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Chuck Poulsen/Needlepoint class
By Chuck Poulsen
My brother in Wisconsin sent me a photocopy of a membership card in the Ku Klux Klan.
It has a date of Dec. 31, 1926, some 84 years ago.
It was my grandfather’s membership card.
There is a coat of arms on the card and the words “honour and duty.” It also says the KKK is an “invisible empire.”
I’m not sure how one squares honour and duty with being invisible under white sheets and hoods.
The first KKK was founded in 1865 by Tennessee veterans of the Confederate army. It spread throughout the U.S. South to restore white supremacy after the Civil War.
In 1915, the second Klan was founded because industrialization in the North attracted immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and a migration of Southern blacks. The KKK hated blacks, Catholics, and Jews. Some chapters hung blacks and burned their houses. Your kind of everyday evil, Adolph.
At its peak in 1926, five million American men belonged to the KKK, about 15 per cent of the male white population.
Before you judge my grandfather, let me tell you a bit about him.
My grandfather was Charles, my namesake. Everyone called him Charlie.
He died of heart problems when he was 65, following a lifetime of smoking Chesterfield cigarettes, which, according to an old magazine ad, were endorsed by the majority of doctors in the U.S. as the best-tasting cigarettes. Charlie was a wonderful grandfather. He took me to ballgames when the Braves were in Milwaukee. I saw Hank Aaron and Jackie Robinson, both blacks, play. Charlie let me play golf along with his group although I just held them up.
He taught my brother and me card games, especially poker. One of the poker lessons came on a Sunday morning when I was supposed to be in church. My mother was not amused but Charlie cared more about being with me than being in a church.
My brother and I loved it when Charlie and my grandmother came to babysit. We got away with everything.
Charlie raised his voice to me once. I was the pitcher for a Little League team. I had thrown a decent game but my team gave me no support in runs. I’d ignored the fact that I didn’t produce any runs myself.
I got in the back seat of the car for the ride home, threw my mitt on the floor and whined that I was going to quit.
Charlie turned in his seat, pointed his finger at my face, and barked: “Don’t you ever quit the team! Ever!”
I was so stunned, I couldn’t cry.
I was born in 1946 in Racine, Wisconsin. We white kids called the black kids niggers or jigs. There was an old sign painted on the side of a downtown building advertising “nigger hair” chewing tobacco. As a kid, I went to Florida with my parents. We stopped at a gas station in Alabama that had a men’s and ladies’ bathroom. It also had a bathroom for “coloured,” both men and women.
I had no idea that by 1966 I would find myself marching in civil rights demonstrations in support of equality for blacks. Times change and so do people, at least some of them.
The KKK was somewhat of a fraternal organization in the northern states.
Charlie liked to fraternize.
My mother said that Charlie could make friends with a lamp post. He had charisma before JFK made the word popular.
There were only a handful of blacks in Racine in 1926, nothing for the whites to worry about for competition for jobs.
Kids can distinguish between anger or kindness in a person as well as adults, maybe better.
I asked my brother what he thought of our grandfather’s KKK membership.
He said: “He was a very social guy who joined groups to socialize. Did you ever know Charlie to hate anybody?”
My answer: “I can’t conceive of it.”
The lesson may be:
Don’t judge a book by its cover, even if it’s a membership card in the KKK.
Or maybe not. Perhaps this is the lesson:
Charlie knew what the KKK stood for. Maybe one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but people can judge a man by the company he keeps. There is no excuse for what Charlie did.
Take your pick.
Chuck Poulsen is a retired journalist, but can’t seem to stop writing. You can contact him directly at needlepoint@shaw.ca. His column appears Wednesdays.
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Let’s remember the updated and more accurate definition of racist:
RACIST: 1. Slang: Extremely Disparaging and Offensive term for a white person. 2: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities, if promoted by white people. 3: a belief that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race, if promoted by white people.
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No J. Morgan…you’re the updated and more accurate definition of a racist….
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Chuck the fact of the matter is that your grandfather was a member of the KKK and I am not going to put on the rose colored glasses you are wearing to explain your grandfathers actions. Maybe you could send this article of yours to the couple in Nova Scotia who just had a cross burned outside there home about what a wonderful man your grandfather was even though he was a card carrying KKK member.
If you probably asked the children of the Nazis about there parents I am sure they would say they werw good as well at home after they had been working all day killing the jewish people and then going home and having dinner with their children, reading stories to their children and then kissing them goodnight. The fact of the matter is they were still Nazis killing innocent people.
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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The guy was a racist, it has nothing to do with being social. The organization is and was known for being a racist group. KKK is the international symbol of hatred
and violence. KKK members have committed murder, arson,
thuggery, rape and God knows what else. There is no such
thing as a nice racist or bigot. My family is like a mini
United Nations and I can’t imagine hating any of them.
It is so hard to hate people you don’t know.
Charlie, knew what his friends were and what KKK stood for
And if he wasn’t one of them, the old saying applies
“If you lay down with dogs, you wake up with flees”
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There are no words that I can use to express the horror, and anger that I felt as a child, while listening to my mother describe the utter fear that she felt as a child while growing up in Mississippi. Born in 1920 she was exposed to the hangings, burnings and injustices carried out on people of her race just for being. My mother left Mississippi in 1940, at the age of 20 years, and due to the fear and trauma that she experienced earlier on in her life due to the many evils of the KKK she swore never to return to her place of birth. My mother is now 89 years old and to date she never has returned.
Yes, Charlie probably was a loving grandfather to you, but most importantly, he was definitely a racist, and had he still been alive, probably still would be.
Thank God for change. I totally agree with Fred Steele.
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