Chalfant: KKK held convention on fairgrounds in 1925

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People organized in 1909 and was seen as a threat by those who supported the status quo of racial discrimination.

African Americans dared to ask for their rights despite the discrimination of the times, after decades of the denial of rights guaranteed by the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution and frequent lynchings.

In response to these vast societal changes, William Joseph Simmons, a middle-class resident of Atlanta, started the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 at a meeting at Stone Mountain, Ga., surrounded by waving flags and a burning cross.

In 1920, Simmons hired the Southern Publicity Association to further organize the Klan. By 1921, membership in the Klan was close to 1 million.

The Klan operated not only in the former Confederate States but throughout the Midwestern states of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois and Missouri. By 1922, the Klan had organized in Pettis County, holding a meeting complete with burning cross near Hughesville in September 1922.
 
By 1925, the Klan was well established in central Missouri. Groups existed in Hughesville, Sedalia, La Monte and Windsor. That year Sedalia hosted the state convention of the Realm of Missouri, Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan.

Held in the Coliseum of the State Fairgrounds, the meeting involved conferring the Second Degree honor on 1,000 Klansmen, including 100 men from the Klans in Pettis County.

At the state convention, the Klan used a ritual book published by Simmons in 1916. A copy, called the “White Book” or “Kloran,” details the purpose and rituals of the new Klan. The book was “the property of the Ku Klux Klan” and was to be “loaned” to clubs. It was never to be “kept or carried where any person of the ‘alien’ world may chance to become acquainted with its sacred contents.”

The possessor of one Kloran neglected to return his copy and instead hid it under the floorboards of the attic of his home, where it was discovered many years later. The book reveals the purpose, rituals, lexicon and inner workings of the Klan.

The Kreed of the new Klan included recognition of the U.S. government and the Constitutional laws, which included the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling that mandated separate but equal public facilities.

The Kreed apparently neglected to recognize that the 14th Amendment had granted citizenship to all of those born in the United States and that the 15th Amendment had granted the right to vote to African-American men.

The Kreed presented itself as maintaining a “real practical fraternal relationship among men of kindred thought, purpose and ideals.” One of those ideals was “the faithful maintenance of White Supremacy” its members pledged to “strenuously oppose any compromise thereof in any and all things.”

Those wishing to become members of the Klan participated in a ceremony reminiscent of baptism, in which they approached the “fiery cross” and the “sacred altar” draped with an American flag and adorned with a saber and Bible opened to Romans 12, in which the Apostle Paul admonishes Christians to recognize one another’s skills as gifts from God and implores people to use these gifts for the furtherance of God’s kingdom.

The Exalted Cyclops then sprinkled the applicant with water, the “transparent, life-giving, powerful God-given fluid, more precious and far more significant than all the sacred oils of the ancients.”

That an organization based on hatred toward anyone who was not a “native-born white, Gentile American citizen” would use the flag in such a way seems contrary to the concept of the United States as a nation whose motto is “E Pluribus Unum,” which means “out of many, one.” That an organization that practiced lynching as a means of controlling African Americans who simply asked for their rights as citizens would use the Bible and the sacrament of baptism in such a way is blasphemous.

That the Klan attracted so many middle-class citizens, the “prominent businessmen” who attended the meeting in Hughesville, is terrifying. The Klan perhaps realized how frightening it was, for its ritual identified the group’s officers as “Terrors.”