More extractions from “Religion and the Origins of the Death Camps: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation” by Professor Richard L. Rubenstein in the 1992 edition of his book “After Auschwitz”.
Hitler as Charismatic Leader and the German Moral Universe
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Sigmund Freud offered a prophetic analysis of the way individuals surrender their judgment and moral responsibility to an all-powerful leader in the process of group formation.
Put differently, Freud set forth a psychoanalytic interpretation of the relationship between the charismatic leader and his followers.
According to Freud, people permit themselves cruelties and immoralities as members of cohesive groups which they would not otherwise permit themselves.
Freud maintained that under the influence of an emotionally powerful leader the behavior of group members is characterized by intensification of affect and diminution of intellectual functioning as well as identification with and absolute submission to the will of the leader (Fuhrer).
Writing shortly before Hitler was to compose the murky pages of Mein Kampf in Landsberg Prison, Freud suggested that unquestioning loyalty to the leader and identification of the individual’s moral standards with the leader’s will are indispensable features of such group behavior....
After the Nazis took power, all German officials were compelled to take an oath of allegiance to the person of Adolph Hitler rather than to the constitution.
Every German was thereby bound by the closest of psychological ties to the Fuhrer.
The ties were reinforced every time two Germans greeted each other with Heil Hitler!
Hitler acquired the God-like ability to determine right and wrong simply on the basis of his anarchic, archaic, and totally destructive will.
The Germans were bound to Hitler by primal libidinous ties as members of a psychically, if not racially, homogeneous community.
When Hitler took upon himself ultimate responsibility for the actions of those bound to him by solemn personal oath, he completed the transformation of the German moral system.
Right and wrong were no longer defined by obedience to or rebellion against the will of the biblical God; they were defined solely in terms of obedience to or rebellion against the will of the Fuhrer.
Even the most casual remark of Hitler at the table could and did become the basis of a nonnegotiable Fuhrer-Befehl, an order of the Leader.
The theological significance of taking an unconditional oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler was clearly understood by by Karl Barth in 1934. Knowing that refusal would cost him his position at the University of Bonn, he declined to heed the advice of his illustrious colleague, Rudolf Bultmann, that he take the oath....
[Nazis] later explained that they could not bring themselves to violate the oath of allegiance they had pledged to [Hitler]. Honor had reduced itself to absolute fealty to the most dishonorable leader history has ever known....
The burdensome pain of the inevitable loneliness and alienation of modern pluralistic society was at an end....
No absolute monarch ever bound his people to himself more completely or with stronger emotionalties than did Adolph Hitler. Henceforth, there would be only one real crime: disobedience to the will of the Fuhrer. It is not surprising that the system could not outlive its leader....
While Judeo-Christian submission was normally life enhancing, the new German submission became an instrument of mass murder and, ultimately, of national self-destruction....
[T]he need to find a magic enemy of omnipotent proportions to blame for the terrible happenings. Always strangers, the Jews now became enemies in German eyes.
Once a consensus to form a Volk community was achieved, there was no longer a viable place for the Jews in German life. If nothing else, their international connections, their involuntary cosmopolitanism, and the never-to-be-forgotten fact that Jewish emancipation had first been brought to Germany by Napoleon’s foreign armies, all made Jewish participation in German life utterly untenable....
In the end, Germany required more of the Jews than expulsion or assimilation.
An allegedly omnipotent enemy was needed to provide the raw material for what was to become history’s greatest ritual murder.
German popular culture had long ago designated the villain-enemy-victim.
As we have seen, the myth of the Jew as Christ-killer, from which were derived the secondary myths of the Jew as Antichrist, Devil’s spawn, Satan, sorcerer, magician, cannibal, and murderer, pointed to the existence of a demonic power equal to the task of sapping Germany’s strength, of secretly causing her defeat (in World War I), and of gloating in the triumph of the victors (of World War I)....
Just as the “demonic” Jews of the Middle Ages supposedly brought about the Black Death by their midnight arts and had allegedly sacrificed innocent Christian children in order to drink their blood at Passover, so they were now regarded as a prime cause of the Fatherland’s defeat. Not the open power of the known enemy but the hidden power of the satanic magic enemy had brought about the “stab in the back.” Again the Judas myth.
Maybe Thomas Wolfe was wrong — maybe you can go home again.
In 2006, indie filmmaker Dan Jacobson accompanied his 82-year-old grandfather Steven Metzler on a pilgrimage to Romania. Metzler had not been back to his dinky hometown of Deda Bistra in more than 60 years. He was just a boy when he and a brother were rounded up and packed off to the infamous death camp Auschwitz. The rest of his Romanian-Jewish family perished under the Nazi regime.
What kind of reception will be waiting for Metzler in his homeland? Will the locals remember what really happened during the war years? Or will they conveniently lose all memory of the Holocaust and pretend not to know Metzler?
Find out when The Tallahassee Film Society presents Jacobson’s travelogue “Looking for Roots, Finding Flowers” this weekend at the All Saints Cinema. The documentary is being shown as part of the Jewish Film Series.
