhetoric, and then I stopped. It was especially sinister because it was poorly produced, cheap paper and only red and black ink. In fact, it was almost identical to a Klan flyer recently distributed to the townspeople of Martinsville, Indiana.
(I’m sure there were a gaggle of schoolkids in the hall of their integrated school staring in horror at the Klan publication, just as we did over thirty years ago.)
A few years later, Mom was driving me for the first time to my dorm in Bloomington Indiana, and somewhere between Highway 70 and IU there was a lovely state park, and a rustic brown wood city-council approved sign that said – and my memory of the words may be fuzzy here:
Welcome to Monroe County!
Birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan
“Mom! Did you see that? Mom!”
She laughed. “I don’t want you coming back from college all involved with the Klan.”
“MOM!”
“I’m just kidding. Lord.”
So, of course, when I drove what I imagine was the same road thirty years later I kept my eyes peeled for the Klan sign. It was dark, though, when we drove in, so the next day I said to the waitress at the The Village Deli, “So, I remember there was this Klan sign years ago? I saw it thirty years ago, it was by a park and it said, ‘Welcome to’ – “
“Martinsville,” said confidently.
“Really? I thought it was Monroe County. I remember being shocked they had that sign there in 1980. Tell me they took it down.”
“Yes, I think it’s gone now.” She sounded so sure it was Martinsville that when I got home I looked at a map and indeed Martinsville is by a big state park, but it would have been a little out of the way for Mom to drive.
Of course, I thought the sign might be worth a blog post and that perhaps someone in the 80s has taken a photo for me. Google Image Search found no photos, but my search on “Klan Indiana Monroe County” brought me to WIkipedia, which helped explain why Martinsville has that unjust reputation. Evidently it wasn’t a “Welcome” sign, but a murder from the 60’s that wasn’t committed by a Martinsville resident but some drifter. Probably from Saint Louis.
So THEN of course that led to a Google Search on “Indiana Klan Murder” and OH MY GOD.
If you aren’t a mentally ill person on the verge of tears, go here and read the story of Madge Oberholtzer. It is the most horrifying thing I have ever read and I ask, how is this not a major motion picture with an Academy Award performance? A murder so awful the rest of the Klan said, “I’m ashamed to be in the Klan even though no one can see my face because of this creepy hood.”
Moral: The Klan is Bad. And Stupid, because any other organization would have changed its name after that Madge Oberholtzer story.
4 responses to “A Reasoned Non-Inflammatory Report of My Personal Experience with the Ku Klux Klan”
I live around here and you have me confused as hell. A big state park near Martinsville? Really? I suppose near would be a relative term, I can’t think of a big state park anywhere near Martinsville. The birthplace of the Klan in Monroe county? No, ain’t buying it that there was such a sign. The Klan was a southern invention right after the civil war.
My great-grandfather was some kind of grand poohbah in the Klan. When I was growing up my grandparent’s next door neighbor was the state coordinator for the Klan and the American Nazi party. Oh yeah that was over 40 years ago. The Klan was quite active in Indiana. I imagine you would find that in a similar time frame it was very active in Missouri. Harry Truman, a Missourian, almost joined the Klan back when.
What irritates me is that the people of Martinsville of today must carry an unfair burden. You know like if you Muslim in-laws get to be labeled as terrorists…because golly they are Muslims.
Oh, silly, the Klan was born in Stone Mountain, Georgia, courtesy of the Confederate (surprise!) General Nathan Bedford Forrest and Friends.
When I was about 10, there was a lot of excitement in our neighborhood because the Klan was supposed to stage some sort of obscenity at a nearby crossroads. We thought it was hysterically funny (even in Richmond, in the 1960’s) because the Klan was so 1870s.
We showed up, the Klan didn’t, and we were disappointed that we had no one to jeer at.
Wow, that is horrible. What’s even worse is that my brain is imagining that he probably did that to other women and got away with it before she reported him. It makes me glad I live in the age of DNA and cell phones.
Zayrina – Damn Klan is still around in Saint Louis. Is it helpful to know that no one has this misconception about Martinsville except people in Indiana? (MY great-grandfathers were just an opium addict and a convict. Damnit.) PS – I think it was Morgan-Monroe state forest.Becs – I know, I thought it was odd at the time. But evidently there are three different Klans with three different birthplaces.Amy_in_StL – What I like is that he was BANISHED from Indiana. “Leave Indiana and never return.”