Ugly Surprise While Looking at 1914 Kentucky Newspapers: Race, Terror and the Night Riders

 

     
            While researching ancestors from Kentucky, I was trying to find information on a music store located in the town of Dawson Springs. An ancestor, Lorene Smith, had purchased patriotic sheet music from World War I at the store while living in the community. I had hypothesized that the store would have advertised in the local newspaper, so I was browsing any Dawson Springs newspapers I could find from the World War I era. There were only a few issues available online, including three issues from the year 1914. While I didn’t find any mention of the music store, I found two very troubling articles that revised my preconceptions about the era in that area of Kentucky.

            The first reported that the black area of the community had been plastered with signs warning “the Negroes of the city to leave by Oct. 15” and were signed by the “Coon Hunters”. The reporter noted that this “caused great excitement among the negroes.” As if that were a surprise.

The article then stated that the “Night Riders”, AKA the Ku Klux Klan, posted their own notices denying they were the Coon Hunters. They reassured the black community that “the better element of colored people need have no fear.” However, they went on to say they had 1,000 members and were “going to clean up and make the bad element go away.” I would guess this provided no comfort to the black community.

This was horrifying! This small community had two separate groups of racist whites out terrorizing black residents at one time. And there wasn’t a single mention in the article of the police stepping in—probably because they were among the 1,000 Night Riders.

The next article, just days later, describes a racist attack on a black resident in the nearby community of Hopkinsville. Three white men were charged with being members of a Night Riders mob that attacked Beverly Reynolds. They “took him from his home a few nights ago, after shooting him through the palm of the right hand, and whipping him to leave the country.”

Instead of being charged with assault with a deadly weapon, they were only booked on “banding together to injure", and they were only arrested after Mr. Reynolds swore out a warrant against them. More proof of the racism permeating the justice system. I wonder if they ever served any time, and I worry about what happened to Mr. Reynolds after his courageous effort to bring the men to justice.

It amazes me that newspapers calmly printed evidence that the Klan was openly terrorizing the black residents of the area. There was no outrage, no promises to root out these evil men, no calls by the clergy to obey the Ten Commandments and treat black people like real Christians would. Everyone in the white community seems to have been complicit in these attacks. And Rev. Willis Smith was living there at the time, but there is no indication that he did anything to encourage peace between races or to protect black people from attacks.

I wanted to believe that Dawson Springs and the surrounding area had long since left the ugly stain of racism in the past, but as I was trying to research the Klan’s history in the area, I ran across articles stating that the second largest KKK group in the nation is headquartered in Dawson Springs. A man named Ron Edwards founded the Imperial Klans of America in the early 2000s, and built a Klan compound in Dawson Springs. He was arrested for drug dealing in 2010, not his Klan activities. Now the group has changed their name to the Nordic Order Knights of the KKK, but is still headquartered in the community. This is so depressing.