KKK Legend

Before I get to a new Blog please, please contact both Obama and Clinton Web-sights and insist that they stop hitting the destruct button with their mudslinging as it will simply assure John McCain’s election. Ask you friends to do likewise. Thanks, RS


KKK Introduction

This is an opportunity for an old friend, George Gamble, to be a guest blogger. I first met George about 40 years ago. We have been in contact on and off ever since. Here’s a little background to his piece on the KKK.

In 1965 I went to work for Mayor John Lindsey after spending four years running the Work Programs at Mobilization For Youth, the lower east side effort to help ghetto youth become productive citizens. As Deputy Manpower Commissioner my major responsibility was the development of employment programs for disadvantaged youth.

In the 60’s there was a concerted effort by the very conservative John Birch Society to get Mayor Lindsey to fire me because of my radical past. (I had insisting on telling Lindsey about that past when he hired me.) City Hall was besieged with letters from John Birchers from all over the country insisting that he “get rid of that notorious red who is running the biggest anti poverty program in the country using our good God fearing taxpayers’ money.” Lindsey, who had a very pixy sense of humor, would pass me in City Hall saying, “What on earth did you do to get the John Birch red neck crowd all worked up to get you fired?” I knew it stemmed from the attacks against me when I was leading the Machinists’ Union in NY State and I had the union busters after my hide. Lindsey just laughed it off saying, “It’s quite a credit to us to have those folks send me letters about you.”

And so it came as a surprise when George told me about his KKK experience. I did not think that the right wing crowd was so well organized that the John Birch gang was telling the KKK arm what they had to raise hell about. It also reminded me how I was ridden out of Trion, Georgia back in the thirties for trying to help Textile Workers organize Clarks ONT Cotton. Thanks George for your reminder of another time.


“The KKK Legend of Bob Schrank” by George Gamble

It happened in the fall of 1968, about 6 years after I had left the home of my friend Bob Schrank to join the Peace Corps. Bob is a great story teller, and I heard many of his labor organizing stories during that year when I worked with him and lived with him and his family in the Bronx. But I never expected to hear strangers tell stories about him, least of all strangers in a distant place. But that’s exactly what happened; I heard the legend of Bob Schrank.

After my Peace Corps service in Gabon, getting married to another Peace Corps Volunteer that I met in New York, and finally finishing up my undergraduate degree at Long Island University (LIU) in Brooklyn, my wife Dee and I moved to North Carolina for me to do graduate work in anthropology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (UNC). An anthropology professor at LIU had suggested UNC to me as a good place to pursue my education in anthropology. I applied and was accepted into their program.

We arrived in Chapel Hill in the summer of 1967 never having been in the South before. I was born and raised in New York, initially in the city and later on a farm upstate and Dee was born and raised on a farm in Colorado. Although we both had traveled and worked overseas as Peace Corps Volunteers, Dee in Colombia and me in Gabon, we had seen very little of the US outside our respective regions.

Chapel Hill was a small university town, with about 40,000 residents including the university’s 15,000 students. In many ways it was a sleepy Southern town, hot and humid in the summer, with little air conditioning anywhere, still running on its history and traditions. In many ways it was not unlike other NC towns, but in some ways also very different. It was after all a university town where people read, and thought and discussed ideas, old ideas and new ideas. Politically it was a progressive island in a very conservative state. The civil rights movement which began in the late 1950’s took hold in Chapel Hill and in some other NC cities was slowly beginning to change the segregated Jim Crowe laws of the past. By the time we arrived in Chapel Hill in 1967 formal segregation was gradually giving way to integration in the public schools, and in other arenas of daily life. But there was still the racial divide, a racial tension that was more or less evident from one situation or one day to another.

Driving home from classes one day I saw a roadside billboard advertising a Ku Klux Klan Rally for the next week at a rural location close to Chapel Hill. We had heard and read about the Klan, but never so close before. Ensuing discussion with Dee and a fellow graduate student resulted in our decision to attend this rally to see for ourselves what’s up with this group nowadays. For us budding anthropologists it was field research.

At the scheduled date and time the three of us drove to the site of the KKK rally, some 15 miles outside of Chapel Hill. Our apprehension increased as we drove up to the rally entrance, a roadside gate opening onto a large field, attended by two white men dressed in military uniforms including helmets and hand gun holsters. To identify the site unambiguously for potential attendees and other passer-bys there was a small propane-fired cross, a KKK emblem, close to the entrance. We were admitted upon expressing our interest to attend the rally.

The scene at the rally site was simple and crude. A telephone-pole sized cross wrapped in kerosene-soaked burlap was the predominant feature. A flatbed trailer from an 18 wheeler was the stage with lights and amplified sound. People parked their cars and pickups facing the stage and then leaned or sat on their vehicles to hear and see the speakers. There were probably some 25 or so vehicles there and perhaps 50 or so people. There was a cadre of a dozen or so folks who were wearing the infamous white sheets and caps, but their faces were uncovered. There was a Victrola playing “The Old Rugged Cross” in the background and the speakers began. Many details of their talks are lost to my memory but I do clearly remember two things which surprised me. The first was their vitriol against groups other than the Negroes. In fact Negroes didn’t even get top billing, they came second or third behind the Catholics, the Jews, and the Communists. All of whom were decried as morally inferior to upstanding, white, bible-thumping Protestants like the speakers.


And then came the real shocker. While railing against these groups one of the speakers told a story about one of those labor organizers, those Communists, who came down to NC and tried to stir up the workers at the textile mills and destroy their traditional, moral way of life. That Communist, Bob Schrank was his name, he was a real disreputable character. My jaw dropped. Bob Schrank, my friend, my buddy being demonized here in NC years after his labor organizing in the area. Bob had become a legend in his own lifetime! What a fantastic achievement. In the years since I’ve recounted that story many times to Bob and we laughed until our sides ached. Bob remembers his labor organizing in the South in less dramatic terms. He didn’t think his work down there merited such legendary magnitude. But that’s his perspective. He must have put the fear of god in those “good ol’ boys”, those “red necks”, so much so that they can’t forget him even years after he had been there.

I sorely regret not having spoken to that Grand Poo Ba after the rally and asked him if he personally knew Bob and to tell me more about him. I suspect that he didn’t know Bob, it was just the legend of Bob Schrank that was passed along from one Klan group to another.

Viva Roberto and all his agitating and labor organizing.

George Gamble