The Persisters who unmasked bigots

It’s no secret why the cowards who decided to parade around Capitol Hill in the khaki-polo uniforms of retail floor salesmen on this Fourth of July hid behind white face masks and sunglasses.

Because “any organization that hides its members behind masks or disguises is a dangerous and un-American organization,” said the mayor of New York. In 1922.

We’ve been here before, with the racist fools.

And throughout history, there were members of congress, mayors and even a president who were persistent in unmasking them.

Congress took a swipe at gutless maskers back in 1870 with legislation to neuter the bloodthirsty Ku Klux Klan members who wouldn’t show their faces when they terrorized innocent Americans.

“There can be no doubt of the existence of numerous insurrectionary organizations known as Kuklux Klans, who, shielded by their disguise, by the secrecy of their movements and by the terror which they inspire, perpetrate crimes with impunity,” Rep. William Loughridge from Iowa said on the House floor in 1870, reading from an Aug. 14, 1869, report from a police officer in charge of a Georgia district.

The result of that was The Enforcement Act of 1870, created at the suggestion of President Ulysses S. Grant. It specifically banned individuals from banding together or “going in disguise upon the public highways or upon the premises of another” with the aim to violate Americans’ rights.

This was morality and decency and justice waaaay before facial recognition technology was there to fuck with a bigot’s secret life.

Today’s Temu version of Nazis or the Klan (or whoever the white supremacists think they’re emulating) are taking advantage of our nation’s mask confusion during Covid, when they all whined about protecting themselves and their community with face masks and we grappled with masking laws that have stood for more than a century.

Now that the newest crop of racists are too cowardly to risk their family, friends, freedom or jobs in the name of their bigotry, the masks are back on.

America knows how to do this.

It began with the 1870 act, then two more, when masked racists murdered and intimidated Black Americans – in their homes and at polls – under their hoods during Reconstruction.

When they rose again in the 1920s, persisters who spoke up launched a series of unmaskings to kick their butts.

New York Mayor John Francis Hyland told the police commissioner to “treat the Ku Kluxers as active enemies to society” when they wanted to come to town, according to a Nov. 27, 1922, story in the Washington Herald.

They weren’t fooling anyone.

“The mask and that alone, is the instrumentality that enables the klan to perpetrate its diabolisms and get away with it. The remedy is to compel them, by law, to discard their masks in public on all occasions, at all times,” wrote D.H. Hardy, a D.C. attorney, in an editorial in Washington’s Evening Star on Monday, Jan 1, 1923.

“There is no value in the mask,” Hardy wrote.

“And if they want to parade and ride and exist under the protection of American freedom, let them,” Hardy said, “so long as their faces are in the open, their countenances exposed to public view and their identities unconcealed.

“There is no novelty in the idea. Many towns and villages all over the country have for years had ordinances prohibiting citizens from appearing on the public streets in disguise.”

Exactly.

Later that year, the Klan had their largest rally ever in Kokoma, Indiana. About 10,000 klansmen hit the streets, empowered by their ability to cover their faces completely.

In 1925, the KKK made more vile noise with a HUGE parade in D.C., right down Pennsylvania Avenue.

But the only way it could happen was if they did it unmasked.

Their attempt to take over the nation’s capital began that May, when the Klan announced its headquarters are moving to a building near the White House in D.C.

“From this suite of offices, presided over by Imperial Wizard H.W. Evans and his royal retinue of dragons, goblins and kleagles, is daily pouring into Uncle Sam’s mails thousands of pieces of literature, preaching ‘100 per cent Americanism,’” according to the May 11, 1925 Times Herald.

When they began planning their march in August, they applied for a permit for up to 200,000 marchers. And in his application, the Klan’s Imperial Representative said he understood D.C.’s law on masks. Police chief Charles Evans said it was a no-go unless “the entire head of every person parading be wholly uncovered except such portion of the head as is covered by an ordinary hat”.

“Visors up,” he said, according to the June 17 Times-Herald.

President Calvin Coolidge was cold to the Klan’s overtures, telling The Washington Daily News that he won’t accept their invitation to review the parade.

They paraded without their masks, though the hoods made Pennsylvania Avenue look like a Washington Monument-look-alike contest.

Following the examples of D.C. and New York, cities across America that year demanded that the Klan take their masks off for every public demonstration.

Headlines announced the stances of mayors, city councils and county aldermen who persisted in keeping disguised Klan members from parading down their Main Streets. From Elmira and Buffalo in New York to Dunklin County, Missouri, and Knoxville, Tennessee, the KKK was unmasked.

Exposed, their numbers and actions dwindled.

When they paraded again in D.C. in 1926, the Klan delegation was only about 12,000. That’s half the numbers who showed up the year before, according to police estimates.

By 1927, New York banned them, masked or not.

“The Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti, or any other organization having ‘a basis of religions or racial prejudices’ will not be permitted hensforth to parade in New York City,” The Washington Post wrote on Jun 5, 1927.

Same happened in Detroit.

In Grand Prairie, Texas, where a parade was allowed, klansmen were attacked by spectators throwing bricks and bottles at them, according to The Evening Star on July 24, 1927.

Voters in Newport News, Virginia defeated an ordinance that would’ve allowed a masked KKK parade.

After all that pushback. didn’t even try to come back to D.C.’s streets that year.