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[ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: The Klan in Oregon didn't just have numbers, it reached into the highest echelons of power.

We had a governor who was Klan-affiliated.

MAN: It's a political machine, it's a national purity crusade.

They supported immigration restriction laws.

It was basically a money-making organization.

MAN: Most communities of any size had a Klan.

In Oregon, the main focus of the Ku Klux Klan was fear of Catholics.

There were hardly any African Americans in Oregon at the time.

MAN: But what the Klan represented was a frightening threat for people of color, all colors.

Blacks especially.

WOMAN: It's something that Oregon has really tried to... forget.

And yet we can't begin to understand this place that we live without this information.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ ♪♪♪ ] NARRATOR: In 1925, tens of thousands of Ku Klux Klan members paraded through the streets of Washington, D.C. Nationwide, the Klan was at its height, with millions of members.

For a time, this notorious group built a movement around normalizing hatred.

According to a 1924 Klan brochure, it was an organization that stood for white supremacy, the Protestant faith, and patriotic ideals.

Through the 1920s, it's believed there were between 15- to 50,000 Klan members in Oregon.

Indiana and Texas claimed to have five times that number.

No one really knows.

There are no complete records, and membership numbers were often exaggerated.

Other than a handful of images, most of that history has been hidden away.

But the Oregon Historical Society holds some of the robes and other materials used by the KKK, providing tangible evidence of the Klan's presence here.

Not discussing the KKK and their role in that period of history in Oregon would be remiss of us.

And I think that it is really important, because there will always be reasons to look to the past to do better, there will always be ongoing scholarship and research, and that's one of the reasons that OHS exists.

I was doing a research project, so I trot down to the Historical Society and go into the manuscripts room.

There's a card that says "Ku Klux Klan, proceedings of, 1922, La Grande, Ore." Apparently when the organization petered out in the '20s, somebody just gave all the minutes over to Colon Eberhard and said, "Here, put them in your office."

Hadn't been opened since the '20s.

Eberhard was an Oregon state legislator and member of the La Grande KKK.

When he died in the 1960s, the minutes were found inside his locked safe.

They included 200 pages of Klan dealings from 1922 to 1924.

To my knowledge, nobody ever looked at them until I realized there were no other minutes of secret Ku Klux Klan meetings which actually describe what happened at meetings.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ man reads on-screen text ] Walter Pierce was an eastern Oregon lawyer and rancher who would spend four decades in politics.

A supporter of Prohibition and tough immigration laws, the Klan backed him for governor.

Pierce comes to the meeting in January of 1923.

What is it the Klan wants from him?

They wanted jobs in the state administration.

WOMAN: We tend to think of the KKK as sort of this rogue group of guys who intimidate people and all that, and that was true, but the KKK in Oregon wove its way into the political arena.

We had a governor who was Klan-affiliated.

That's not just a local movement here in Oregon, it's a national movement.

And it's created because of national events.

You can see certain patterns of behavior and certain kind of dynamics that were important and powerful parts of the 1920s that are occurring in America today.

There are strong parallels, similarities between the period of the early 1920s and the period of the-- [ chuckles ] The present day.

HOROWITZ: 1919, which is a terrible year in American history, and it's the year of the pandemic and race riots and labor unrest and inflation, the Klan begins to expand.

Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, California, Oregon, Colorado, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas.

Those are the states that seemed to have the largest Klans.

They were on different sections of the country.

They were seen by many white Americans as mainstream through community events like these, meant for families.

There were women's groups and kids' clubs.

An aviation division flew over gatherings.

They owned newspapers, produced movies, and continually recruited members.

Their ceremonies featured fiery crosses that advertised their presence.

LALANDE: The Klan had all kinds of agendas.

The Klan would fasten on whatever seemed to be most resented or feared in any particular area and then focused on those.

In Oregon, the main focus of the Ku Klux Klan was fear of Catholics.

There were hardly any African Americans in Oregon at the time.

The Black population in Oregon has never really been very large.

In fact, from 1844, with first the provisional government and then the territorial government, there have been Black exclusion laws on the books, which essentially said you could not be Black in Oregon.

Or if you were here, you couldn't stay.

You couldn't build a movement against a Black population that was so small and nonthreatening in Oregon.

