My first college teaching job was in 1981 in the mountains of western North Carolina. Moving there from the big city of Denver, I was shocked by some of the blatant forms of racism that still existed.  I’d have thought that with the Civil Rights movement, social protests, and riots of the sixties, such examples as separate hospital rooms for Whites and Blacks and having no person of color at the University I was going to teach at would have been things of the past, a relic of Southern culture.  And I was told repeatedly that the large statue of a Confederate officer on horseback in front of the town hall purposely had his horse’s ass pointed northward in defiance.  But what shocked me even more than all that happened one night while I was watching the national news.  The reporter stood in front of an old tobacco shed with an open field and a ramshackle building in the distance behind him.  He was covering a major Klan meeting.  This wasn’t in Alabama or Mississippi or Arkansas, though.  It was in Connecticut, and more shocking still, it occurred in my hometown!  https://tinyurl.com/bdc3h54w

As I started to do research for my new novel Skunktown(Regal House, 2027), I began coming across more references to the presence of the KKK in New England.  One of the first articles I read was by a Hartford Courant reporter, Dick Lehr.  As in Spike Lee’s movie Black Klansman, Lehr went underground and pretended he wanted to join David Duke’s KKK:   “It was the fall of 1979, and I was a first-year reporter at The Hartford Courant when David Duke launched a recruiting effort in, of all places, Connecticut. His ‘Klan calling cards’ and his newspaper, The Crusader, started appearing in factory parking lots, restaurants, high schools and college campuses.”  Lehr was indeed able to join the Klan and eventually went to a meeting in Danbury where he came face to face with David Duke, the Grand Wizard himself. Duke showed the film Birth of a Nation to a small group of KKK members, using it as a recruitment tool.  A link to this follows: https://tinyurl.com/bdhhxy2r

I also came across a number of other references to the existence of the Klan in Connecticut, was well as throughout New England, during the seventies and early eighties.  Besides the report mentioned above, I saw articles about meetings and marches in numerous Connecticut towns, including in Meriden, Waterbury, Scotland, Westfield, Windham, Cheshire, Naugatuck, Ansonia, Seymour, as well as the aforementioned East Windsor.  While most of these Klan activities were neither large nor particular violent, they suggest that New England, my home, was never immune from such overt forms of racism.  We Yankees like to think that such despicable things only happened faraway, in other places.  We like to think that racism didn’t (doesn’t) happen here.

I’ll be adding more posts about my research for my novel in the future.  Please stay tunes.