Ku Klux Klan Rally

SC State House

Black Citizens were sometimes arrested for loitering if they walked on the State House grounds in Columbia, South Carolina. However, in 1957 the Ku Klux Klan could hold a rally on the grounds after a parade up and down Main Street. Photos by Richard Taylor. Courtesy of The State Newspaper Photograph Archive at Richland Library, Columbia, SC.

A human cross & dynamite

The Ku Klux Klan used violence – kidnapping, beating, mutilating, and lynching – to enforce subjugation and segregation. Klansmen counted on terrorism to intimidate, silence, or run out of town any black person considered successful or outspoken, anyone who didn’t know his or her “place,” anyone accused of an affront to white people, no matter how minor or manufactured the charge.

On December 7, 1957, 200 Klansmen formed a human cross on the State House steps then marched up and down Main Street in Columbia, South Carolina. In an interview afterward, Imperial Wizard E. L. Edwards denied knowledge of the November 20 bombing of Dr. James and Claudia Thomas Sanders’ home in Gaffney, South Carolina. While the home was damaged, neither of the Sanders was injured when three sticks of dynamite exploded. That Cherokee County attack was followed by a dynamite explosion that damaged the home of Lewis Ford, a black tenant farmer.

Claudia Thomas Sanders became a KKK target when she supported gradual desegregation of public schools in an essay included in “South Carolinians Speak,” a booklet about race relations intended to introduce “words of moderation.” Sanders invoked “social conscious and Christian ethics” when she advised, “Gradual desegregation in the schools accomplished by starting with the first grades seems logical.” Of the twelve contributors, all white, eleven of them men, she was the only one physically attacked. The five contributors who were ministers quickly lost their pulpits. With the aid of the FBI, state law enforcement arrested five KKK members. Evidence revealed the dynamiting was a third attempt on Claudia Thomas Sanders’ life. However, charges against two of the men were dropped, one died mysteriously at home when his car crushed him, and an all-white jury acquitted the remaining two.