But Catholics could be built into a threatening presence here that you could build a movement against.

That anti-Catholic strain of Oregon life is not new.

It goes all the way back to the pioneer period, just as the Black exclusion policies and laws.

In 1920, Oregon had a population of almost 800,000.

Ninety-seven percent of residents were white.

Most were Protestant.

For a time, the state would become a breeding ground for Klan activities.

People just do not associate Oregon with that.

They like to think that those kinds of things happen in the South.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The new, revived group took the name and costumes of the Ku Klux Klan of Southern Reconstruction.

LALANDE: The name "Kuklos" is Greek for "circle.

It was a circular organization where you stood together... and you faced out towards enemies and you protected each other.

HOROWITZ: The first Klan of the 1860s was a terrorist organization and was designed to harass Northern troops who were occupying the South after the Civil War and to intimidate African Americans into remaining on the plantations.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The original KKK wore hoods to conceal their identities as they attacked, lynched, and murdered thousands of people across the South.

Faced with federal opposition, the Klan largely disappeared by the 1870s, though other racist groups remained.

Then, in 1915, the film Birth of a Nation hit theaters.

MILLNER: It was a film in which Blacks were portrayed in the most negative ways, with all the old stereotypes.

So it was a tremendously powerful and racist film.

Including hooded Klansmen saving a white woman from a Black attacker.

When it arrived in Oregon theaters, local advocate Beatrice Cannady fought back.

[ woman reads on-screen text ] Cannady hired a lawyer to try to ban the movie.

She wrote editorials against it and gave public lectures denouncing it.

I can't imagine how difficult organizing at that time would have been for racial justice.

And yet, Black folks, in the face of that, created communities and carved out spaces and organized.

MILLNER: That kind of significant, organized response was going to be an important stepping stone in terms of how the Black community is going to respond to those racial issues for the next four or five decades.

It was the first step towards the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s.

The film Birth of a Nation, along with the lynching of a Jewish man, inspired a Klan revival.

Atop Georgia's Stone Mountain, Reverend William Joseph Simmons initiated members and proclaimed himself the Imperial Wizard of the revived Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

They took a lot of the paraphernalia that was associated with the first Klan, the masks and the hoods and the robes, the secret oaths and so forth, and used that.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The Klan developed its own language for members.

Recruiters were called "Kleagles."

They signed up new members and started chapters known as Klaverns.

Membership was $10.

Robes and regalia had to be purchased through the official Klan catalog.

Recruiters got a percentage of all fees, while a portion went to national leaders.

New members would then try and get more members, and so become Kleagles themselves.

And that really became a pyramid scheme for the recruiters.

With so much money at stake, a new leader seized control of the Klan.

In a coup, charismatic leader Hiram Evans of Texas became Imperial Wizard and took over the finances.

HOROWITZ: It is Evans who really makes the 1920s Klan into a mass movement.

He understood that the Klan would thrive if it aligned itself not just as a patriotic group but as a purity reform group, and so they supported Prohibition, they wanted to clean up the "urban" corruption that they attributed to Catholics and Jews, primarily immigrants, and they wanted to purify the schools by having the schools teach American patriotism.

They borrowed slogans like "100% Americanism" and "America for Americans," terms repeatedly reused by political groups right up to the present day.

This whole idea of "100% Americanism," fear of Catholics and other foreigners and so on, that was pervasive in this country at the time.

IMARISHA: Knowing the history and the foundations of the Northwest and Oregon, it's not surprising that there's immense white supremist organizing and activity here.

With the arrival of the first white settlers came a series of racist laws.

Including the Black exclusion law in Oregon's constitution when it became a state, that told Black folks they could not live here, they could not hold real estate, they could not make contracts.

Cities start passing laws to limit what Chinese could do.

The Chinese were restricted where they could live, where they could work, where they could start businesses.

MILLNER: All those things that are happening in Oregon make Oregon a very fertile ground for the Klan to spring up and to eventually rise to power.

Exclusion and other racist laws were still on the books in 1921, when Klan recruiter Luther Powell arrived in Oregon.

LALANDE: Powell came up on the Southern Pacific Railroad from California, and his first stop was the Rogue Valley, Medford, which he helped organize the very first Klan in Oregon.

