Hooded Hatred: A Study of the Akron Ku Klux Klan

Hooded HatredA Study of the Akron Ku Klux Klan Steve Viglio (bio) The Akron, Ohio, Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was the focal point for the Summit County chapter of the organization. It represented not only the city with the largest membership in the county but also in the state of Ohio as a whole. The Klan used a combination of factors to recruit Akronites who felt threatened in their own city. These factors included competition with immigrants and African American migrant Southerners over factory jobs, housing shortages, and overcrowding within the city. Issues like these created a divide amongst Akronites that the Klan used to its advantage. The ineffective unions of the early 1900s also left local workers feeling voiceless within the workplace. The popularity of the chapter in Akron was based on xenophobia and many local Protestants’ feelings of marginalization. The Klan movement reinforced white supremacist attitudes, and membership in the Klan served as an assertion of power. Factionalism and in-fighting ultimately led to the demise of the group. In 1924 and 1925, Akron represented an important area for the Klan as a whole. Membership was large and booming because they also possessed political power within the Akron education system. Just a short year later, however, the once large and popular Klan began to disappear into the shadows for decades to follow. As the Klan ventured into Akron, reform measures remained their top priority. The organization wished for Akron public schools to be reformed parallel to their ideology. Their aims were to spread “100 Percent Americanism” in the school system by infiltrating the Akron Board of Education. Prior to this, the Klan worked with the South High Civic Association (SHCA) as a [End Page 91] means for reform, prior to taking majority control of the board. The SHCA was based out of South Akron, and its members were primarily white Protestants. South Akron also served as a recruitment haven for the KKK in the years that followed. Many Akronites even questioned the motives of the SHCA and whether or not it was only a means for high-ranking Klansmen to get elected to the board. Education reform remained the main successful strategy for Kluxers in the 1920s. The Akron Klan wanted segregation of Akron’s public school system and to instill Protestant values, banishing Catholicism and Judaism from classrooms. This represented their nativist and xenophobic vision for educational reform. The main goal for reform was to attack the parochial school system and to bar Catholics from teaching in public schools. These tactics served to advance their agenda of opposing immigrants, Black people, and Catholics. The Klan’s success in this regard was mixed. It was able to enact compulsory Bible reading in public schools but failed at reforming much else. The Klan was briefly able to gain majority control of the board of education. When the Klan had the majority of board membership, they pushed for segregation and for textbooks that contained offensive material regarding African Americans, Catholics, and Jews.1 At the same time, however, they failed to address major problems. The Akron school system was overcrowded and underfunded. Under the Klan’s authority, these problems were only exacerbated. If the KKK expected to advance its ideology in Akron’s public schools, they needed to address the growing problems within it. Ohio was an important state for the Klan; cities such as Akron and Youngstown were centers for Klan activity. Ohio was a state with one of the largest total Klan members in the 1920s, with some estimates suggesting nearly 500,000 Ohioans were active in the Klan and its associated organizations.2 The Klan’s [End Page 92] popularity in the region was directly related to preexisting white supremacist and nativist attitudes that existed in Akron—and the state of Ohio in general. The African American population in Akron also grew by over 700 percent, which correlated with a larger overall trend in population growth as Akron’s population grew 202 percent to a total of 208,435 residents from 1910 to 1920.3 One reason for this population boom was the large number of African Americans who migrated from southern locations in the United...