No state monopolies on racism

Caption above done by person who scanned the photo and didn't quite realize what she was looking at. 

In commenting on my last post, Ol' Buzzard mentioned the Klan in Mississippi. I'm not going to disagree that Mississippi had lots and lots of overt bigots, but they weren't exactly unique. The North was full of sundown towns (as in  if you were black the sun had better not set while your ass was still in town), like Ironwood, Michigan. I took the train a lot when I was younger (I had a pass for free rides on the Chicago & Northwestern) and asked my dad once why the black porters never got off the train when it was standing in the Ironwood station. It routinely stood in the station long enough for the engineer, fireman, conductor, and train man to all step down, stretch their legs, and do some schmoozing with the depot agent and other locals. That's when I learned about sundown towns. This was in the early 1960's but the town still retained enough of a nasty reputation that no black train crew member was going to take a chance by setting foot on the depot platform.

Interestingly enough, when the Klan started growing in the early 20th century, it actually had more members in the North than it did in the South. The state of Indiana, if I recall correctly, had the largest number of Klan members of any state in the country. The South had individual acts of terrorism -- black men being lynched for supposed sexual assaults, houses being burned if a family seemed too uppity -- but the 20th century race riots where mobs of white racists wiped out whole neighborhoods did not take place in the Deep South. They happened in the border states, the North, or the West, e.g.. the Tulsa riot in 1921. In the South the acts of terrorism were intended to remind blacks of their proper place in society, i.e., as the servant class. In the North the goal was much more "we don't want you here" and "go back where you came from."

And, yes, we had the Klan locally. The person who scanned the historic photo above and labeled it as Odd Fellows may have genuinely believed it was Odd Fellows, but it's definitely the Ku Klux Klan. It's a high quality resolution and when you blow it up the Klan emblem (the blood drop cross) is clearly visible on the front of the robes. There were chapters of the Klan in a number of Upper Peninsula towns, although they seem to have been a phenomenon of the nativist movements of the 1920s and then faded away. Maybe it was because Michigan had a law saying you couldn't cover your face. If you look at the photo, you'll notice there are no masks. It can get a little embarrassing to be spouting hate when everyone knows exactly who you are. Or maybe it never did have much traction. It would be hard to keep an anti-immigrant (the Klan wasn't just about hating blacks; they also opposed immigration from what they considered shithole countries like Finland and Italy) group going once Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924 and the number of new immigrants from undesirable countries dropped. It would be especially hard to be anti-immigrant in an area where a huge chunk of the population consisted of fairly recent arrivals who'd managed to get off the boat before the laws changed.

Minor digression. Both of the commercial buildings shown in the photo are still standing, but both had the clapboard covered with cheap asphalt siding decades ago. The cornices are still there, though.