Illegal liquor sales were a problem in the region, and many residents were attracted to the Klan platform of "law and order."

The couching of your objectives and your behaviors in religious language, in patriotic language, all of those things make the Klan more palatable and acceptable to a certain part of the population.

Medford's mayor expressed disapproval of the masks but accepted honorary membership.

Within months, there were public events in Ashland, Grants Pass, and Klamath Falls.

A rally in Roseburg drew 3,000 people.

In Eugene, ceremonies included a burning cross overlooking the city on Skinner Butte.

The numbers vary, but it's estimated there were anywhere from 40 to 60 Klaverns across the state.

Portland had the most members.

HOROWITZ: Sixty percent of Oregon Klansmen lived in Portland.

The Klan held an initiation of its new members on Mount Scott during the Rose Festival week.

They burned crosses on Mount Tabor.

In 1921, Portland city leaders appeared in this infamous photo in the Portland Telegram.

IMARISHA: We see the top officials, including the mayor and the sheriff and the attorney general posing with hooded Klansmen, and that ran in...

In the newspaper.

And folks were...

Were fine with that.

Listed in the article as "exalted Cyclops," ambitious leader Fred Gifford was already heavily involved in politics.

Within months, he seized control of the state Klan from the national organizers.

MILLNER: Fred Gifford was the Grand Dragon of the Northwest, not just of Oregon.

And Fred Gifford was a con man.

Rumors swirled that he bribed top officials to get what he wanted, including a Portland Police vigilance force made up of mostly Klan members.

For a person of color, for a Black person, when you learn the Klan in Portland had a 100-member squad in the police department, okay, for me, that's a frightening thing.

With its growing power, the KKK established an office in downtown Portland and began soliciting tens of thousands of dollars for Klan projects that never materialized.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ man reads on-screen text ] HOROWITZ: We think of the Klan as patriarchal and that it oppressed women, but it's much more complicated than that.

LALANDE: It was the women of the Klan doing the shopping and the social activities, and they would snub someone who didn't toe the line.

You know, things like, "Don't go to Meier & Frank in Portland."

They were boycotted by Klan members.

They were Jewish-owned.

There was also resistance to the Klan.

There were a lot of people who just were not going to take this.

The Salem Capital Journal ran a whole series exposing the Klan, said, "We don't need these secret organizations in our society.

It's not democratic.

We don't-- They're not accountable to anyone."

[ ♪♪♪ ] Women in both Portland and Tillamook claimed hooded men branded them, but no one was ever charged.

The Klan threatened Black business owners in Salem and Oregon City, warning them to leave town.

But it was three events in southern Oregon that made national news.

LALANDE: What became known as the Southern Oregon Outrages, where individuals would be taken out by the so-called Night Riders, who were masked, basically kidnapped them.

Three men were lynched, but not long enough to kill them.

They included a bootlegger of Mexican heritage, a Black man jailed on liquor charges, and a white man suing a Klan member.

At the urging of Portland's NAACP, Jewish leaders, and others, Oregon governor Benjamin Olcott issued a proclamation condemning Klan activity in the state.

[ man reads on-screen text ] Throughout the 1920s, there were other acts of racial violence throughout the state, though the Klan was not directly implicated, including Japanese workers run out of town in Toledo, Oregon, Jewish synagogues destroyed by arson, and, in Marshfield, the murder and mutilation of Timothy Pettis, a veteran of the all-Black 24th Infantry.

The town is now known as Coos Bay, where in 1902, a white mob shot and lynched a Black man named Alonzo Tucker.

White supremist violence was the norm.

And it was the norm for Black communities, it was the norm for other communities as well.

The just kind of the mob feeling, the feeling that we have the right to do that, we can do that because you are different, and that is a terrible thing.

Within months of its arrival, the Klan openly pushed for laws that would ban one of the state's religious minorities.

LALANDE: They wanted Catholics to be fired from public schools.

They felt they could not be trusted to teach their children.

Some wanted Catholics to be fired from all government jobs.

The anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant aspect of the Klan in Oregon and actually nationwide is often lost to people today.

The thing I think is so hard to understand today is that there really was this belief that Catholics could not be good Americans because they were allegiant to the Pope and they were going to try to infiltrate our country.

And it just seems so bizarre but really is a fear that people had.

