The lengths to which Klan “extremists” are willing to go, or more accurately the depths to which they can descend, is illustrated by an episode which occurred at Traveler’s Rest in Greenville County which is in the upper part of the state. On the night of July 21, 1957, eleven white men broke into the home of Claude Cruell, a moderately prosperous fifty-eight year old Negro farmer and Baptist deacon. Four of them proceeded to chain him up and beat him. The others watched. During the course of the beating, according to Cruell’s wife, Fannie, who was subsequently driven away several miles from the farm and made to walk home, the invaders berated the Negro couple for “trying to mix with white people.”
Specifically, the group was referring to the Cruells’ association with Sherwood Turner and his family. Turner, a tall, illiterate thirty-four year old white man who eked out a precarious livelihood as an itinerant bean picker and handyman, lived with his wife and seven small children in a nearby house which they rented from Cruell for five dollars a month. On occasion, the Negro farmer had given Turner and his family rides in his car to nearby bean fields. On the day of the beating the Cruells were caring for Turner’s children while the latter had taken his wife, a thin, anemic woman, to the Stroud Memorial Hospital at Marietta for emergency treatment for a kidney ailment. The Turner children, consequently, witnessed the beating of Cruell.
A police investigation led directly to the independent Greenville County Ku Klux Klan. It was A. Marshall Rochester, head of the Greenville Klansmen, who led the “inquisitional” party to the Cruell farm. They had intended to whip not only Cruell but also the pitiful Mrs. Turner. Rochester openly acknowledged his role in the affair. Eight of the other men arrested with him not only in connection with the Cruell beating but also that of another Negro, Willie Lewis Brown, on July 29th, admitted membership in the Klan; a tenth said that he was a “probationary” member, and the eleventh identified himself as its “chaplain.”
The Cruell incident brought an indignant protest from Grand Dragon Bickley who denounced the Greenville Klansmen. He expressed “great pleasure” that the incidents of violence in Greenville had been solved by law enforcement authorities and held that such episodes resulted “only in harmful effects upon the South and our nation as a whole.” He carefully pointed out that his own organization had no acts of violence charged against it and also that it was not on the Attorney General’s subversive list. “This is due to the fact,” said Bickley, “that in all our chartered klaverns, the klansmen are taught to respect law and order.”
When the Klansmen were finally brought to trial after an indictment by a grand jury all but six were exonerated by Judge James M. Brailsford, Jr., who ordered charges against them dismissed. The trial jury found two others innocent. The remaining four, including Rochester, were found guilty of conspiracy and assault and battery and sentenced to jail terms ranging from one to six years. Rochester received the maximum six year sentence from Judge Brailsford who remarked: “I don’t see that I can accomplish any good by lecturing these men.” He was undoubtedly right.[133]
The press of the state has universally harrassed the Klan not only in the Cruell episode but in its other activities as well. The Morning News referred to the organization as “this blasphemy against religion; this living curse against decency; this social cancer that pollutes everyone and every area it touches.” The Independent called the Klan a “latter-day bedsheet brigade” which appealed only to the “mentally immature” who had “something to hide.” The News and Courier believed that it was made up of “hotheads, crackpots and brutes,” who went “night riding for sport” and did more harm than good for the cause of segregation.[134]
Not only does the Klan have to contend with a hostile press but it also faces opposition from the state government. Governor Timmerman quixotically charged that the reorganization of the Klan was the work of the Communist Party. In early 1956 the South Carolina Klan applied for a state charter. Attorney General Callison ruled against this request on the ground that Klan ritual called for the wearing of robes and hoods, which was illegal under the state’s anti-masking law.[135] Previously Callison had joined other Southern attorneys general in a declaration which pledged joint action to “use every legal means” to check Klan growth and expose its “secret and unlawful purposes.”[136] The attorney general’s actions were applauded by the press.
Public support of the Klan is rare. An occasional letter to the editor has defended the order. The writer of one such letter to the News and Courier, for example, had “never heard of the Klu Klux Klan bothering anyone who did not need a double-dose of what they got.” Neither had he ever known of the Klan taking the law into its own hands until “the law had been notified, and had failed to take action.” Because of the nature of the Communist conspiracy, he was in “favor of America waking up” even if the Klan had to do the waking.[137] Another letter writer to the News and Courier, one C. A. Rea of Hamlet, North Carolina, a town close to the South Carolina border, said that he had attended several KKK rallies and was sure that Klansmen did “not want any trouble.” Rea, who concluded his letter with “Yours for Christianity, segregation, and decency,” praised South Carolina law enforcement officers “for their fairness and cooperation” at Klan rallies. “They recognize and respect constitutional rights of peaceful assembly and of free speech,” he declared.[138]
The other white supremacy groups, nearly all of which had short existences, were less well known than the Klan. One of these, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, apparently had only one chapter in the state. This group was located at Florence and affiliated with a national organization led by Bryant Bowles who achieved a fleeting notoriety in connection with his attempts to prevent school integration in Delaware and Washington, D.C. The NAAWP, according to its national president, represented the white man’s “last hope” against the NAACP. He pledged to fight the “trend from communism to liberalism and then to negroism in the United States.”[139]
The Florence chapter was headed by G. L. Ivey, a restaurant owner, who fired all of his Negro employees immediately after the Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954. The pronouncements of Ivey and Bowles were similar to those made by some of the more outspoken members of the Klan. What the Negro really wanted, Ivey told white Carolinians, was “to get into your front bedroom.” Bowles protested that he was not anti-Semitic but added “the Jews are fast making me that way” through their support of the NAACP.[140]