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FREEDOMWAYS SECOND QUARTER 1980

thousand unhooded Klansmen paraded from the Capitol to the White House to demonstrate their power. But a new mood was on the rise among its opponents, as seen in a remark by a Black present that day: "We were ready to fight if they broke ranks. We didn't know anything about nonviolence in those days."4

From its inception, the new Klan sparked a furious response from its enemies. The opening in Boston of Birth of a Nation was marked by violence. Blacks demonstrating at the theater and two throwing acid bombs at the silver screen. Police arrived to restore order and several Blacks were arrested. Mass demonstrations and meetings-in which Irish leaders, Harvard historians and others joined with Blacks-followed. The NAACP launched a major campaign against this racist movie, but it did not meet with success.5

In 1922, the Klan began a membership drive and within a year anti-Klan forces had mobilized in various locations. Whites and Blacks, ministers and laymen, Protestants, Catholics and Jews often united to combat the spread of the KKK. In Chicago, the American Unity League was formed by Catholics and Jews with the black clergyman, Bishop Samuel Fallows of the Reformed Episcopal Church, as Honorary Chairman. The A.U.L. published 150,000 copies of Tolerance weekly and initiated boycott campaigns against known Klan merchants. The Chicago City Council, prodded to investigate Klan membership among its city employees, appointed a committee that included a Catholic chairman, a Black, a Norwegian, a Pole and a Jew. That same year in Dallas, Texas, 23 Protestants, a Catholic and a Jew organized a public meeting to oppose Klan threats to law and order. Five thousand citizens attended and spilled out onto the streets. The meeting voted to form the Dallas Citizens League to oppose the Klan.6

In 1923, anti-Klan forces in various places massed for action. In Maryland in February, arosnists stormed Baltimore's Thomas Dixon Klavern of the KKK (named in honor of the author of The Clansmen, the novel that became the movie Birth of a Nation). The next month, citizens of Brooklyn, New York, tried to raid a KKK meeting at the First Baptist Church. By the summer's end, the violence had spread to other cities and on September 1, 1923, the New York times commented editorially: "At Steubenville, Binghamton, Pittsburgh and Perth Amboy there has been rioting of a grave character in which parading Klansmen have been stoned and beaten."

The most extensive mayhem took place in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and indicates both the fury of anti-Klan forces and the degree of unity they forged. The Klan scheduled a meeting at the Odd Fellows' Hall and some 3,000 irate citizens turned out to voice their anger toward them. Outside the hall, Police Chief Touneson