Oregon's first Catholic school was St. Mary's Academy, founded by the Sisters of the Holy Names, 12 nuns and a Mother Superior who arrived in Portland from Quebec.

So when the Sisters arrived in 1859, they came into Portland, and within two weeks had opened their first school.

By the '20s, the Sisters had really put down roots in Oregon and in Washington State, and they had opened 12 schools of their own, and they also staffed parochial schools around the state.

The Klan wanted to shut these schools and others like them down.

In 1922, a compulsory education bill went before voters.

The Klan wasn't the official sponsor, but behind the scenes, it worked to make the law a test case for other states.

The law would require students to attend public schools, banning private institutions like Catholic academies.

The Catholics in Oregon spring into action, and they form a civil rights group to go and educate people around the state about why they really need to vote.

Despite their efforts, in 1922, the compulsory school bill passed.

The 1922 election was the Ku Klux Klan's opportunity, and it was a successful opportunity to show its muscle, its political muscle in Oregon.

It crossed party lines.

Klan-backed Walter Pierce was elected governor, and Klan supporter Kaspar K. Kubli was named Oregon's Speaker of the House.

Most Klan-backed laws died in the legislature, but some stayed on the books for years, including the so-called garb bill, banning teachers from wearing religious clothing in the classroom.

Those of Asian descent were also the target of racist laws supported by the Klan and other anti-immigration groups.

HOROWITZ: They were instrumental in the passage of the alien land law of 1923, which was directed at Japanese American ranchers and farmers which made it illegal for a foreigner who was not eligible for citizenship, which meant Asian Americans, to own land in their own name in the state of Oregon.

Similar laws were passed across the Pacific Northwest.

And in 1924, Washington State Congressman Albert Johnson successfully sponsored a federal bill to strictly limit immigration.

The national act that almost eliminated all immigration for countries where the people were not white.

That was a very important national result of the Klan movement.

The bill was a huge success for the Klan, but in Oregon, support was wavering, in part thanks to Catholic nuns.

They joined with a private military academy to challenge the compulsory school bill.

Pierce v. the Society of Sisters went all the way to the Supreme Court.

In 1925, the bill was deemed unconstitutional in a ruling that still stands.

CANTOR: Because of this case that happened here in Oregon almost a hundred years ago, we still can have private education throughout the country.

At the same time, Black leaders were also demanding action.

In 1926, the local NAACP pushed to have Oregon's Black exclusion law finally removed from the state constitution.

MILLNER: And those victories are important because they encourage Blacks to continue to fight and resist and seek future victories as well.

All across the country, the Ku Klux Klan's mainstream appeal was dying, as former members exposed Klan secrets in tell-all books, including the editor of the Oregon Klan newspaper.

[ man reads on-screen text ] Many Klan-backed politicians were voted out of office or recalled, including three Multnomah County commissioners accused of taking bribes for the construction of Portland bridges.

Klaverns across the state turned on each other, sometimes through physical fights.

Some chapters formed new groups or dissolved altogether.

MILLNER: In any experience where tremendous amounts of money, political infighting, and backbiting, you're going to have all of the kind of political dynamics that we can see flourishing around us in the 21st century now.

By the late 1920s, just a few years after the Klan had arrived in Oregon, it seemed to disappear.

But the Klan philosophy does not go away.

Many people who were active in the Klan in the early years of the 1920s will continue to be active in Oregon political and economic and social life deep into the 20th century.

Leaving a lingering legacy of bigotry, hate, and violence that sometimes turns deadly.

Some of the atrocious things that happened, people who don't know the trauma and the events of the past, they won't recognize when it's happening again.

HO: Today we see the similar thing, similar approach, similar mentality, and these are terrible to me, I think.

If we understand the past, can we use some of the lessons that we learn to make things better today?

MILLNER: You can't change what happened in the 1920s, but you do have to learn from it and acknowledge and accept that it did happen.

And you have to make an individual, personal decision not based on guilt but based on what kind of future you want to see this country create around these racial issues.

That's the responsibility that you have today.

There's more about The Rise of Hate on Oregon Experience online.

To learn more, visit... [ ♪♪♪ ] Leading support for Oregon Experience is provided by... Major support provided by... Additional support provided by the contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.