Pastor’s fight against KKK becomes movie
LAURENS, S.C. — Not many years ago in a small, rural South Carolina town stood the Redneck Shop — a racist emporium and Ku Klux Klan museum housed in an old theater, where white supremacist neoNazis gave heilHitler salutes and flaunted swastikas and Rebel flags.
That building, once the property of the Klan, now belongs to a black preacher and committed foe of racism who fought the group for more than 20 years. The Rev. David Kennedy plans to transform it into a shrine of reconciliation.
How Kennedy, whose greatuncle was lynched in the community, got ownership of the old Echo Theater building from an exKlansman — a man who once contemplated murdering Kennedy — is the subject of a movie that could end up raising funds for that transformation.
“It symbolizes right now in the shape it’s in — hatred,” Kennedy said. “But we hope we can turn it into a building of love.”
A decade ago, the white supremacist store in Laurens was a place where one of the few shirts sold without an overt racial slur said, “If I had known this was going to happen I would have picked my own cotton.” The World Famous Ku Klux Klan Museum with its racist meeting place was in the back.
The KKK had put the title in the name of a trusted member, Michael Burden. Burden says other Klan members once suggested that he kill Kennedy, and he considered it. Kennedy didn’t know that when he saw Burden, hungry, poor and full of hate, and took him to a buffet to fill his stomach, then to a hotel so his family wouldn’t have to sleep on the street.
Burden’s girlfriend at the time kept urging him to leave the Klan and in 1997, he did. He also bestowed ownership of the old theater building upon Kennedy for $1,000.
Kennedy estimates it needs at least $500,000 in repairs that must be done carefully because of the theater’s age and historic location. That seems impossible for the minister whose New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church congregation meets in a converted gun store several miles west of Laurens.
But a movie may provide a
Hollywood ending.
The story of the unlikely friendship between Kennedy and Burden has been made into a film called “Burden,” scheduled for national release Feb. 28. Starring Forest Whitaker as Kennedy, it was shown at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.