The Art of the Interview … and the Ku Klux Klan

There comes a point in this practice of journalism where we are forced by circumstance to write about people and things about which we have opinions, even if it is a news story, which automatically means a balanced approach is required.

The goal is to see that the views of all people involved are fairly presented. This week’s article arising from the distribution of leaflets in a Houma subdivision by a group that identifies as the Ku Klux Klan is an example of this.

No matter how balanced I wish to be, it is difficult while writing about the Ku Klux Klan to purge the brain of a lifetime of knowledge, images and memories.

The lengthiest conversation I had in this regard was with a young man from somewhere in Louisiana. He wouldn’t say where specifically – about the leaflets that were left in driveways in Houma by his organization, the Patriotic Brigade Knights of the KKK. He wouldn’t let me know his real name. He hides, like the members of the Klan always have hidden behind their fearsome hoods.

My last encounter with the Ku Klux Klan was in Mississippi. A guy named Ron Sisk was fixing to raise what he touted as the biggest rebel flag, ever, in a wooded area of McHenry where he ran a head shop. The Sons of Confederate Veterans and several area politicians were going to be there. Sisk kept the marijuana pipes and other paraphernalia in full view behind his glass counters. But the other merchandise he sold, cards to be placed on windshields that read “The Klan Is Watching You” and tee-shirts containing racial epithets, were under the counter. The flag raising was billed as an event to honor Confederate heroes like Nathan Bedford Forrest and Robert E. Lee. On the same flier, in the midst of them, was the name of Samuel Bowers. I asked Sisk why the name of the man who murdered civil rights worker Vernon Dahmer and was also convicted of conspiracy in the murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney during the Freedom Summer should be on a list with the likes of Robert E. Lee.

He told me that a man named Jimmie Maxey had paid for the fliers and helped organized the event, and told him the name of Bowers should be included. Mr. Maxey, now deceased, was the Grand Dragon of the South Mississippi Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

I called Maxey, who owned a printing company in the town of Petal. I asked him if he was paying to help organize the rally and he said that he was.

“Your people killed people,” I said to Maxey. “Bowers killed people. Why should he be honored?”

“Son, you have to understand it was a war going on then,” Maxey replied, in a creaky and eerily calm voice. “It’s different now.”

My story the next morning exposed the KKK connection to the flag raising. Respectable organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and most of the politicians immediately bowed out.

At the flag raising, which was attended by far fewer people than planned, Ron Sisk lunged at me, placing his hands around my throat, in the presence of a half-dozen Mississippi state troopers. He was immediately arrested and jailed. It turned out that at the time this occurred, Sisk was already under federal investigation for trafficking in methamphetamine and he was later charged in connection with that. Maxey, in connection with new prosecutions in the Mississippi Burning case, threatened the Mississippi Attorney General. So to any local members of the Ku Klux Klan, please forgive me if I find your claims to benevolence hollow. I believe that you have a right to speak just like everyone else, of course. But if you want credit for helping old ladies cross the street or cleaning up highways then maybe you should call yourselves the Patriotic Brigade of the Grown Up Boy Scouts.

That you would keep the name of the Klan alive is a sacrilege perpetrated against the named and nameless slain by the Klan in north Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and many other places. I quote a black preacher from Mississippi I spoke with years ago, who said that if the waters of the Pearl River were low enough to walk across, someone doing that would never touch bottom because of the bones still laying there. The group whose name you claim did that. Why should we believe that you would not, in their name, do it again? •