“Looking for Roots, Finding Flowers” is really a glorified home movie. The budget is minimal. The approach is highly personal. It rambles in parts. But it’s the stories you hear along the way that make “Looking for Roots” so harrowing and hard to shake.
Metzler recounts how, when he first arrived at Auschwitz, he asked a fellow prisoner if there was any way to escape the camp. The prisoner pointed to the chimney over the crematory that was billowing smoke and red ash before saying: “Through the chimney.”
In Romania, Metzler talks to a Ukrainian woman who was in Odessa when the Germans went on a killing spree during the war. She tells bone-chilling stories about massacres involving burning children alive in a house and hanging so many Jews from telegraph lines that their feet nearly touched the ground from the weight.
“They didn’t kill us all,” Metzler points out.
And that’s a very good point indeed.
Photo here at tallahassee.com
A pilgrimage to Romania is documented in “Looking for Roots, Finding Flowers.” (Special to the Democrat)
The man Adolf Hitler has gotten more credit than he deserves for any of the events of the WWII era.
His name has come to be synonymous with evil. But was he indeed the most evil genius, or was he just the front man? Let look at this guy.
Bormann Ran Hitler for the Illuminati
The second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, Martin Bormann, was a “Soviet” (i.e. Illuminati) agent who ensured the destruction of both Germany and European Jewry.
Thus, he advanced two of the Illuminati’s main goals: integrate Germany into a world government by annihilating its national, cultural and racial pretensions, and establish Israel as the Masonic banker’s world capital by threatening European Jews with extermination.
The Illuminati are a loose alliance of Jewish finance and the British/America/European aristocracy joined by marriage, money and belief in the occult (Freemasonry). Winston Churchill, a Freemason whose mother was Jewish, fits this description.
They own vast interlocking cartels (banking, oil, pharmaceuticals, war, chemicals, minerals, media etc.) and control society and government through corporate and professional groups, the media, education, secret societies, think tanks, foundations and intelligence agencies. Their goal is “to absorb the world’s wealth” (in Cecil Rhodes’ words) and control its citizens using propaganda, “education” and social engineering.
Nations (Britain, US, Israel) movements (Zionism, Socialism, Nazism, Communism) and people (Americans, Germans, Jews) are their pawns to be sacrificed to their demented megalomaniac scheme for global dictatorship. Bormann’s career illustrates how they orchestrate wars to advance this long-term objective.
Martin Bormann (1900-?) was the organizer, treasurer and paymaster of the Nazi Party and controlled its powerful machine. He was the contact with Illuminati bankers and industrialists who financed the Nazi Party and donated millions to Hitler. As Deputy Fuhrer and Hitler’s Secretary, Bormann signed Hitler’s paycheck and managed his accounts. He determined whom and what Hitler saw, and acted in his name.
Goering said “Bormann stayed with Hitler day and night and gradually brought him so much under his will that he ruled Hitler’s whole existence.” ("Martin Bormann” by James McGovern, p.160)
Hitler made Bormann the Executor of his will. Bormann, not Hitler, owned the Berghof. “The entire complex on the Obersalzberg, consisting of 87 buildings and worth over one and a half million marks, was legally registered in Bormann’s name. (McGovern, p.128)
An anti-Semite, Bormann also signed the documents that led to Jews in Germany being deported to the death camps set up by the Nazis in Poland. On October 9th, 1942, he signed a decree that stated that “the permanent elimination of the Jews from the territories of Greater Germany can no longer be carried out by emigration but by the use of ruthless force in the special camps of the East.” On July 1st, 1943, Bormann signed a decree which gave Adolf Eichmann total power over the ‘Jewish Problem’.
The serene landscapes and the delicate florals are inconsistent with his reputation.
Makes you wonder if he was really so evil or as I suggested, just a front man.
From Michael Newton’s book The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida, page 196-197:
Chapter 6: Retrenchment and Resistance (1966-1999):
New Moralistic Crusades
As a quasireligious order dedicated to America’s salvation from sin, the KKK cast about for modern issues and fastened upon the “right to life” crusade, organized in response to the USSC’s ruling in Roe v. Wade.
As always, there was a a racial slant to the Klan’s moralistic argument.
From California, Klansman and skinhead recruiter Tom Metzger declared:
“Almost all abortion doctors are Jews. Abortion makes money for Jews. Almost all abortion nurses are lesbians. Abortion gives thrills to lesbians.... Jews must be punished for this holocaust and murder of white children along with their perverted lesbian nurses.”
Across the continent, Glenn Miller’s Confederate Knights of the KKK agreed, proclaiming in a printed statement: “More than ten million white babies have been murdered through Jewish-engineered legalized abortion since 1973 here in America and more than one million per year are being slaughtered this way.... The Klan understands that this is just one of many tools used to destroy the white race and we know who it is.”
In 1985 Miller’s Klan (A.K.A. the White Patriot Party) pioneered the use of “Wanted” posters to target specific abortion providers, displaying photographs of various physicians together with their home addresses and telephone numbers, announcing that selected individuals had been “tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.”
