Klan leaders deliver impassioned harangues at klavern rallies. Their principal foes, as evidenced by the organizations singled out by Edwards, are Negroes, Jews and to a somewhat lesser extent Catholics. Liberal use is made of the smear technique of accusing opponents of being pro-Communist. Speaking at Sumter Imperial Wizard Edwards charged that the Supreme Court’s ruling was “a Communist-Jewish-Catholic plot” aimed at “destroying and mongrelizing” the white race. Parties to this conspiracy included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, “the Jew Bernard Baruch,” and President Eisenhower, whom he referred to as “Eisenberger.” With characteristic disregard for historical accuracy, the Imperial Wizard branded the NAACP as an organization formed in 1906 by a “group of three people sent directly from Russia.” He urged all “one hundred percent Protestant white Americans” to join the Klan and help overcome this menace.[129]
At a Timmonsville meeting Ku Klux attitudes were well expressed by a Klan speaker identified only as a “minister of the Gospel” who would be in his pulpit the following Sunday morning. After the opening prayer, this defender of the faith announced that he hated all Jews and “niggers.”
The NAACP [he continued] is a Communist front organization. We have documents in the House Un-American Activities Committee to prove this. I was supposed to have literature here tonight to prove this, but it was late in arriving....
The main issue in South Carolina is not so much Communism as it is niggerism....
Klansmen don’t wear sheets, they wear robes. It is a shame that good Christian people have to hide themselves to do what our country was founded for....
That nigger-lovin’ Estes Kefauver wouldn’t sign the referendum (Southern Manifesto); we ought to send that nigger-lover to Africa....
The National Council of Churches is a Communist front organization. Bishop Oxnam, the former president, is under indictment by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a Communist....
I’d rather (my little boy) grow up unable to read or write than sit beside a nigger in school.
Another speaker, standing on the flat bed of a Ford truck, told a Klan rally that Henry Ford II had given $1,500,000 to the NAACP and that he (the speaker) would boycott all Ford products until Ford gave an equal amount to a white supremacy group.[130]
Klan speakers invariably include a thinly veiled threat against those who seek to upset racial segregation. The Grand Dragon of South Carolina warned that “the day the Negro steps into a white South Carolina school as a student will be the day we pick up our weapons.”[131] A “preacher” told another rally that “moderation has never been the answer to anything. It’s the extremists—you and me—who are going to solve this situation.”[132]