In July 1924, Oren Van Loon, a white minister in Michigan, posed for a news photographer, who focused his lens on the letters “KKK” branded into Van Loon’s back. Intrarracial violence—white supremacist violence against whites—was a significant threat to whites in both the Jim Crow South and the North. The case of Van Loon reflects, in ways that conventionally defined lynching images do not, the intraracial violence that was integral to white supremacist terror and dominance.
Van Loon was not an anti-racist agitator, and had even allowed the KKK to hold meetings in his church. Van Loon had criticized secret societies and the practice of cross-burning, but not the “100 percent Americanism” ideology, nor the interracial and intraracial violence of the KKK. Van Loon’s criticism of the Klan did not challenge the white supremacy at the heart of the Klan’s project, yet they still drugged and kidnapped him, tortured and branded him as both a punishment and a warning to other whites who might challenge the Klan, not just in terms of racial ideology, but in terms of their patriarchal dominance that entitled them to do, in their view, whatever they wanted to do. At the hospital, police guarded his room in case the Klan planned to torment the pastor further. Van Loon claimed to not remember anything about the incident. His hair, which had been gray before his abduction and eleven-day ordeal, had turned white.
Van Loon’s case illustrates an important aspect of white supremacist violence: its thoroughgoing paranoia about any challenge to white male dominance and the terrorist organizations who took it upon themselves to preserve it. Lynching, historically, has been a term that refers not just to hanging, but also to whippings and floggings, tar and feathering, branding, as well as any combination of these. While visual culture scholars have often claimed that lynching photographs, which often circulated in the form of postcards, functioned to threaten blacks and consolidate white identity and community, I am in the process of writing a quite long essay in which I argue that such events and images necessarily threatened whites with violence as well. In order to understand how and why, we must begin to uncover a mostly forgotten history, one in which folks like Van Loon rise up from the footnotes of the past. In the process, we begin to see that white supremacist terrorism victimized whites and blacks in both the North and the South.
White supremacist violence is and was a patriarchal violence, and is thus entangled with the domestic violence rampant in the United States since before its founding, a violence that reproduces the concentration of power in male hands and most often damages women and children. This means, then, that lynchings, even of black men and women, always carried a supplemental threat to whites who would dare disobey the ever-shifting protocols of white supremacist patriarchy. In the early and mid-1920s, the Klan “not infrequently” targeted whites, “Protestants and females who were considered ‘immoral’ or ‘traitors’ to their race or gender,” including an Alabama divorcee, “flogged for the ‘crime’ of remarrying then given a jar of Vaseline for her wounds.” The Klan attacked other adults for “immorality and failure to go to church,” and even lashed girls for “riding in automobiles with young men.”
Lynching photographs could never only function to threaten blacks in an environment where white supremacists regularly inflicted floggings and beatings on whites as well. Threat doesn’t work so neatly. In his singular essay, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat,” Brian Massumi explains that “the affective reality of threat is contagious.” Even a young white woman cheering at a lynching of a black man would have also been subject to patriarchal violence herself. Thus she could not have wholly inoculated her psyche against the supplemental threat of violence that issued from the male hands knotting the noose, pouring the kerosene, flashing the castration knife, shooting holes of daylight through a torso charred. Those were the same hands that bruised her ribs; that knife was the same knife that opened her flesh in places she had to bind and keep hidden. In short, the unspeakably violent men before her carried their terrible capacity with them at all times, and she knew that, and they knew she knew that, and so what Massumi calls the “threat-environment” grew thicker for whites as well in the wake of lynching spectacles, and as lynching postcards and other mementos circulated. The whites in the crowd lived with the hyperviolent white supremacists carrying out the torture and death-work. These men were their brothers, supervisors, lovers, co-workers, classmates, family friends, uncles, cousins, perpetrators.
There is relatively little in the way of a photographic history of white supremacist violence against whites, though there is a significant amount of textual evidence. The “KKK Folder” in the massive Bettmann Archive of images, which I visited a few years ago, contains no images that portray physical violence, besides the image of Van Loon. But it does contain one image of “James A. Colescott, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan” as he reads a newspaper story about his subpoena to appear before a grand jury investigating a rash of floggings in East Point, GA. In the photo, the headline of the front page is legible: “Ku Klux Chief Is Called by Grand Jurors For Questioning in Flogging Probe Here.” The investigation of the floggings in East Point began after the flogging and death of Ike Gaston, a white barber.
According to an oral history interview with Daniel Duke, the principle investigator for the grand jury, Gaston was “a drinker and he drank and he didn’t look after his family but was a likeable fellow.” The KKK “decided to discipline him for not looking after his family. So they carried him out there on March 3, 1940, I think. So the next morning they found his body partially frozen, it was cold, with this big whip with the Klan thing carved on it with cleats on it.” A few reporters, along with Captain Jordan from the county police force and a detective, began investigating the case. The coroner on the Gaston case, Paul Donahue, held a hearing for anyone who had been flogged. Duke recounts:
“Of course, the press and all the papers were there. The Constitution and The Journal were separate papers then and The Atlanta Georgian. They had their cameras and they had everything there. Donahue put out a call that anybody that had been flogged to come to that hearing. Two or three people showed up. A fellow named Young, I’ll always remember him because I was asking the questions and of course, they had the evidence of the KKK with the whip there and the pictures of Ike Gaston where they showed he had been beaten so severely, dead, they took it off his body. They put Young up there. Young said, “I was flogged with this whip.” How do you know, Mr. Young? He said, “I can pull my britches down and I can show you the cleat marks.” So he pulled his pants down right there and the cameras got him. They had a picture in the paper of his back end with those cleat marks. So that cut the thing loose.”
