TAR AND FEATHERS

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 17, 20 July 1921, Page 5

TAR AND FEATHERS

KU-KLUX-KLAN AT WORK

TWO CASES IN SOUTHERN / STATES.

(UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATION.--COPIMOHT.)

(AUSTRALIAN * NEW ZEALAND CABLE ASSOCIATION.)

(Received July 20, 9 a.m.)

NEW YORK, 18th July, Two extraordinary tar and feathering episodes occurred during the week-end down South. Mrs. Beulah Johnson was taken from an hotel porch in Tercaha, Texas, and a dozen men in Klan robes motored her several miles into t>hs country, stripped her, and coated her body .with tar and feathers. Later she. was arrested for a bigamy charge.

, The other caee occurred at Miami,, in Florida. The Rev. Philip Irwin, a British subject; and Archdeacon of the Eng-; lish Episcopal Church doing church work among the negroes, was seized by masked men and carried to a wood, tarred and feathered, put into a hack, and brought.back to town. Irwin told the police that the men said he had been social equality to the negroes and advocating intermarriage. The men threateiied to lynch him unless he left Miami in 48 hours.

The Ku-Klux-Klan in ita origin was a political secret society, whose sphere of activity was confined to the Southern States, which in 1861 had rebelled against the North. After the Civil War persons who had fought on the side of the Confederates, or supported them, were disfranchised, amd the negroee, or many of them, received the vote. The Ku-Klux-Klan — whose peculiar name was supposed more or less to reproduce the sound made by the cocking of the hammers of old-fashioned muzzle-loading rifles or? guns—was fomied in order to terrorise, the negroee and Northern sympathisers, and there is no doubt that its members were guilty of many secret rriurders and other outrages. An obnoxious person was usually given a warning to "clear .out.": If ho failed to do so he was visited at night by white-hooded and robed Ku-Klux-Klan emissaries, who' killed him. Of late years the "Klan" ■had lost. its terroristic significance, and existed as a sort of benevolent institu-

A demonstration of the rapidity' with which the mysterious order of. "Ku-Klux-Klan". is being revived in the United States was siven in January, of this year, when 500 candidates, were admitted to the "Supreme Knighthood of the Invisible Empire." The ceremony took place at Alabama on the State Fair grounds, and for the first time in history the public were permitted to view a conclave of the Ku-Klux, although the witnesses^Tvere kept at a safe distance outside the fair grounds, and newspaper representatives we're permitted to behold the proceedings from a housetop inside the precincts. Hordes' of white-robed and hooded figures formed a great quadrangle, the outer walls of which were guarded by mounted "Kla-nsmen." Half the fair grounds were knee-deap in water, through which the candidates splashed their' way to the strains of weird music to the centre of the race track, where a great living cross was formed by other "Klansmen" .shrouded in white. 'Each man held aloft a cross, the standard being white and the crossarm 'red, and -two great searchlights played upon them. Enthroned in front of a cross surrounded by a thousand Klansmen heaTimr torches, sat the "Imperial Wizard," Nathan Forrest, and as the candidates marched past they took the oath.

The Ku-Klux-Klan in the past year hag spread with great rapidity throughout the country, and although the professed objects of its members are chiefly to "protect Americanism" and guard the supremacy of whites over hlacks. it is suggested that there are other hidden causes for its sudden revival.