Florida was the first state to experience a wave of terrorism against women’s clinics: between 1982 and 1984, authorities recorded five fire bombings, two arson attacks, and three drive-by shooting directed at clinics in Clearwater, St. Petersburg, Fort Lauderdale, Pembroke Pines, and Pensacola.
The Templar Knights of the KKK staged a rally supporting assassin Paul Hill, sentenced to die for the murder of a clinic physician and his bodyguard in July 1994....
In 1994 Grand Dragon John Baumgardner announced a demonstration outside Melbourne’s clinic to protect the “misuse” of federal marshals, but the nine Klansmen who appeared on August 20th were led by J. D. Adler of Port St. Lucie, a self-proclaimed leader of a new splinter faction, the United Klan of Florida (UKF).
Asked if he would protest abortions procured by black women, Adler replied: “We couldn’t care in the least. I can’t feign concern for someone I don’t care about.”
In addition to robed clinic vigils, the UKF maintained a “hot line” with recorded messages describing abortion as “racial suicide” assisted by “killers of white babies,” while murder of abortionists was termed “justifiable homicide.”
The KKK announced another clinic protest for February 25, 1995, this one in Miami, but pro-choice demonstrators found no knights to jeer at when they turned out with their picket signs.
Even after violence had begun to fade away, Baumgardner’s newsletter ran a poem lauding a warrior of “Yahweh” who kills an abortionist, then blows up the U.S. Supreme Court with a truck bomb.
Note by the poster, Paul D. Harvill: “Yahweh” is the likely Hebrew pronunciation for YHWH, the sacred name for the Hebrew - Jewish God. Isn’t that bizarre? As well as the rest of the above.
From Michael Newton’s book The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida, page 206:
Chapter 6: Retrenchment and Resistance (1966-1999):
Despite various difficulties organizationally, like David Duke’s defection from the Klan in 1980 had a limited effect on the Florida realm, already spilt by Duke’s rift with Jack Gregory the previous year....
Despite such difficulties, the KKK was not without its victories. An Orlando Klansman surprised the state GOP by winning election to Orange County’s Republican Executive Committee....
At least five hundred of the Invisible Empire were found in Florida, where they paid dues to United Klans, representing Bob Shelton’s second-largest realm (after his native Alabama)....
Bill Wilkinson’s Invisible Empire Knights was expanding. He claimed twenty-one Florida klaverns by the mid-1980s.
One of the group’s recruiting tools was a Pensacola “hate line,” its recorded message telling callers: “Listen, Whitey, the Jews have taken over America and you are too damned ignorant to see it.
“They are pouring out your tax money to the nig.gers, and you are too damn brainwashed to know it.
“The Jews are pouring out pro-nig.ger, pro-Jew poison to you over the Jew-owned TV, and you are so damned stupid that you swallow it.
“The Christ-killing Jew has seized the reins of government and passed laws to imprison you if your raise your hand against the nig.ger, and you don’t have the brains to do a damn thing about it....
“He has filled your schools with stink’ nig.gers, and you have taken it lying down.
“You are now reaping your reward...you no longer have what it takes to hunt down the white-hating instigators who are destroying you.”
Yeah, that Metzger guy is off his rocker.
The KKK has lost its direction.
As I read their history, it seems that they started out with a Just reason but then soon went way off course.
Yeah, that Metzger guy is off his rocker.
The KKK has lost its direction.
As I read their history, it seems that they started out with a Just reason but then soon went way off course.
The KKK from day one with the choice of Nathan Bedford Forrest as the first grand wizard demonstrates that from day one the KKK was primarily an organization committed to the oppression and suppression of African-Americans, and shortly thereafter others who were (and are) not white, native born and Protestant.
Below is a consolidation from various postings regarding the man.
Michael Newton’s book The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida cites him at least seventeen times. He is much more infamous than I had ever considered before.
Here are some examples of his own damning words and actions. And words we see so much of on these Forums too - although at times more “sophisticated” in their presentation:
Clinging precariously to a facade of moderation, Hendrix told one audience, “I don’t advocate violence, but some people just plain need hangin,’” thereafter reciting a list of names that included Governor Collins, Mayor Burns, and various civil rights activists.
The National States Rights Party, organized in early 1958 as an avowed white racist political party, openly cooperated with the KKK. Founded by a collection of anti-Semites that included Jesse Stoner, American Nazi party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, and veterans of the defunct Columbians, the NSRP borrowed its uniforms, the SS lightning-flash insignia, and the Thunderbolt title of its newspaper from Atlanta’s erstwhile “juvenile delinquents of the Klan.”
Bill Hendrix was among the featured speakers at the party’s August 1958 convention in Louisville, Kentucky, and he was a member of the four-man delegation that greeted [Fredrick] John Kasper upon his release from the federal lockup in Tallahassee.
