Mayor Curley’s Plan to Ban the Klan (episode 148)

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In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan expanded into New England and tried to make Boston a capital of their invisible empire. However, their deep hatred for Catholics and Jews, as well as their promotion of “100% Americanism,” made the KKK a hard sell in an area where the population was growing rapidly, with a constant stream of Jewish and Catholic immigrants. After staying on the sidelines at first, Boston’s colorful mayor James Michael Curley made it his mission to drive the KKK out of Boston. After a few highly publicized Klan rallies in and around Boston, Curley began to fight them with rhetoric and questionably legal manipulation of the city permitting process.

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Ban the Klan

• Mayor Walsh explains the decision to allow a “straight pride” parade.
• William Monroe Trotter testifies against the KKK before Congress.
• Harvard Crimson profile of James Michael Curley.
• The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930, Kenneth T. Jackson
• Not a Catholic Nation: The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s, Mark Paul Richard
• Irish Nationalists in Boston: Catholicism and Conflict, 1900–1928, Damien Murray
• “Unmasking the Ku Klux Klan: The Northern Movement against the KKK, 1920-1925.” Journal of American Ethnic History, David J Goldberg
• At an October 1922 rally in Cambridge, the KKK claims to have a presence in every New England state, predicts 300,000 members in a year.
• The day after the Cambridge rally, Boston mayor Curley declares the Klan unwelcome in his city.
• Bricks thrown through windows of suspected Klansmen; snowball attack on suspected leader.
• An American Legion leader is threatened when he refuses to join the KKK.
• Mayor Curley’s January 1923 open letter declaring war on the KKK in Boston (includes other city documents regarding Curley and the KKK. Thanks to Marta Crilly at the Boston City Archives for finding all these materials and sending them along).
• Curley urges taxing Shawmut Congregational Church if they continue hosting KKK meetings.
• Curley threatens to pull licenses from public halls that rent to the Klan.
• The ACLU advocates for the KKK’s right to free speech, which Curley counters by saying the Klan shouldn’t shelter behind rights it denies to others.
• The ACLU still marks October 23, 1923, when they lost their argument with Mayor Curley, as an important landmark date in civil liberties history.
• Campus observers are surprised at the rise of the Harvard KKK.
• Harvard could use its rules against secret societies to prevent a campus chapter of the KKK.
• The NAACP says that Harvard would be better off shutting the doors forever than hosting the Klan.
• Harvard Klansmen plan to meet off campus.
• While campaigning for governor, Curley calls the Klan “vermin who should be shaken out of the folds of the American flag.”
• Curley claims that the KKK is handing out flyers at his own campaign events.
• Curley blames Republicans for protecting the KKK.
• An anti-Klan riot in Worcester in 1924 spells the beginning of the end for the Massachusetts KKK.
• In 1982, a KKK leader is hit with an egg on WBZ-TV, then is met with violent counterprotests at a march.
• David Duke speaks at Old South Meeting House in 1991.
• Here’s the source for our image of Klansmen posing at Harvard in 1924.
• View a KKK flyer that may have been handed out at Curley’s campaign rally.

Boston Book Club

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Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week hasn’t actually been published yet. Black Radical: the Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter is now available for pre-order, with an expected publication date of November 19. I’m taking the unusual step of recommending a pre-publication book because I’m just so darn excited for this one. My twitter friend Rayshauna Gray tweeted about it last week, which is how I learned that Kerri Greenidge had written a new biography of William Monroe Trotter, who was one of the most under-sung Black activists of the early 20th century. He made his name at the turn of the century as the radical response to Booker T Washington’s racial moderation. He published the weekly newspaper The Guardian, giving him a platform to, among other things, lead Boston’s protests against the movie Birth of a Nation, as we heard back in episode 121.

The author of the new bio, Dr. Greenidge, is a student of African American political history and radical Black political consciousness. She was a longtime historian at the Boston African American National Historic SIte, and now she teaches in Tufts University’s Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, where she is director of the program in American studies, and where she is also codirector of the African American Trail Project.

Here’s how the Amazon pre-order page describes the book:

This long-overdue biography reestablishes William Monroe Trotter’s essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and King in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes. William Monroe Trotter, though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post- Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of black liberation that prefigured leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Synthesizing years of archival research, historian Kerri Greenidge renders the drama of turn- of- the- century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure, whose prophetic, yet ultimately tragic, life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era.

In case you can’t tell, I’m really looking forward to this one.

Upcoming Event

On September 7, the Museum of African American History will be hosting a panel discussion called Legacies of 1619: Recognition & Resilience. You’ve probably heard the kerfluffle surrounding the 1619 project, a special edition of the New York Times Magazine timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia in 1619. The articles and related projects are intended to emphasize how central slavery is to the history of the United States.

The panel will feature David Krugler of the University of Wisconsin, Peter Wirzbicki from Princeton, and our aforementioned author, Kerri Greenidge of Tufts. It will be moderated by Robert Bellinger of Suffolk University. Here’s how the event website describes it:

The institution of slavery in English North America began in 1619 with the arrival of roughly 20 Africans in the settlement of Jamestown. What has followed has been 400 years of exploitation and discrimination in many different forms. However, telling this story is not complete without an exploration of how African American communities have created culture and institutions that have survived despite these challenges. This program will explore both structures of exploitation and forms of resistance.

The talk is a joint production of the Museum of African American History, Roxbury Community College, and the Mass Historical Society. It will be held on Saturday, September 7 at 4pm, with a reception beginning at 3:30. The event is free, but advanced registration is required.