Related articles and links |  1 of 3

When news came over the intercom system that President John F. Kennedy had been shot, students in my high school stood and cheered. They cheered because he was the President who had proposed civil-rights legislation and had then backed it up by forcing the University of Mississippi to integrate. To our comfortable enclave of racism in the suburbs outside Atlanta, Georgia, Kennedy represented an intolerable threat.

In 1966, when I was graduated from that school, no black student had ever set foot on campus. Black families had moved into the neighborhood, and whites on all sides were fleeing to Stone Mountain and other suburban points east, but no black parents dared enroll their children in our school. We all believed then, and I have no reason to disbelieve now, that Gordon singlehandedly kept them away. Gordon, a tenth-grader reputed to be the nephew of the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, had put out the word that the first black kid in our school would go home on a stretcher.

The Ku Klux Klan had an almost mystical hold on our imaginations. It was an invisible army, we were taught, a last line of defense to preserve the Christian purity of the South. I remember as a child watching a funeral procession for a Wizard of the KKK. Caught trying to turn left across traffic, we had to wait until the entire motorcade passed. Dozens, scores, hundreds of cars slid past us, each one driven by a figure wearing a silky white or crimson robe and a pointed hood with slits cut out for eyes. The day was hot, and the drivers' bare elbows jutted from open car windows at acute angles. Who were they, these druids reincarnate? They could be anyone-the corner gas station attendant, a church deacon, my uncle—no one knew for sure. The next day's Atlanta Journal reported that the funeral procession had been five miles long.

I remember also a Fourth of July rally held at the Southeastern Fairgrounds racetrack. Organizers had brought together such luminaries as George Wallace and a national officer of the John Birch Society, as well as Atlanta's own Lester Maddox, ardent segregationist and future governor of Georgia. A group of 20 black men, showing bravery such as I had never before seen, attended that rally, sitting in a conspicuous dark clump high in the bleachers, not participating, just observing.

I saw no one give a signal, but shortly after a rousing rendition of "Dixie," hooded Klansmen arose from the crowd and began an ominous climb up those bleachers. The black men had no escape. They stood and huddled together, looking around in desperation, but there was nowhere to go. At last, frantic, a few of them started climbing a 30-foot, chain-link fence built to protect spectators from the race cars, and the Klansmen scrambled to catch them.

The speaker's bullhorn fell silent, and we all turned to watch the Klansmen pry loose the clinging bodies, as though removing prey from a trap. They began beating them with fists and with Lester Maddox's souvenir ax handles. After a time, a few Georgia State Patrolmen lazily made their way up the stands and asked the Klansmen to stop.

More than two decades have passed, but I can still hear the crowd's throaty rebel yells, the victims' low moans and pleas for mercy, and the crunch of the Klansmen's bare fists against flesh. And with much shame, I still recall the adolescent thrill I felt—my first experience of the mob instinct—mixed with some horror, as I watched that scene transpire.

Today I feel shame, remorse, and also repentance. It took years for God to break the stranglehold of blatant racism in me—I wonder if any of us gets free of its more subtle forms—and I now see this sin as one of the most poisonous, with perhaps the greatest societal effects.

next page... |  1 of 3

January (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44