Fredrick John Kasper was the founder and chief agitator for the Seaboard White Citizens’ Council. A New Jersey native obsessed with anti-Semitism and the poetry of Ezra Pound, Kasper hit the road in 1956, touring southern trouble spots in an effort to stiffen white resistance; he scored his greatest triumph in the September riots that stunned tiny Clinton, Tennessee. While awaiting trial in federal counts from that campaign, he found his way to Florida, where he was welcomed as a speaker at KKK rallies (though he apparently never joined the hooded order). The end came for Kasper in March 1957, shortly after he addressed a Klan crowd in Chiefland, urging the knights to help him spread his “segregation gospel” against the “radical-minded and Jewish-and-Communist-controlled Supreme Court.” Subpoenaed by the Florida state legislature, he grudgingly admitted dating black women while he lived in New York City. There were photographs to prove it, and despite Kasper’s plea that he “felt all along that the Jewish race should be segregated,” a majority of southern Klansmen turned against him overnight, unmoved by his subsequent conviction and imprisonment for contempt of court in Tennessee. [This paragraph is from page 152.]
My source is Michael Newton’s book The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida, published in 2001 by the Board of Regents of the State of Florida as one of a continuing series of books with The Florida History and Culture Series, edited by Raymond Arsenault and Gary R. Mormino. Page 154.
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A photograph of the Southern Knights of the KKK, led by Bill Hendrix, prepare for a Miami motorcade in 1949 appears on page 108 of Michael Newton’s book The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida.
The photo is in the Florida State Archives.
It is photo 21 in this book that contains 43 more images.
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Michael Newton’s book The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida, page 126:
The Many Klans of Bill Hendrix (subheading)
Uncowed by Governor Warren’s threat to unmask the Invisible Empire by legislation, its knights opted for a show of force on January 27, 1949, staging a nocturnal motorcade through downtown Tallahassee.
Observers counted forty-three cars in the procession, with the lead vehicle sporting an electrified cross and two flags (one each for the United States and the KKK).
Six drivers were arrested for improper license tags, four of them visitors from Georgia.
Bright and early the next morning, Governor Warren announced his intent to push legislation banning the KKK “and any other terrorist organization” in Florida. “The hooded hoodlums and sheeted jerks who paraded the streets of Tallahassee last night made a disgusting and alarming spectacle,” Warren told reporters.
“These covered cowards who call themselves Klansmen quite obviously have set out to terrorize minority groups in Florida, as they have in a near-by state.”
The Tallahassee parade was, in fact, a coming-out party for the Southern Knights of the KKK. Organized that month with an estimated two hundred members [only 58 numbers from J. L. Maxwell’s May 1, 1950 list cited earlier from the Tallahassee KKK documents that initiated this entire thread].
The fledgling Klan was led by thirty-nine year old William Hendrix, a local plumbing contractor.
However:
My own research through Tallahassee City Directories reveal something more:
Beginning with the 1948-1949 volume onward until the last city directory entry from 1961, William R. Hendrix is listed as a clerk with the United States Post Office.
The 1417 Chowkeebin Nene residential address for Bill Hendrix begins about 1953 or 1954.
Later I’ll back before the 1948-1949 edition to ascertain how long he resided and was active in Tallahassee.
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National By Laws
SK-KKK
Original Klan
N.S.S.A
1951
Property of the Southern Knights of KKK
Regional offices: KKK—1417 Chowkeebin Street.
P.O. Boxes are provided for the cities of Jacksonville, Live Oak, Orlando, Little River Station - Miami. As well as the KKK in Iron City, Georgia.
One could order robes from Tom Hamilton at P.O. Box 231—Leesville, South Carolina for $6.50 plus mailing costs.
Pens could be ordered from Bill Hendrix at 1417 Chowkeebin Street in Tallahassee for $1.50 each.
From Michael Newton’s book:
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January 27, 1949— within the Many Klans of Bill Hendrix section: nocturnal motorcade in Tallahassee—200 members led by Hendrix
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May 1949—
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June 11, 1949— page 127 --- Hendrix:
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July 31, 1949— Despite Gov. Warren’s administration’s stated opposition to the KKK, Governor Warren’s secretary of state issued a Florida charter to the Original Southern Klans, Bill Hendrix presiding at grand dragon.
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August 17, 1949— First Lucky Club 13 minutes extant from the auction lot.
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August 28, 1949—page 126-127— On August 28, 1949 Hendrix broke with his Georgia associates, emerging from a secret klonvocation in Jacksonville to announce his election as “national adjutant” of the new Northern and Southern Knights of the KKK, serving an anonymous “Permanent Emperor Samuel II” - whom Stetson Kennedy promptly identified as Jacksonville Democratic party leader Edgar Waybright.
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January 29, 1950—Another Klan merger for Hendrix , this one reported on January 29, 1950. Hendrix announced the alliance of his knights with the Association of Carolina Klans, lead by Tarheel grocer Tom Hamilton, and the Federated Klans of America, under William Morris.
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Their program, Hendrix told reporters, was to an all-out war on “hate groups,” including the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Federal Council of Churches in Christ in America.
Progressive education was also a target, panned by Hendrix as “nothing more than a communist movement” designed to subvert American values.
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Along the way, Hendrix urged collaboration between the KKK and the Catholic Church, in opposition to communism and “Judeized [sic] Christianity,” but Catholic response was lukewarm at best.
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The only apparent coordinated action between new allies was an abortive plan to revive the KKK in Virginia, quickly scotched by opposition from Governor John Battle.
