For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
-- 1 Corinthians, 1:18
The Klan and me go waaay back. So this time every year, when the Ku Klux Klan erect a cross on Fountain Square, I get a little misty.
Yes, it seems like only yesterday it was an exquisite spring Saturday in downtown Middletown. (The year is fuzzy to me now, in part because I affectionately refer to the five years I spent as the only black reporter at Hamilton's daily newspaper as "the lost years.") The KKK descended upon the otherwise desolate Butler County burg to rally for no particular reason except that they had a legal right to.
They have a tendency to do that -- to show up 'cause they can.
That time, I figured the occasion would be a good lesson in tolerance, stamina and worldliness, so I took my then-teenaged sister. Downtown Middletown looked like downtown Bosnia with its checkpoints, police tape, armed sheriff's deputies and helicopters buzzing overhead.
I have to admit it was an adrenaline rush to come face to face with the pageantry of hatred on such a grand scale. I never knew, growing up in Hamilton (not exactly the most racially congealed city in America), that Klan robes could be so elegant or that they came in so many different colors, accustomed as I was to the garden variety white cotton.
Anyway, there were campfire songs of hatred sung to the tunes of popular melodies. Supporters and detractors took turns yelling at each other, and the day proceeded without incident, though I admit to feeling paranoid and anxious as we walked back to my car because there suddenly seemed to be no police protection anywhere in sight.
The Klan got police escorts out of town, while the rest of us -- KKK supporters and detractors -- were left to our own devices.
Fast-forward a few years later to downtown Hamilton on the steps of the historic Butler County Courthouse. It was another Saturday morning, only cold and crisp.
Again, the Klan and members of the Aryan Nations showed up in their JC Penney white sale finest. In the weeks preceding the rally, a deputy of the Butler County Sheriff's Department deflected attention from our impending guests and nearly bungled security measures by publicly wondering if some of the city's "niggers" would cause problems by responding violently to the Klan's presence in town.
Deputy Chuck Barrett, then chief spokesman for the sheriff, told a Hamilton Journal-News reporter that officers weren't worried so much about the KKK, but that their concerns centered on "the niggers coming up from the Second Ward." For those who don't know, Hamilton is designed around and still operates under an antiquated ward system, whose corresponding numbers represent a certain socioeconomic standing and racial classification. Living in the Second Ward? You must be poor and black.
Barrett shared with the same reporter his concern over what he perceived as my race-baiting via my weekly column in the Hamilton paper. Referring to my "rasties" (dreadlocks), he called me Alfalfa. Of course, the whole debacle was hilarious -- there we were so worried about white men we couldn't see behind hoods when we should have been checking the ones in plain sight.
Further, racial hatred is so insidious that its purveyors generally walk ass-backward into stupidity. Take Barrett, who called me Alfalfa when he clearly meant Buckwheat. I mean, if you're gonna be stupid at least be smart about it.
My memory is hazy about that day, but I think there were some minor skirmishes and several arrests, lightweight for a Klan rally of that scope. I remember being in the press pen directly beside the courthouse steps and making eye contact with several Klansmen. We smiled at one another, as if to say, "Isn't this crazy?"
Of course, we knew our smiles were really nervous responses. Had we not been separated by armed officers, orange barrels and police tape, I don't know that I'd have felt comfortable or sarcastic enough to smile at someone calling me "nigger" to my face.
But all that hatred gets old quick. I mean, really, there are only so many KKK rallies you can go to and protest before you have to start really questioning whether you're extinguishing or fanning the flame.
So, for me, the Klan is no longer sexy. They hold no appeal. I am no longer interested in standing in the shadows of their billowing robes.
I'm much more interested in ferreting out the Chuck Barretts of the world. You know, the ones walking and working among us without the benefit of bedding as a cover. Given my druthers, I'll take a bigot in a sheet over a bigot in a suit or uniform any day. And because we're bound by the Constitution to do so, let the Klan have Fountain Square with their tainted cross.
The righteous among us bear the weight of an unfettered cross every day.
