The Klan In and Around Hicksville
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 3, 1929
News reports of Klan activities within Hicksville and in surrounding communities suggest that these places embraced the KKK as much as the rest of Long Island did. Below are summaries of local 1920s newspaper articles, from which readers can form their own opinions of what went on:
- A Hicksville widow wrote to the Long-Islander newspaper, publicly thanking the KKK for donating groceries to her needy family.
- A "large number of people" drove from Farmingdale to East Rockaway for a fund-raiser in support of a new local war memorial. For reasons not explained, attendees were asked to vote for the "most popular patriotic organization." The overwhelming winner of the contest was the Klan.
- While taking an evening walk with his wife, a Jewish pharmacist in Freeport was kidnapped by three men who claimed to be Klansmen, two weeks after ten such men had intimidated him at his drug store. He was threatened with reprisals if he did not shutter his business and leave Freeport, and was offered money as a further incentive. Some hours after midnight, he was freed on a deserted roadside in Hicksville.
- On the eve of one July 4th, presumably as a display of Klan patriotism, wooden crosses were simultaneously erected and set afire in twelve communities on Long Island. In Sea Cliff, the cross was so close to the war memorial that the latter was damaged by the flames.
- A Klan speaker in Suffolk publicly denounced the Pope and all Catholics, and proclaimed that the KKK planned to drive "Hebrew merchants" out of business on Long Island by establishing competing "Christian" businesses.
- The annual reports of both the Hicksville and the Bethpage (the latter still called " Central Park ") Public Libraries indicated that they had accepted financial donations from the Klan.
- Early during the 1925 Hicksville Memorial Day parade, the KKK surreptitiously placed a large wreath around the World War I Memorial (at that time, the boulder was still located near the LIRR station). When the parade reached the Memorial for the scheduled placing of wreaths, the sight of the Klan wreath triggered fights between Klansmen and a number of Knights of Columbus and other Catholics.
Note: Of course, people other than Catholics also opposed the Klan's presumptuous claim upon America's war dead. At a wreath-placement ceremony in Rockville Centre, a similar brawl occurred between the KKK and the American Legion.
- When a Bethpage fireman died, his funeral service was conducted at a Lutheran church - but his burial at Hicksville's Plainlawn Cemetery was performed according to the Klan funeral rite, which typically is conducted in full KKK regalia.
- In Hicksville, 5,000 people attended a "Klan and friends only" rally / initiation in an open field beside New South Road. A cross burned. Local police dutifully kept away those who had not been invited. One feature of the rally was the christening of an infant dressed in Klan garb.
- An aside: That child would have been born around the same time as many of our parents!
- As in Hicksville, Syosset officials welcomed a ceremonial visit by the Klan to its high school auditorium, and accepted its gifts.
- The Klan donated the largest trophy to be awarded at the Firemen's Tournament in Hicksville.
- The "Honorable Knights and Ladies of the Ku Klux Klan" were guests at a special Sunday service at the Methodist Episcopal Church in Bethpage.
- After more than a decade of acceptance on Long Island, in 1926 the KKK felt sufficiently at home to hold a four-day state convention (Klorero) at the Mineola Fair Grounds. New York's Grand Dragon and his senior officers, aka the Nine Hydras, presided.
from The Ku Klux Klan in Sayville and Long Island at http://www.oocities.org/timmlimm/clan.htm
Reading the above news items, one sees the diverse and inconsistent faces which the Klan presented to people - and one also sees that, in large part because of them, it thrived in the 1920s.
