The Pastor and the Klan

Growing Up under Southern Apartheid, Part 11

Ku Klux Klan Rally in Opelika, 1925
(Photo from The Encyclopedia of Alabama)

My grandfather was a Baptist preacher who pastored churches in South Alabama’s Black Belt region during the first half of the 20^th century. Churches in that day were often simple clapboard structures built with pride by hard-working people. They would gather in those churches to sing beloved hymns such as “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Blessed Assurance,” and “Amazing Grace.” Since he died over a decade before I was born, my knowledge of my grandfather comes through my mother’s recollections – that and a notebook of his containing the sermons he preached. 

Poverty and humility have long been considered Christian virtues, and that was certainly the case in my grandfather’s day. It was said that one of the deacons in his church would pray, “Protect our pastor in your love, Lord. We’ll keep him poor if you’ll keep him humble.”

The KKK Comes Calling

One of my mother’s early memories of her father involves an encounter with the Ku Klux Klan. This would have been in the 1920s. According to The Encyclopedia of Alabama, the KKK rapidly increased in its popularity and influence in the 1920s by cultivating alliances with industrialists as well as Black Belt planters. They would raise funds to support local community organizations such as schools, libraries, and churches – their ulterior motive being to promote white supremacy. “By the mid-1920s, the Klan claimed to represent Alabama's social and economic elite: lawyers, newspaper editors, educators, physicians, business leaders, judges, Masons, bankers, ministers, and politicians (1).” Indeed, it was a period in Alabama’s history when politicians sought Klan support, or even membership, in order to get elected to state and local offices.

My mother recalled that at that time, the Klan would often supply pulpit Bibles for churches and would support ministers with cash to supplement their meager ministerial salaries. The encounter she recalled happened one Sunday night during the evening church service. She said she was a small child at the time. Her account is a little more detailed than one would expect from a child, so I suspect that the incident must have been a frequent topic for discussion in her family. On that night, a group of men wearing white robes and hoods arrived unannounced, marching into the church during the middle of the service. Such an unexpected disruption by men in full Klan regalia must have had a startling effect on the people gathered for worship. The hooded leader went up to the pulpit where my grandfather was preaching to offer him an envelope filled with cash. My grandfather, as my mother recalls, shook his head, giving no verbal response, but refusing the offering from the Klan. The Klansman then forcefully brandished the envelope, emphasizing that it was intended that the preacher receive it. My mother recalled the uneasy tension that seemed to fill the room. When my grandfather again refused the envelope, the Klan then marched out of the church, their motives having been thwarted.

I have no idea where the church was that the Klan encounter took place. Knowing the South, my grandfather’s actions did nothing to change any attitudes on race. Segregation in the South in the 1920s was the accepted norm. What his actions did show was that there was one preacher who would give no credence to the authoritarian views or acts of violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan. 

A Country Preacher’s Message

My grandfather was born in the mid-1880s. He came from a farming family (as did most in those days). He must have been a man of some vision and determination in that he went to college and seminary at a time when higher education was not the norm.

I mentioned that some of my limited knowledge of my grandfather comes from his own leather-bound notebook containing his sermons. My mother passed the notebook on to me before she died. The sermons are not written out in full, but in an outline form with major points listed numerically similar to what we might think of as “bullet points” today.  I imagine that a well-honed preacher could take the notes from any one of those two-page outlines and expand them with a message shaped to relate to any particular congregation he might stand before. That notebook also records where he preached. In the upper margin, he wrote the names of places where each sermon had been delivered probably to ensure that if he preached there again, he would not repeat a message already proclaimed.

Looking through my grandfather’s sermons, he covers topics of life and faith, with titles such as “The Commonplace Life Glorified,” “Christ, the Way the Truth and the Life,” “Death Is Swallowed Up,” and “The Wonderful Teacher.” He also has a few notes indicating that he was one to keep his eye open to analogies of faith seen in everyday life. Here are two of his anecdotes:   

In the summer of 1912, while making the trip from Coffeeville to Cunningham by river, one of the deckhands on the lower deck was sounding the depths along the shoal and calling out, “9, 3, 6,” etc. “Deeper to the right…deeper to the left.” The pilot kept in the deepest water.  So God puts his children over life’s sea with Christ as their pilot, in deepest mercy and grace.

Sept. 26, 1921, while walking down the street in the town of Grove Hill, Ala., I reached down and picked up my little four-year-old boy who was weak and worn out. He threw his arms around my neck, patted me on the back and said, “I did not ask you to do that, Daddy.” God the father does many things for us we do not ask for.

Then and Now

In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was finding a renewed stronghold, not just in the South, but throughout America (2). During that time, my grandfather was confronted with a choice.  The Klan was offering a monetary reward and all he had to do in return was to continue with his ministerial role.  He must have known that buying into what the Klan was offering would exact a greater price from his soul. Aligning himself with such power and influence would obviously go against the grain of the life of faith and service that he had thus far forged for himself and his family.

I don’t think my grandfather suffered any repercussions from his refusal of monetary support from the Klan. Perhaps certain Klansmen might have used their influence to make his life a little better off financially, but he chose instead to live a life consistent with his core values.

Nationally, the influence of the Klan quickly waned in the 1930s with the Great Depression. They instead concentrated their efforts in the rural South rather than upon a national agenda (3). Though racism remained rampant, most people were not willing to accept the Klan’s message of hate and violence. By the 1960s, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was leading marches in Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham, though the South resisted and the Klan in the South continued unabated, the nation as a whole had enough of a conscience to realize that a change had to come.

Today, we are seeing once again a renewed effort by white supremacists to influence national policies. After Barack Obama was elected President in what many saw as a sign of racial progress, the nation erupted in a backlash of racism and hatred. We have seen the pendulum suddenly swing back, making it appear that the nation is ready to return to a day when white people may have lived free, but Black people lived in fear and oppression. The way ahead will probably not be easy, but what if a few people can live by higher values rather than capitulating to authoritarian hatred and violence? What if a few people of faith can resist buying into an unholy political alliance? Better yet, what if a significant number of people can answer to a higher calling? What if we decide to do what is right for the common good rather than seeking to preserve our own self-interests?

< Index to previous essays 

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1. From “The Ku Klux Klan in Alabama from 1915-1930,” The Encyclopedia of Alabama, at http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-3221.

2. See “When the KKK Was Mainstream,” NPR History Dept. at https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/03/19/390711598/when-the-ku-klux-klan-was-mainstream.

3. For a concise presentation of the history of the Ku Klux Klan, see "The History of the KKK in American Politics," JSTOR Daily where news meets its scholarly match at https://daily.jstor.org/history-kkk-american-politics/.

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