My Childhood Nightmares of the Ku Klux Klan

I can assure anyone reading this article it is the most emotional piece of writing I have ever done. I can also assure you the events of this article are 100 per cent true and unforgettable to me. In 1966 when I was six years old we lived in a small town in Mississippi. My father was born and raised in Tennesse and my mother was born and raised in the small town we were living in at the time. I knew at a very young age my parents and their families were racist in every aspect of the word.

My mother's father, my grandfather died long before I was born. Most children have happy or wonderful memories of their grandfathers. The only picture I had ever been shown of my grandfather by my mother was of him on one side of an Afro American man and another man on the other side. The black man was hanging by the neck from a large tree. My grandfather and the other man had the looks on their faces of two deep sea fisherman who had landed and prize winning marlin and were posing with their catch. At six years old, it made me sick to my stomach as my family members passed the picture around with proud looks on their faces.

A couple of days after I was shown this picture on a cold winter night in December I was awakened by my parents. They rushed my large winter coat, leaving me in my pajamas printed with little cowboys on horses and me into a pair of winter boots. They told me we were going to meet my Uncle and their was going to be fireworks. I was very excited even if it was late at night. We drove for a long time until we came to a large old barn deep in the woods. I could see light shining from beneath the bottom of the big double barn doors. Dried pine needles and pinecones crunched beneath our feet as we approached a door at the side of the barn.

There was drunken yelling, cursing, and laughter coming from within. I entered the barn with my parents and it was packed with a lot of white people men, women, and children. Then there was a large number of who I assumed were men dressed in white sheets with white hoods. On the front of the white sheets, it looked like strips of red cloth had been sewn on in the form of a cross. They were in the center of the barn where another wooden cross was planted in the ground. The barn floor was covered with straw and an old wood heater burned in the corner giving of the smell of wood burring.

In just a few minutes, the men in the white robes started clapping and cheering. Two of them went to the big double barn doors in the front and opened them. Several other men in robes and hoods drug a black man from the back of a pickup into the barn. One was on each side of him holding him under his arms as they drug him toward the center of the room while others closed the barn doors. At first I could not tell if he was alive because as the two men drug him to the wooden cross his head laid limp to the side and his legs dragged limply also.

They placed the black man forward onto the cross strapping his arms to the horizontal part of the cross with what looked like belts. His head lay limply against the vertical part of the cross. A man came out of the crowd dressed in the same type robes and hood except he had a red sash around his waist. He carried what I would call a bullwhip. He cracked the whip several times, as the crowd cheered him on and you could feel the electricity of their excitement in the air. He lashed the whip onto the man several times leaving large red and pink marks across his back as he screamed a scream I shall never forget.

I ran from the barn and hid in my parent's car with my hands over my ears. I cannot tell you what happened to the man on the cross, I suspect he died. For years, I could never enter a church because of the sign of the cross. I associated it with hatred. It was not until later that I found Christianity through my wife. I have never been a racist, I am disgusted with my family and through my entire life I have never had anything to do with any of them except my parents and very little to do with them. We are all children of God and racism has no place in this world. I would like to forget that night and the picture of my grandfather but they are scars permanently embedded into my mind.