As people continued to come forward, it became clear that flogging had affected a number of whites, not just Gaston and Young, and it is very likely that more were affected than came forward.
The local press invited anyone who had suffered a flogging to come to Duke and tell him about it. He recalled: “Well, they came in, a few blacks came but most of them were white. Several whites came and they would be almost defiant and they’d say, ‘[W]e don’t believe you’re going to do anything, we’ve done been down here.’” The Klan captured one man while visiting a girlfriend that was also romantically involved with a member of the Klan, so “one Sunday afternoon and they grabbed him and they darn near killed him.” He told Duke that when he went to the courthouse to report the beating, the officer taking his report “was in on the flogging,” that he “recognized his voice, he was a tall man.” Duke investigated the man’s claims and found them to be accurate: “I called and wanted to know who was on that desk down there…He fit the description. We wound up indicting three or four deputy sheriffs. We sent three of them to the penitentiary.”
In his memoir of his infiltration of the Georgia Klan, The Klan Unmasked, ethnographer and activist Stetson Kennedy describes his first meeting on the “flog squad” that carried out the attacks in East Point. Though their most recent flogging had been a black man who had the habit of “jostling” white women at the bus stop, all of their upcoming targets were white men from the North who came south to do union organizing. Such attacks on union organizers were not uncommon amongst white supremacist organizations. In November 1917, the Knights of Liberty kidnapped and assaulted sixteen members of the International Workers of the World (IWW), an incident that became known as “The Tulsa Outrage.” The black-robed Knights lined the “Wobblies” up at gunpoint, lashed their backs with a hemp rope one-by-one, “then applied hot tar and feathers from a slit pillow.”
The images of Van Loon’s brand and the Imperial Wizard holding the newspaper point to the pervasiveness of intraracial violence in the era of Jim Crow, and represent a larger archive of historical material that has been virtually ignored in many histories of racial violence, and in particular, in scholarly literature on lynching images. In 1950, Tabor City, North Carolina experienced over dozen terror attacks. In one instance, the Klan kidnapped a white man and woman, forced them “to bend over a car fender,” then beat them “with a machine belt nailed to a pick handle. Between blows, the victims were made to pray, and listen to sermons and hymn singing from the Klansmen.” An August 11, 1952 Time article reports a rash of floggings by the KKK in Columbus County, N.C. in 1951. The first victim was a thirty-eight-year-old black woman: they gagged her with her slip, “tied her legs [to] plow lines and beat her with sticks and gun butts” for the vague offense of “running around with white men.” But the overwhelming majority of victims in this instance—ten out of thirteen—were white, punished for varied crimes as defined by the Klan, such as “not attending church regularly, cursing near women,” or “drinking too much.”
The subjection of whites to intraracial violence proliferated a feeling of threat amongst whites in areas with a strong Klan presence. Intraracial violence and the threat-environment it created has a historical legacy that, like interracial violence, stretches back to the tense days of the mid-19th century and beyond. The 1920s Indiana Klan had predecessors in the whitecappers that would flog women sadistically from the 1850s to 1889, leaving their victims nearly dead for sexually impropriety. Other predecessor organizations that inflicted intraracial violence were the Know-Nothings and the Horse Thief Detective Association, whose members were recruited when the Klan first organized in Indiana. The Indiana Klan’s calling card in the Roaring Twenties placed little emphasis on racial dominance or the specific threat of black men to white womanhood: “Remember, every criminal, every gambler, every thug, every libertine, every girl ruiner, every home wrecker, every wife beater, every dopepeddler, every shyster lawyer, every K of C [Knight of Columbus], every white slaver, every brothel madame, every Rome-controlled newspaper—is fighting the KKK.”
In her book Women and the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s, Kathleen M. Blee details how threats in the form of a letter or visit from Klansmen were highly effective in Indiana, so much so that “physical attacks on offending persons were less common” there, because the Klan, nationally, had such a reputation for violence. One white resident in Warren, Indiana, recounted that “in spite of no record of violence there was a general feeling of fear, mystery, and power associated with the Warren Klan. Young girls were warned never to get into a car with men—especially men wearing white hoods!’” By way of conclusion, I want to leave you with two images (here and here) that I will write more about later, but for now it reinforces my point that the incredible violence threatening blacks must have created a shock wave in consciousness for the whites witnessing it, being taught to feel protected by it, to feel safe because the men you knew best wouldn’t hesitate to abduct and dismember someone on your behalf, and laugh all the while.
Sources for this post include:
JoEllen McNergney Vinyard, Right in Michigan’s Grassroots: From the KKK to the Michigan Militia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 2012. 78. “Branded Pastor Leaves the Hospital.” Gettysburg Times, July 15 1924. “Memory of Branded Pastor Still Blank,” The Naples Record, July 16, 1924. The Southern Poverty Law Center, Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism and Violence, 6th Edition (Montgomery: The Southern Poverty Law Center, 2011), 20. Southern Poverty Law Center, Klan, 20. “Oral History Interview with Daniel Duke, August 22, 1990.” Interview A-0366. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 263-267. Stetson Kennedy, “I Work My Way Into the Flog Squad” in The Klan Unmasked (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1990), 95-105. His memoir was originally published under the title I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan in 1942. Nigel Anthony Sellars, Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905-1930 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 1998. 108. “Crackdown on the Klan,” Time, February 25, 1952. “A Flogging for the Klan.” Time, August 11, 1952. Michael Newton. The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: A History (Jefferson: McFarland & Company: 2010), 27-34, 60-61, 83-86, 106, 151. Kathleen M. Blee, Women and the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1991), 179.