When I was twenty, I decided I wanted to be a writer. To get some practical, professional experience, I began writing for my college’s student newspaper. This was before word processing, when the latest technology was an electric typewriter with auto-correct. For me, the writing was done on a manual typewriter, a Smith Corona with a worn out S key that my father had used when he attended Pennsylvania Military College three decades earlier. The typewriter clipped into a hard tan case that locked and had a rugged handle for easy portability. With case, the typewriter weighed over ten pounds.
My first weeks at the newspaper were unremarkable. I did some copy editing, made a few fact-check calls, and wrote an opinion piece on a subject I don’t recall but which ended with a cliché, something that brought the ire of the assistant editor, a senior English major who snapped her lips and told me never to use clichés and never ever to end an essay with one. The highlight up to that point had been a late Friday afternoon meeting during which several staff writers produced six packs of beer from paper bags.
Then I got my first assignment. I was to cover a Ku Klux Klan rally and the subsequent protest of that rally in the small mill town of Rumford, an hour away. The Klan, I learned, was on a recruiting mission in this unlikely of places in Maine and found a farmer willing to hold the event on his property. As part of the press, I had credentials that allowed me entry onto the private property so that I could attend a press conference by a Klan representative.
At the time, I was politically active and had I not been covering the story would surely have been one of the protesters. I had been an adamant opponent of Citibank’s investment in South Africa under its apartheid system and had even been arrested outside a local branch with a host of others for refusing to stop reading the names of blacks killed under the apartheid government. One summer I canvassed for Greenpeace and grew accustomed to the malcontent and misunderstanding of so many. I had been questioned by police, ridiculed by homeowners, and in one instance chased off by an angry husband upset at his wife’s twenty-five dollar tax-deductible contribution.
The Klan rally occurred on a Saturday in early November on the outskirts of the town, where yellowing fields dipped and rolled west toward the White Mountains thirty miles in the distance. The road in followed the Androscoggin River, then snaked along winding country roads. I ended up making the trip alone and when I arrived the flashing blue lights of the Maine State Police greeted me. Protesters, I was told, were relegated to a field across the street from the rally, which was being held on private property . Trespassers, I was warned, would be prosecuted. “That’s ok,” I said, flashing my press card. “I’m here to cover the story. “
The mood in the field was restless. By 11 AM the crowd had swelled to about two hundred. Shortly before noon, the organizers of the protest arrived with signs, a bullhorn, and an agenda. Within thirty minutes, the quiet pockets of mostly college-aged students had banded together and were shouting “Not here Klan! Not here Klan!” One of the organizers, a slight gray-bearded man wearing a faded jean jacket and a Jesse Jackson for president pin, was talking in earnest to one of the troopers. The man was adamant that the police had no right to restrict where the protesters gathered so long as they weren’t creating a safety hazard and stayed off the private property. Before too long, much of the crowd in the field was across the street in front of the farmhouse and the shouts of “Go home Klan! Go home Klan!” continued.
I am not sure what law enforcement had expected from the gathering, but in no time, another State Trooper was on the scene along with two cars from the sheriff’s office. I was standing near the driveway on the road side of the yellow police tape that spanned the length of the property. About thirty yards in stood a barn, where inside I could see men milling about. As the crowd got louder, several men emerged from the barn and came to the end of the gravel driveway. If they were Klansmen, I do not know, but they were clearly on edge. One man shouted at the crowd to shut up and go back home; he spat on the ground and laughed. “Keep it up,” he said.
The press conference took place in the barn at 2 PM. I don’t know what I expected (Klansmen in robes?), but what transpired was ordinary. The press asked questions and a lone man who would not say if he was in the Klan or not responded. He did say that members of the Klan would appear in the evening for a ceremony and we were all welcome to attend. The whole press conference lasted maybe twenty minutes and before I knew it, I was back out with the crowd.
Three images stand out from this experience. First, the crowd. As much as I oppose everything the Ku Klux Klan stands for, the crowd, if not antagonistic, was provoking. They jeered at anyone who appeared on the property. A man yelled through a bullhorn, “Go home Klan! Go home Klan!” which the crowed repeated, over and over again. Some yelled incendiary remarks. They gestured. The police did little to control the crowd and what I remember most now is how tense the situation became. Perhaps the tenseness was due to the number of protestors, the lack of sufficient crowd control, or both. Perhaps the protesters should have been made to stay across the road. I am not sure. What I am sure about, though, is that I can understand how situations can quickly turn to something ugly.
In fact, things did get ugly, which is the second image that stands out. At some point a car tried to turn onto the property, but the crowd refused to move. A trooper intervened and the crowd slowly dispersed but not without one or two banging the roof of the car and intense yelling. I had no idea who was in the car, but once it made its way down the driveway to the barn, two young men and a young woman emerged. The woman, who could have been just another brown-haired college student, was visibly upset and, turning to the crowd, raised her middle finger, which brought boos and catcalls and even louder yelling of “Go home Klan! Go home Klan!” Suddenly, from inside the barn, a man emerged running toward the crowd with a rifle raised in his hand. The man’s jaw was tight and his eyes narrow and as he got closer, I realized it was the same man from earlier who told the crowd to “Keep it up.” The rifle was never lowered or aimed at the crowd and two troopers quickly came between the man and the crowd. “That was my daughter!” he yelled. “You’ve got no right!”
The last image, the one most frightening, took place after dark when I witnessed six hooded figures emerge from the barn and proceed onto a grassy knoll in a side field and burn a cross. Not many of the protesters remained and those that did said little. We all stood silently at the edge of the gravel driveway watching those six ghostly figures and the burning cross.
