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Our General Assembly made a minor mistake in adopting
Martin Luther King Day. If the legislature had designated
the third Monday in January as the Annual Skirmish
between Civil Rights Marchers and the Ku Klux Klan,
then the yearly ruckus would proceed according to
expectations, thereby eliminating at least one source of
disappointment from Colorado.
Further, Annual Skirmish Day would certainly honor the Rev. Dr. King's memory; he led many marches that were vigorously opposed by various Kleagles and their Klaverns. Heated confrontations are as much a part of the King legacy as prayers and sermons.
Renaming the holiday would also remind us that the Klan did not operate only in that region where folks order grits and still speak of Nathan Bedford Forrest in reverent tones.
Our histories seldom mention that in the mid-1920s, the
Klan was the major political force in Colorado. John Galen
Locke, Grand Dragon of the Realm of Kolorado,
commanded a sheet-clad army of thousands.
Crosses burned almost nightly on Table Mountain above Golden, and hooded Klansmen marched in daylight parades on downtown Denver streets, along with members of the Klan Ladies' Auxiliary. (The parades weren't confined to Denver. When the Klan marched down F Street in Salida about 70 years ago, they had several horse-drawn floats -- the old picture is almost amusing now because the horses also wore hoods.)
With violence and blackmail, Locke controlled merchants, police and judges. In the 1924 election, he installed his henchman, Clarence Morley, as governor.
Locke used this governmental machinery and his hooded terrorists against anyone who spoke against him, but that didn't stop one of the forgotten heroes of Colorado journalism: Sidney Whipple, editor of the Denver Express.
Day in and day out, Whipple railed against the
Invisible Government
and its stooges, among them
Denver Mayor Ben Stapleton.
Locke fought back by telling merchants that the Klan would boycott their businesses if they continued to advertise in the Express, and when Whipple ignored that threat, the Grand Dragon had Whipple hauled before a Klan-run grand jury.
Locke and Whipple both succeeded in destroying the other. Morley was voted out in 1926, Mayor Stapleton turned against the Klan, and the Colorado KKK has never amounted to much more than an embarrassment since then.
But as a history notes, the Express was not a
powerful or rich Denver paper. Klan members, on the other
hand, numbered in the tens of thousands. By bringing their
power to bear, the Klan caused subscribers to cancel and
advertisers to withdraw from the Express. Eventually, the
Express was forced out of business in 1927.
Newspapers have died for worse causes, and perhaps it is heartening to realize that conflicts between the Klan and fair-minded people are no novelty in Colorado.
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