How the Ku Klux Klan Welcomed My Father to Arkansas in 1965

My father began his ministry at the Pulaski Heights Christian Church in Little Rock, Arkansas, on March 1, 1964. He had left his previous church in Daytona Beach, Florida, in part because some in the congregation were outraged that he had welcomed a black woman to a service one Sunday in the fall of 1963. Some were also upset that my parents had twice invited small groups of black and white church members from around town over for mixed-race social gatherings at our home. Folks with a similar mindset tracked my father down in his new posting. A little over a year after he started work at Pulaski Heights, he received a thinly-veiled death threat, apparently from the Ku Klux Klan. (Click thumbnails to enlarge.)

It was scrawled on one of three crude posters, drawn with a black marker on torn pieces of white poster board, that I found in my father’s files. It reads, “Let’s Hang Him,” alongside a stick figure with my father’s name, hanging on a gallows with “K.K.K.” at the bottom.

One of the other posters accused my father of supporting mixed-race marriages, something the writer seemed to think was so self-evidently abominable that no editorial comment was required. The third poster, topped with a hammer and sickle and the headline “Birds of a feather,” showed a hand labeled “Thompson” embracing a hand labeled “Kosygin, Brezhnev, Castro, Mao Tse Tung.”

The posters are undated and I found no other mention of them in my father’s files, nor had I ever heard of them before. There is no evidence as to how they were delivered to my father, who now (at the time of writing in 2012) has advanced dementia and wouldn’t be able to discuss the posters. But their proximity in the files to a hate letter condoning a recent KKK murder, and some newspaper clippings about that case, leads me to believe the posters date to early April 1965.

Viola Liuzzo, a white mother from Detroit who had come to Little Rock to work in a campaign to help black people register to vote, had been gunned down by a carload of Ku Klux Klansmen shortly after dropping off several other voter-registration volunteers at the Little Rock airport on March 25. Three weeks earlier, on March 7, ever since known as Bloody Sunday, Alabama lawmen had savagely beaten civil rights protesters crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in a peaceful march for voting rights for blacks.

My father was one of a dozen clergymen named in an article in the Arkansas Gazette as having attended the April 3 memorial service for Liuzzo in Little Rock. The service was delayed by a bomb threat, according to the article in the Gazette, which ran on the front page on April 4 (click to enlarge) alongside another story stating that someone had burned a cross and left other KKK symbols in the backyard of the home in Detroit where Liuzzo’s husband and five young children lived.

Apparently another Arkansas newspaper on that day ran a photograph showing my father and other clergymen leaving the service. Someone who identified himself as Sherman McDaniel, from Conway, Arkansas, saw that article and sent my father a letter the next day commenting on it. Whether the name on the letter was a pseudonym or not, online genealogical records list a man by that name in Conway, who was born in 1909 and died in 1983 at the age of 73. (Here’s an image of the letter.)

McDaniel seemed convinced that most Arkansans were on his side. “Several people have told me they are ashamed to admit being members of the Christian Church since they learned what you are doing,” he wrote. He was quite proud of the letter, and wanted my father to show it to each member of his congregation. “[T]hen see how many of them are willing to ‘sic’ you on with what you have been practicing.”

The letter, McDaniel believed, “should keep you out of devilment for a while.” Whoever drew up the posters obviously thought they would have the same effect. They didn’t.