Ku Klux Kian Stage Night of Terror In Florida Town

Grey River Argus, 19 July 1949, Page 7

Ku Klux Kian Stage Night of Terror In Florida Town

(Rec. 9.45) NEW YORK, July 17. Governor Fuller Warren has ordered fifty National Guardsmen into the town of Groveland, in the State of Florida, wher" a Ku Klux Klan parade has followed a night of terror. A chain of events began when a young wife reported that she had been taken from her husband, in Groveland, by four negroes, and had been raped by each of them at the gunpoint. Two negroes were th Q n arrested as being suspects. Later, however, a heavily armed mob Threatened to storm the gaol in the nearby town of Tavares, where, they thought, the two negroes were being held. But the Sheriff persuaded them to leave. The negroes had been transferred, to a secret gaol. The mob then roamed through the negro section of .Groveland, firing shots and shouting threats. Foui’ shots were fired into a house occupied by two young lawyers who had filed an injunction suit against the Ku Klux Klan at Atlanta, in Georgia. Neither was hit. A cross was burned ip the yard of the house. Cue of the lawyers, Mr Hal Irvin, agea 25, said he had received a telephone call earlier warning him: “You will be sorry you filed that suit.” Only a few hours earlier Irvin and his partner, Mi' Samuel Johnson, aged 21, had sought a court injunction against the Klan’s dragon leade Dr. Samuel Green, and hooded followers to restrain them from molesting a former serviceman, Mr Hugh Gilliland, aged 29. An inquiry in Birmingham, Alabama, into violence by masked mobs wound up in confusion when the investigating Grand Jury went into recess after disclosures that one of its members was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The Grand Jury itself requested the recess, and at the same time asked that each member be examined for possible disqualification.