“The Day the Klan Came to Town”by B. Campbell / B. Khodabandeh, 2021
This is a graphic story – in both senses – about a massive Ku
Klux Klan raid on the working-class town of Carnegie, Pennsylvania in 1923, a
town full of mills and mines. It’s done
in pictures and text, with some written explanations on both ends. If you’ve
dipped into graphic novels or the “The
Idiot’s Guides to…” you’ll know the kind of graphics I’m talking about. This one is in black and white in a kind of raw,
wood-cut style.
What is different about this actual event is that it was
not just an attack on African-Americans, it was also an attack on European-Americans
- Italians, Jews, Irish, Catholics, Armenians, the Orthodox and whomever wasn’t
a light-skinned Protestant. In essence,
mostly newly-arrived immigrants. This
was the second iteration of the Klan, which pretended to be an upstanding civic
organization standing for whiteness, God and Americanism. This nativist, fascistic strain continues in
U.S. society to this day.
The Klan came to Carnegie to hold a massive rally with the
national Imperial Wizard of the Klan, Hiram Wesley Evans, burning crosses and
all. The police chief of the town allows
the Klan to march due to ‘free speech.’
The Klan members are armed with clubs, knives and guns. Little kids and women fawn over them. Some Klan women knock down a pregnant Italian woman in the street. The governor, a Republican, refuses to call
out the National Guard. Some of the Klansmen are in the U.S. army when they are
disrobed. There is a discussion of
parade permits. The mayor tries to stop
the march but is helpless. The tiny
police force is mobilized but does nothing.
Most of the Klansmen wear conical hats that do not cover
their faces, or use a bandanna for the mouth.
They march towards the Irish part of town armed, singing Christian
songs. All the suspect ethnicities
realize the danger and organize to stop the march. They block one key bridge with a vehicle and
assemble behind it. The Irish, African-Americans
and Italians are armed with clubs and knives too. The book shows a Russian Jew firing a warning
shot at the Klan march. When the Klan
finally arrive in the neighborhood the throng will not let them through and
instead attacks their lead car. The very confusing melee is on, rocks rain from
the buildings on the Klan dropped by women, guns are fired in response, reinforcements
join the neighborhood fighters, many are injured and eventually one
dark-skinned man is knifed in front of a Catholic church and dies, and one Klan
member is shot. The confrontation is
ultimately won by the united front of working-class ethnicities. The Klan turn tail and leave because of the
armed resistance.
The book’s sections are not linear however. They jump to a long back story of Italians in
WWI, then an Italian village, then the voyage to the U.S. and Ellis Island,
which breaks the narrative. Nor is it
clear where these events are happening in Carnegie from the pictures, as none
of us have a map of it in our heads. There are two creeks that run through town,
which is just southwest of Pittsburgh, almost an outer suburb. The author
Campbell grew up in Carnegie and unearthed this history through diligent
research, facts which no one in his town knew.
He had to imagine part of it as it had been buried alive.
It illustrates a deep problem with the U.S., a country that
repeats its nightmares year after year. We are in yet another cycle, which will
not stop until the material economic roots of racism and nativism are removed. Now that Italians, Irish, most Jews and the Orthodox
are closer to ‘whiteness’ and ‘Americanism,’ it remains for new minorities to
take their place alongside the remaining Latinos and African-Americans. In a racist society this process never stops.
Nevertheless the idea that the oppressed working class
should unite against fascism across ethnic, national and cultural barriers is
the key takeaway from the story. This
obvious truth is still too complex for many identitarian politicians and
activists in the U.S. because they are intent on including the upper class in
their front, or breaking up alliances. This
illustrated book doesn’t clearly show the support of the upper class strata in
Carnegie for the Klan, but it was certainly there across the country at the
time. It could have shown the Carnegie town
‘fathers’ as friends of the Klan, but it didn’t from what I could tell.
A new and valuable story for anti-fascists to take to
heart.
Prior blog reviews on this issue, use the blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Anti-fascist
series,” “Ku Klux Klan,” “A Fever in the Heartland,” “A Time to Kill” (Grisham);
“No Fascist USA!” “BlacKKKlansman” (Lee); “The Bloody Shirt,” “Monument,”
“Comrade Harry McAllister,” “Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate.”
And I bought it at May Day Books, which has more than
textual books – buttons, some shirts, pamphlets, newspapers and magazines, graphic
novels, songbooks and left books on art and music.
Red Frog / August 25, 2024
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