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Closer to home, Hendrix toured his realm incessantly, predicting divine judgment for the vice dens of Palm Beach, inviting new legislators to join him for a rally at the Live Oak courthouse (no takers), and raiding the membership of Miami’s venerable John B. Gordon Klan. In the latter instance, at least, he enjoyed some success: the klavern split up, with a majority defecting to the Southern Knights ( Hendrix ), while the remainder—rechristened as Den No. 2—allied themselves with Sam Roper’s Association of Georgia Klans.
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While Bill Hendrix and others occupied themselves with melodrama and ritual trappings, Klansmen at the grassroots level sought more visceral expressions for their anger and anxiety.
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The year 1951 began with a new rash of Ku Klux violence....including murder. It was mid-April 1951 before the Judiciary Committee of the state house finally sent an anti-mask bill to the floor, despite the protests from Bill Hendrix that “[w]e took off our masks three years ago and our program is now wide-open.”
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Paul D. Harvill’s investigation based upon the Affiliated Auctions’ Tallahassee KKK Lucky Thirteen Club documents, the local organization was anything but “wide-open”.
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June 21, 1951—Hendrix announces to seek the Governorship of Florida.
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February 12, 1952—Hendrix arrested for mailing postcards “too libelous to appear in the public record.” One postcard addressed Fuller Warren as “the scalawag perverted governor,” while another depicted anti-Klan columnist Drew Pearson plummeting into a toilet labeled American Pot for Communists and Stooges. Calling his arrest “a case of outright persecution,” Hendrix was nonetheless convicted and fined seven hundred dollars, with a one-year jail term suspended. Leaving the courtroom, he remarked to newsmen, “It looks like I’m out of the mailing business.”
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July 15, 1952—Seeking from diversity what he lacked in managerial finesse, Bill Hendrix announced the formation of an American Confederate Army, pledged to battle, ”f the Supreme Court ever outlaws racial segregation.” His troops were compiling a list of NAACP and Anti-Defamation League members, Hendrix warned, and “if law and order ever breaks down we will hold them responsible.”
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Sadly for the movement’s secrecy, it was infiltrated from the start, with Stetson Kennedy commissioned as an active colonel on July 18, 1952.
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A few days later, after more than a year on the campaign trail as an unofficial contender for the governor’s office, Hendrix finally paid his $600 fee and filed as a candidate. Come November 1952, he polled barely eleven thousand votes statewide and was left in the dust by 1948’s loser, Dan McCarty.
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November 1952 --- Hendrix polled barely eleven thousand votes statewide and was left in the dust by 1948’s loser, Dan McCarty.
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Life in the Invisible Empire was less dramatic for Bill Hendrix after his failed campaign for governor. He was briefly reunited with his Carolina ally, Tom Hamilton, when both appeared as featured speakers at an anti-United Nations rally hosted by Parson Jack Johnston at his Columbus Baptist Tabernacle, but is signaled no expansion or revival for the Southern Knights of Florida.
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In June 1953 Hendrix was succeeded as grand dragon by C. L. Parker, a furniture salesman from River Junction, though Hendrix remained active as a Klan spokesman. July witnessed a major defection from the Southern Knights,as Tampa private investigator William Griffin , lately the grand titan for Central Florida, bailed out of his own ambitious-sounding Association of Florida Ku Klux Klans.
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By October Parker and Hendrix claimed affiliation with an illusory “United Klan” said to have at least 100,000 members, but their paucity of followers was indicated by a public plea for blacks to join the KKK - albeit “on a segregated basis.”
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All that was required of new recruits, said Parker, was a nominal one-dollar entry fee, coupled with a pledge of belief in God and the U.S. Constitution.
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“Our main purpose,” he announced, “is to keep the Ne.gro from intermarriage with the whites - the law of God.” To that end, Parker reassured black prospects that they belonged to a pure race, while whites were the mongrels. Hendrix , for his part, denied any link to the various Klans accused of terrorism in Florida. “I believe in using legal procedures,” he said, “even if it takes longer.”
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The fruitless effort to recruit black Klansmen was the last gasp for Hendrix. Declining membership and legal difficulties, couple with electoral defeat, restrictive state legislation, and the threat (however minimal) of federal prosecution combined to push him out of the Invisible Empire - at least, for the time being. By year’s end (1952), he was formally retired from the Klan and resettled in Pinellas Park, content to watch the race wars from a distance.
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However Paul D. Harvill’s investigation reveals that he either resided or partially resided in Tallahassee around this time as he is still listed both before and afterward as a clerk with the U.S. Post Office in Tallahassee, with his residential address earlier as RD 2; then later as 1417 Chowkeebin Nene.
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While Bill Hendrix and others occupied themselves with melodrama and ritual trappings, Klansmen at the grassroots level sought more visceral expressions for their anger and anxiety. The year 1951 began with a new rash of Ku Klux violence....including murder.
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above pages 126 - 139
below—page 141-142:
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On May 17, 1954, the USSC, by a unanimous vote in Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education, overturned the venerable Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in so far as public education was concerned. Resistance was certain.
