Like 2020s, the 1920s saw racism roaring after a pandemic
LORENA — For those of us of a certain age, the 1920s feel like the beginning of the modern era. Not that we were alive a century ago, but we knew people who were. In old-time movies and in person, they looked like us, sounded like us. Like us, they were coming back to life, so to speak, after a virulent pandemic. A world war had left them hungry for new beginnings; the Roaring ’20s were the result.
Also like us, old resentments and old prejudices that had been subsumed to some extent by mass illness at home and war abroad re-emerged. Like us, our forebears had their insurrectionists. They called themselves the Ku Klux Klan.
This little bedroom community south of Waco knew the Klan.
So did Waco. So did Houston.
Originally founded in Tennessee in 1868 by six young Confederate veterans, the Klan had pretty much dissolved by the mid-1870s. It came roaring back decades later, in the wake of the Great War. The first Texas “klavern” of the reconstituted Klan emerged at a Confederate reunion in Houston in 1920. Thousands of hooded, white-robed Klansmen marched in a nighttime parade along Main under banners proclaiming “We Were Here Yesterday, 1866,” “We Are Here Today, 1920” and “We Will be Here Forever.”
If you lived in Waco in the early 1920s, you wouldn’t be inclined to argue. Guy B. Harrison, Jr., who joined the Waco klavern in 1921 at the urging of his father, recalled its pervasive influence in a series of Baylor University oral history interviews in 1972.
“If you were going to live and do well in business circles, you had to (be a member),” he recalled. “There were so many Klansmen here that if the Klan decided to boycott somebody, it would force them out of business, hurt them severely. It bankrupted a number of prominent concerns here.”
Harrison told his interviewer that he and his father joined the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, because they believed in its principles. Annual dues were $1.50, although he grumbled about having to pay the Atlanta headquarters $10 for his robe, since “materials and workmanship weren’t worth more than a dollar and a half.” (Harrison’s oral history interviews are on file at Baylor’s superb Texas Collection.)
“It was for the United States, for America,” he said. “It was Whitsu, white supremacy. It was sort of an America-first organization. And it did a lot of good. … We forced undesirable people out of business. We forced undesirable people to leave Waco.”
Harrison was still a new member when Waco Klan No. 33 organized a downtown march on the night of Oct. 1, 1921. McLennan County Sheriff Bob Buchanan blocked it, telling Klan leaders they would not be allowed to march while hooded. Instead of protesting, the klavern decided to accept a spurof-the-moment invitation from Lorena residents to parade along their main street. Between 3,000 and 4,000 people drove down to watch. Harrison was on hand to march.
At about 9:30 in the evening, the Klansmen stepped out, robed and hooded and marching two by two behind an American flag and a burning cross. Buchanan and two deputies halted the procession. The sheriff reminded the leaders they were still in McLennan County, told them they couldn’t march unless they identified themselves and attempted to snatch the hood off a man carrying the American flag. The flag-bearer — “a very prominent man here in Waco,” Harrison recalled — beat the sheriff to the ground with his flag staff.
“’Fraid to march?” the man was heard to say. “Ha! I followed this old flag against 15 million Germans!”
“A wild scene ensued,” a Waco News-Tribune reporter named George Isbell wrote in the newspaper’s Sunday edition the next day. “A pistol shot rang out in the clear air. A lull of a few seconds followed, then between 10 and 15 shots were fired in rapid succession.”
Just before the melee erupted, Harrison noticed that his uncle, a prominent Wacoan named Louis Crow, had parked across the street from where he was standing. Crow owned a string of laundries.
“He liked in the summertime to wear a white suit, white shirt, white collar, white tie,” Harrison recalled. “He had a great big diamond ring in front of that stiff shirt,”
Crow, who had gotten out of the car so his kids in the back seat could watch the parade, saw Buchanan fall. “He knew the sheriff, had known him all his life … so he rushed across to help him up,” Harrison said. “The sheriff came to about that time and saw my uncle in all that white and thought he was a Klansman, perhaps the one who had knocked him down. He jerked out a tremendous big dirk, almost a Bowie knife, and stabbed my uncle in the chest. … After he did that, he got up on his heels in a squatting position and began to shoot.”
The parade broke into chaos at the sound of gunfire. Panicked onlookers revved up their Model Ts and maneuvered through narrow nighttime streets to get out of town. Buchanan was carried into a drugstore, shot in the right lung and right knee. Crow also was brought in, bright-red blood spreading across his white-suited chest. The sheriff ’s knife thrust had nearly severed his liver.
“I begged and I pleaded, and I begged and I pleaded with them to halt,” Buchanan told reporter Isbell, “but they wouldn’t hear me.”
Nine men, including Crow and the sheriff, were transported to Waco hospitals. Crow died five days later. Buchanan recovered and was indicted early in 1922. I haven’t determined whether he was ever tried.
Harrison left the Klan not long after the Lorena Riot, in part because of “my belief in politics and how we live and treat other people” but also because he was allergic to the blue tobacco smoke that befogged every meeting. The Klan also started recruiting “men who were not desirable characters,” he said. “It got to be very bad.”
Tens of thousands of Harrison’s fellow Texans stayed with the Klan long enough for the group to elect legislators, sheriffs, judges and other state and local officials, as well as a U.S. senator, Earle Bradford Mayfield, in 1922. Its political power began to wane with the unlikely election of Klan opponent Ma Ferguson as governor in 1924.
Harrison would go on to be Waco’s mayor pro tem, a prominent Boy Scout leader and for 44 years a popular history professor at Baylor. “I kept my robe until, oh, 15 or 20 years ago when I burned it,” he told his interviewer in 1972. “With the exception of the cross.”