By DWIGHT HOBBES
Mention the KKK and your next thought probably is its history of hunting, harassing and hanging black folk. However, it didn’t start there – at least not in Minnesota. African Americans simply became these terrorists’ preferred target (a black woman, Beulah Mae Donald, it turns out, bankrupted the organization in court). Before black people, Elizabeth Dorsey Hatle’s The Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota (The History Press) documents, it was Germans. That would eventually include Catholics, Jews and just about everybody who wasn’t them – working class Protestants.
Newspapers like the Waseca Herald, Anoka Herald and Owatonna Journal-Chronicle helped things, along with Hollywood propagandist hit film, The Birth of a Nation, (originally titled The Clansman) aiding the cause. Which, importantly, selective law enforcement and slick politicians insidiously empowered. Earle Brown, for instance, qualified on both accounts. As Hennepin County Sheriff, he told a 1923 grand jury he infiltrated the Klan but, Hatle writes, “[He] did nothing during his tenure to stop the Minneapolis…chapters from meeting or burning their crosses in Hennepin County.” The city had at least 10 chapters. Also, while it was hardly a forerunner of the women’s movement, the WKKK had female members. “Mary Edmond was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and she is in [a] photograph of the Claremont Presbyterian Church; men and women belonging to the church posed in front of the church…in their Klan regalia.” For that matter, more than a few Minnesotans’ idea of that proverbial old time religion embraced the invisible empire. “Methodist bishop T. Otto Nall wrote of a state meeting of Minnesota Methodist ministers where instead of attending to Methodist Church annual business, the ministers from across the state marched in a Klan parade.”
The Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota is 159 pages of detailed information including recounting an event that made national news. In 1920, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie were jailed in Duluth for allegedly raping and robbing Irene Tusken. Newspapers printed articles, loose talk spread, including the concoction that she was dying of her injuries. Never mind that her physician Dr. David Graham found evidence of neither rape nor any other sort of assault. Race hatred was all it took to incite a thousands-strong mob to break the men out of jail and string them up from a lamppost. No one, of course, was prosecuted.
Granted, there is no Klan left hereabouts. Hatle notes, though, “The Southern Poverty Law Center listed twelve hate groups in Minnesota.” This is the most in the Midwest. Such rabid racism is generally associated with the South’s sordid track record for man’s inhumanity against man. Well, it’s a matter of record that the North’s hands have never been clean. That includes this state where, today, protest after protest has decried institutionalized racism. The Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota digs up and lays bare, quite arguably, its roots.
Dwight Hobbes is a long-time Twin Cities journalist and essayist.