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Dan McCarty was elected Governor in 1952. By September 1953, he was dead. Senate President Charley Johns became the temporary governor. He was an outspoken segregationist, having represented Bradford and Union Counties in the State Senate. His residence was Starke.
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The Florida Supreme Court ordered that Johns was an acting governor, until a special election in 1954. Johns announced his candidacy in October 1953, followed two months later by State Senator LeRoy Collins.
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The write-in campaign of retired Klansman Bill Hendrix , announced on May 29, 1954 with a platform of strict segregation and legalized gambling, attracted no great interest from voters. Note that his announcement was twelve days after the USSC decision in Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education.........
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In the wake of Black Monday (May 17, 1954, the USSC, by a unanimous vote in Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education, overturned the venerable Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in so far as public education was concerned.),
January 27, 1949— “The Many Klans of Bill Hendrix” section: nocturnal motorcade in Tallahassee—200 members led by Hendrix.
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July 31, 1949— Despite Gov. Warren’s administration’s stated opposition to the KKK, Governor Warren’s secretary of state issued a Florida charter to the Original Southern Klans, Bill Hendrix presiding at grand dragon.
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On May 17, 1954, the USSC, by a unanimous vote in Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education, overturned the venerable Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in so far as public education was concerned. Resistance was certain.
The write-in campaign of retired Klansman Bill Hendrix , announced on May 29, 1954 with a platform of strict segregation and legalized gambling, attracted no great interest from voters. Note that his announcement was twelve days after the USSC decision in Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education.
August 1955: At least Hendrix had one less rival to worry about in August 1955, as William Griffin disbanded his Tampa-based Association of Florida Ku Klux Klans.
October 1955: The Invisible Empire’s big news for 1955 was the issuance of a Georgia corporate charter on October 24th, to Imperial Wizard Eldon Edwards and his U.S. Klans, Knights of the KKK. Quietly organized in September 1953, the U.S. Klans had already expanded from Georgia to plant klaverns in Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Texas.
Early 1956: its kleagles were active in Florida, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Louisiana, building what would be the decade’s single largest Klan, with ten to fifteen thousand members....
Bill Hendrix revived his Southern Knights to meet the latest challenge, and a cross was burned in Tallahassee on May 28, 1956 at the home of a black coed jailed for refusing to ride in the back of a city bus. Membership applications bearing Hendrix’s name and Pinellas Park address were distributed at a rally in the state capital a short time later, but he faced competition from multiple rivals. At a Gainesville rally staged by members of fledgling Florida Ku Klux Klan, fliers were distributed with the admonition: “Beware of swindlers. There are certain parties using the outlawed organization known in the past as the Knights of the KKK for personal gain only. They are using a Pinellas Park address. Beware.”
During more violence, parades and rallies in various parts of Florida, like Lakeland, Starke, Wildwood, hooded orators denounced Governor Collins as “one of the worst enemies of states’ rights in America.”
Bill Hendrix for his part, told reporters that the public demonstrations “will do the segregation question more harm than good....”
April 1957: As for the Church of Rome, Bill Hendrix removed that point of disagreement with the Association of the Citizens’ Councils of Florida on April 22, 1957, two days after an imperial council meeting in South Carolina, with the announcement that his Southern Knights would henceforth welcome Catholic members. The Klan’s fight “today is against integration, communism, and federal controls,” he declared....
1957: A new tough-talking group, organized by Bill Hendrix, was the Knights of the White Camellia of the National Christian Church, launched after Hendrix returned from a gathering of Klans in Montgomery, Alabama.
By early 1958 a resurgence of racist bombing was seen in the state and in the South at large. Miami’s Temple Beth-El suffered $30,000 damage from a dynamite blast in March; a month later, Jacksonville bombers struck twice on the same day, blasting a Jewish Center and all-black James Weldon Johnson Junior High School.
On May 3, 1958, with forty-six racist bombings recorded in Dixie over the past fifteen months, police from twenty-two southern cities gathered in Jacksonville at the invitation of Mayor Haydon Burns, to create the Southern Conference on Bombing (SCB). There was a certain irony in Burns’s chairing of the meeting - elevated to high camp by the attendance of Alabama’s Eugene “Bull” Connor, who collaborated openly with terrorists and never solved a hate crime in his twenty years as “Bombingham’s” police commissioner - but at least the conference attendees sounded sincere, posting $55,700 in rewards for information leading to arrests and convictions.
Jacksonville assistant police chief H.V. Branch was placed in overall charge of the campaign, while the FBI remained aloof, refusing to participate.
The short-lived SCB would never win a case in court, but its technique of infiltrating racist groups provided fascinating glimpses from inside the hard-core white resistance to desegregation.
One early target was Bill Hendrix’s Knights of the White Camellia, described by SCB investigators as engaged in a war with Eldon Edwards for control of the Invisible Empire. Hendrix dismissed Edwards as the “so-called leader of the U.S. Klans who came in for money and has gotten a good many people in trouble.”
Clinging precariously to a facade of moderation, Hendrix told one audience, “I don’t advocate violence, but some people just plain need hangin,’” thereafter reciting a list of names that included Governor Collins, Mayor Burns, and various civil rights activists.
