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FREEDOMWAYS                              SECOND QUARTER 1980

themselves Knights of the Flaming Circle and asked their members to leave their women and children at home. At the south end of Niles, they established a checkpoint and chased arriving Klansmen from their cars, trying to tear off their sheets.  Bloodshed and casualties mounted and the sheriff, unable to restore order, summoned the National Guard.
   In Queens, New York, during the 1927 Memorial Day parade, a similar incident took place. Controversy ensued when the Klan was granted the right to march with others. The Boy Scouts immediately withdrew and the Knights of Columbus organized a disruption of the Klan march. During the four-mile cavalcade, Klansmen were jeered from the sidewalk and several efforts were made to drive cars into their line. A series of scuffles escalated into a wild melee as charging residents stripped Klansmen of their sheets and drove them from the parade.
   History has a way, with some alterations, of repeating itself. When in our own time a white worker in Plains, Georgia, drove his car into a KKK rally, or black and white youths in Columbus, Ohio, stripped Klansmen of their robes, they were duplicating earlier resistance to the hooded order and its bigotry. They carried on a tradition that stated communities do not have to suffer hate and divisiveness of the KKK in silence.

                       REFERENCES

1. Report on the Alleged Outrages in the Southern States by the Select Committee of the Senate, North Carolina (Washington, D.C., 1871), p. 10.

2. William Loren Katz, Eyewitness: The Negro in American History (Pittman, New York, 1974 revised edition), p. 271.

3. Ibid, pp. 257-258.

4. Ibid, p. 398.

5. Thomas R. Cripps, "The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture Birth of a Nation." The Historian, XXV (May, 1963), pp. 344-62.

6. Resistance to the KKK during the 1920s can be found in the pages of the New York Times and somewhat fully in Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (Oxford University Press, 1967).