Civil rights attorney and activist James Williams began our tour of Plymouth, N.C., on the banks of the Roanoke River. He had come home, and he had invited me to accompany him on a tour of the small town in Eastern North Carolina where he was born and raised.
The Klan Last Time
The Rose Hill Poultry Workers Strike of 1968
The Rose Hill poultry workers strike of 1968 was one of the unsung chapters in the story of the black struggle for justice and equality in Eastern North Carolina.
Remembering a Church Bombing: A Conversation with Retired State Trooper Bob Edwards
A retired state trooper named Bobbie “Bob” Edwards sent me a message a few weeks ago. He told me that he had read my recent story about the bombing of an African American church in eastern North Carolina in 1966. He said my article had brought back memories. He had seen the church explode, he told me. He had been the only eyewitness.
The Klan Last Time- Part 8: Onions and Hyacinths
When I found the KKK papers, I was relatively young and my career as a historian was just getting started. I incorporated what I learned into a few pages in my first book and I also wrote a personal essay about how my new knowledge of the Klan had changed the way I saw my home in eastern North Carolina.
The Klan Last Time- Part 7: None of Their Cars Came Back Out
According to the KKK papers, things began to change in 1967. Attendance at Klan rallies plummeted. Many white people walked away from the fiery cross never to return. SHP agents began to report that state Klan leaders were finding it difficult to convince local people to lease them land for rallies.
The Klan Last Time- Part 6: In the Night
While the Klan’s public rallies and cross burnings brought to mind a county fair or a church revival, the soul of the Ku Klux Klan revealed itself most plainly later in the night, after the children’s games had finished and the burning cross extinguished.
The Klan Last Time- Part 5: Welcome to Smithfield
A sign of the KKK’s public acceptance was that many Klansmen no longer hid behind their cloaks. Klan membership was often an open secret, sometimes widely known and even boasted. Klan activists posted signs in local businesses and public streets announcing recruitment rallies and advertised them in the local newspapers, such as the Greenville Daily Reflector and the Kinston Daily News.
The Klan Last Time- Part 4: Knowing Who Hates Who
In the 1960s, Eastern North Carolina was still primarily an agricultural economy, even more so than it is today. At the time, the people of the Hooded Order realized that tens of thousands of white, middle-class farm owners, tenant farmers and small town merchants were struggling to hold onto their land, their homes and their businesses.
The Klan Last Time- Part 3: Hot Dogs and Cake Raffles
An SBI report dated July 26, 1966 gave a flavor of what those public Klan rallies were like. I expected them to sound far more sinister. But that wasn’t it at all. That afternoon a large crowd massed in a field near Chocowinity, a small town in Beaufort County. In most ways, the occasion resembled a county fair or church revival.
The Klan Last Time- Part 2: Out of the Shadows
The Ku Klux Klan lived in our shadows long before the 1960s, but the Hooded Order had usually been a tiny fringe group. But not always: the Klan had played central roles in the state's political life in the Reconstruction Era and again in the late 1910s and '20s. Another, lesser Klan heyday occurred in the early 1950s.
The Klan Last Time- The State Records Center
The recent events in Charlottesville led me to remember a day 25 years ago, when I stumbled upon a stunning collection of government documents on the Ku Klux Klan's activities in eastern N.C. in the 1960s.
David Cecelski 