The National States Rights Party, organized in early 1958 as an avowed white racist political party, openly cooperated with the KKK. Founded by a collection of anti-Semites that included Jesse Stoner, American Nazi party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, and veterans of the defunct Columbians, the NSRP borrowed its uniforms, the SS lightning-flash insignia, and the Thunderbolt title of its newspaper from Atlanta’s erstwhile “juvenile delinquents of the Klan.”
Bill Hendrix was among the featured speakers at the party’s August 1958 convention in Louisville, Kentucky, and he was a member of the four-man delegation that greeted [Fredrick] John Kasper upon his release from the federal lockup in Tallahassee.
Fredrick John Kasper was the founder and chief agitator fo the Seaboard White Citizens’ Council. A New Jersey native obsessed with anti-Semitism and the poetry of Ezra Pound, Kasper hit the road in 1956, touring southern trouble spots in an effort to stiffen white resistance; he scored his greatest triumph in the September riots that stunned tiny Clinton, Tennessee. While awaiting trial in federal counts from that campaign, he found his way to Florida, where he was welcomed as a speaker at KKK rallies (though he apparently never joined the hooded order). The end came for Kasper in March 1957, shortly after he addressed a Klan crowd in Chiefland, urging the knights to help him spread his “segregation gospel” against the “radical-minded and Jewish-and-Communist-controlled Supreme Court.” Subpoenaed by the Florida state legislature, he grudgingly admitted dating black women while he lived in New York City. There were photographs to prove it, and despite Kasper’s plea that he “felt all along that the Jewish race should be segregated,” a majority of southern Klansmen turned against him overnight, unmoved by his subsequent conviction and imprisonment for contempt of court in Tennessee.
At another meeting Hendrix proclaimed, “Now, I don’t want you good people to go around blowin’ up buildings or temples, but the next time somebody does blow up a temple, I sure hope it is filled with Jews.”
Another group of more than passing interest to the SCB wsa the National States Rights party, organized in early 1958 as an avowed white racist political party, openly cooperating with the KKK.
Founded by a collection of anti-Semites that included Jesse Stoner, American Nazi party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, and veterans of the defunct Columbians, the NSRP borrowed its uniforms, the SS lightning-flash insignia, and the Thunderbolt title of its newspaper from Atlanta’s erstwhile “juvenile delinquents of the Klan.”....
June 1958: With so much racial violence in the news, Florida’s Legislative Investigationing Committee briefly interrupted its pursuit of integrationists and homosexuals to take a quick look at the Klan in June 1958.
Governor Collins had suggested such a probe two years earlier, but the committee - led by disgruntled former governor Charley Johns - had been slow to respond. When it did act, the hearings got off to a peculiar start, committee member Marion Knight inquiring as to whether his own Klan membership in the 1930s disqualified him from participating in the investigation. ("No," Chairman Johns graciously replied, “I don’t think that woud make any difference.")
Before the three-day inquisition ran its course, Eldon Edwards would drop in to visit and Suwannee County’s sheriff would be cited for contempted, but the most intriguing testimony came from a onetime FBI informant who described Orlando Klansman Edgar Brooklyn’s boasts of having murdered Harry Moore in 1951.
Brooklyn (the brother of deceased bombing suspect Earl Brooklyn) promptly denied the accusation and proclaimed that he had long since left the KKK.
Content to look no farther, the John Committee reported that “[t]here is a no question but what some of the men and officers of this organization are dedicated to the use of violence and the threat thereof to carry out their aims, principally in the field of segregation.” Taking a bold stance to “strenuously condemn” such tactics, the committee was quick to note that Florida already had “adequate statutes making such conduct criminal offenses, and it is merely a matter of local officials enforcing the law as it presently stands.”
No suggestion was offered as to how that end might be achieved in jurisdictions where Klan members wore the badges.
Klansmen and their allies on the noe-Nazi fringe were more concerned with action than with talk in 1959. Black homes and businesses were bombed in various parts of Florida. One, George Deatherage, a retired engineer and former Klansman....was indicted on sedition charges due to his promotion of fascism.
February 1960: With the advent of the sit-in movement, beginning essentially on February 1, 1960 by black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, this movement spread rapidly throughout much of the southern states. Florida’s first sit-in was on February 29, 1960 at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Tampa, with demonstrations spreading to St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Daytona Beach and Orlando over the next six days.
March 1960: Governor Collins denounced the protests as “illegal and dangerous,” marshaling state troopers to tear-ga black marchers in Tallahassee on March 12. Whites brandished clubs and jeered from the sidelines, but the first violent clash was recorded in St. Augustine, where members of Dr. Robert Hayling’s NAACP Youth Council were trapped inside the local Woolworth’s store and beaten bloody by Klansmen.
Once the first blow was struck, Ku Klux responses to the sit-ins were predictable. On the night of March 26-27, an estimated one thousand crosses blazed across Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
Florida saw the least action, with two crosses burned along causeways outside Clearwater, each beside a sign reading: King for President, LeRoy Collins for Veep. (The King in question was apparently Reverend Clennon King of St. Petersburg, a black minister who had declared his hopeless candidacy for the White House.)
