Staring Into the Dark Eyes of Hate

© By Tim Peeler, 2019

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People see hate wherever they look these days. Most people haven't seen dark-eyed version of the worst kind of hate.

For me, that happened nearly 30 years ago on Jan. 14, 1990, when I volunteered to cover a ku klux klan rally on Martin Luther King Day for The Salisbury (N.C.) Post, where I worked in my first newspaper job out of college.

It was a Sunday afternoon, a rare day off for most of the afternoon paper's news reporters, so they let a sports guy step in to lend a hand. To be honest, most didn't want any part of it in a town and county that was once known as Klansville, N.C. The featured speaker that day was Virgil Lee Griffin, the klan leader at the heart of the 1979 Greensboro massacre who was acquitted for his role in the killing of five Communist Workers Party members in the shootout. To me, as a young and curious reporter, it was important to cast some sunshine, the best disinfectant, on a gathering grounded in hate. I quoted his hatefulness liberally in the next day's paper.

"Down with Martin Luther King -- he's a communist burning in Hell," Griffin said into his handheld megaphone at the Rowan County Courthouse.

The march had 43 klan members, 60 police officers and 60 Catawba College students, both white and black, there to protest and chide. It was intentionally planned for the MLK holiday, which was still a relatively new federal observance at the time. It was the third klan rally in Salisbury in six years. I moved out of town a few months later, so I don't know if there has been one since then.

I hope not.

The day was supercharged from the beginning, as you might expect from a kkk group that was once led in Rowan County by an independent lightning-rod salesman (I am not making that up). The march began at the abandoned train depot and went through downtown, coming within two blocks of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, where an MLK event was underway, and ending on the courthouse steps.

The Salisbury police, which was sadly well-versed in handling such events, kept marchers moving and protesters stationary on the sidewalks, ripping up all signs because they were not allowed under the city-issued permit. Any participant on the street not continuously moving was removed from the march. The two groups remained mostly separated during the event, though there were profanities and obscenities spat from all directions. There were several verbal clashes between students and klansmen, but no violence. I don't remember being afraid at any time, but I was 23 and probably didn't know better. There was one arrest: a 29-year-old man from out of town carrying a concealed weapon (a hunting knife tucked in his blue jeans).

I talked to an African-American man who did not want me to print his name in the newspaper, a request The Post editor and publisher allowed me to honor.

"I came out to see what this is all about," he said. "I am amazed, really. I can't understand it. We all have to work together and might have to fight together sometime. But I have to live with this (pointing toward the march) behind my back. You just don't know who to watch out for. I don't see why they are against us. We're trying to make a living just like they are."

(Just over a year later a fully integrated U.S. military again fought together in the first Gulf War.)

Wives of klan members marched in the parade, handing out applications to join local klaverns. Many were taken. Most of the klansmen wore T-shirts and blue jeans. Only a few wore the infamous klan regalia. I did, however, see a be-hooded family of four parked at the intersection of Main and Innes streets. Neither of the two kids, fully dressed by their parents in the handmade outfits of hate, was older than 10 years old. It was perhaps the most disturbing thing I ever saw in 20 years of newspaper work.

At the end of the rally, the college students began loudly singing. It was not one of the spirituals made famous during the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s; instead they belted out Ray Charles' "Hit the Road, Jack."

Whether the klan ever came back, I do not know.

Today, on this national Martin Luther King Jr., holiday, I remember that I have looked into the dark eyes of hate and have seen the infinite emptiness that lies within.