In April, in Chattahoochee...night riders torched the home of a black rape suspect.....
Meanwhile in Jacksonville, the city’s newest school was named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the KKK.
August 1960: In late August in Jacksonville, three thousand white men gathered in downtown in the business section, many with baseball bats and ax handles....
By noon, while Police Chief Luther Reynolds and his patrolmen made themselves scare, the Klansmen attacked blacks outside of Woolworth’s and Rich’s Department Stores, injuring fifty and driving many others back to “Nig.gertown.”
By sundown, two dozen knights and sixty-off blacks were in jail; white rioters were released on payment of fines as low as ten dollars, while the siffiest punishment - ninety days, after a jailhouse beating by white inmates - was reserved for a black college student who led the sit-ins.
Mayor Burns blamed the trouble on out-of-town whites, but Police Chief Reynolds insisted that “all the fellows we arrested were local boys....”
December 1960: The afternoon of December 3, 1960, Bill Hendrix and another Klansman were ejectted from St. Petersburg by lawmen, when they tried to picket sit-ins at a downtown lunch counter.
Discouraged, Hendrix announced his latest resignation from the KKK on December 29th, telling the press, “I see no way to stop racial integration and it looks to me like the best thing to do is accept it. I cannot agree to go outside the law to maintain segregation.” In a letter to Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, Hendrix added: “I know the Klan is going to get lawless....If the loud-mouth politicians of the South want to help, let them tell the people the truth - that the decisions of the United States Supreme Court have become law....Integration is now the law of the land and a person can stop it only by violating the law.”
In response to rumors that the Georgia Klan had developed a secret weapon to fight integration, Hendrix wrote,” Any secret weapon they may have would be just another gimmet [sic] to get ten or more dollars out of decent Georgia people.”
Governor Collins did not stand for reelection in 1960, leaving the Democratic gubernatorial primary to a field of nine contenders. Bill Hendrix was back for a third try, this time without the albatross of legalized gambling, but he garnered no appreciable support against the likes of state legislator Farris Bryant and Jacksonville’s Mayor Haydon Burns.
All candidates except self-styled moderate Doyle Carlton condemned the recent sit-ins, Bryant and Carlton running first and second, respectively, with vote tallies of 193,507 versus 186,228. In the runoff, despite (or perhaps because of) an eleventh-hour endorsement from Governor Collins, Carlton trailed Bryant by close to 100,000 votes. Klansmen play no appreciable role in Bryant’s selection, but they could at least draw consolation from his friendly treatment of the hooded order in the past.
Autumn 1960: The Florida Klan was propelled into national headlines by a quirk of political fate. Born-again wizard Bill Hendrix announced his support for Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, drafted as the unwilling presidential candidate of the National States Rights party, and reporters wasted no time seeking Tampa Klansman William Griffin’s view of the endorsement. Rather than echo his bitter rival, Griffin delcared his support for Republican hopeful Richard Nixon.
1965: The Klan was fragmenting again, with the United Klans of America (UKA)....
Independent Klans continued to proliferate in Florida’s chaotic realm, and while Bill Hendrix barely clung to life in Oldsmar, his ten-man Knights of the KKK dwarfed by two competing UKA klaverns in Pinellas County, Jacksonville saw a new flurry of activity in April 1965, when defectors from the United Florida KKK organized a new Militant Knights.
The small but belligerent faction’s debut was announced by local barber Warren Folks, who also billed himself as the executive vice president of something called Save American Inc. For a Klan with only one klavern, the Militant Knights seemed top-heavy with leaders, including Imperial Wizard Donald Ballentine and Grand Dragon Gene Foreman.
Folks did much of the group’s initial talking, though telling Life magazine: “I believe in the Klan. I don’t believe the thing to do at this moment is to go out and shoot a nig.ger in the street, but when the time comes - when it comes - we’ll take them down by the busload, by the trainload, that’s what we’ll do. By the busload. By the carload! We don’t hate Ne.groes. We love ‘em, in their place - like shinin’ shoes, bell-hoppin’, pickin’ cotton, diggin’ ditches, eatin- possum, servin’ time, totin/ buckshot, river-floatin’, etc....”
Mid-October 1965 - late February 1966: By early 1965, highly public acts of violence perpetrated by the KKK in half a dozen states prompted more respectable segreationists - including those in Congress who dominated the archconservative House Committe on Un-American Activities (HUAC) - to wash their hands of the Invisible Empire. Accordingly, the HUAC had voted in March to undertake a formal investigation of the various Klans, with thirty-six days of public hearings conducted between mid-October 1965 to the end of February 1966. A total of 187 witnesses were grilled, including twenty from Florida, questioned about the KKK and National States Rights party activities.
Long before the hearings were convened, though, the racist fringe had delivered its opinion of the probe. J. B. Stoner’s Thunderbolt denounced HUAC as “a bunch of pimps for the Jew-controlled, race-mixing FBI,” conducting a “giant smear campaign” against the Klan; it also branded chairman Edwin Willis of Louisana as a “degenerate scoundrel,” deemed by the party’s scientific minds to be “part ape....”
