When I was eight, my grandfather, Oscar E. Hoover, told me that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

My brother (nearly age 7) and I were in my grandparents’ kitchen where Granddad was making us caramel popcorn.

I don’t recall what prompted me, but I said, “Everyone knows that the Ku Klux Klan is bad.”

Granddad said, sharply, “You shouldn’t talk about things when you don’t know what you’re talking about. I belonged to the KKK. I joined to protect my family.” After a pause, he said, “I quit when I realized that it wasn’t about that.”

I wasn’t sure, then or now, whether his last statement confirmed my initial declaration.

I was sure, then and now, that his intention was an admonishment of the “children should be seen and not heard” variety. So, I shut up.

Ku Klux Klan / Tipton, IN. / Text on back says “Nov 1922” / ID: 1211 From Tipton Genealogy | Flickr under Creative Common License

My brother didn’t remember that conversation, but he did remember one that he had with our grandmother, Bertha Hoover, after Oscar died.

I asked her, and she seemed a little uncomfortable and told me that he was not aware of the full reputation and nature of the Klan, and that he quit and denounced it later when he learned “what they were a’doin’ to colored folk.”

Since that was all I knew about the Klan, I asked her what they were doing at the time he was in it, and I distinctly remember her saying “They were a’fightin’ Catholics.”  Unfortunately, I do not remember her next sentence, but she made it clear she was OK with Catholics nowadays, but back then they were doing something that justified a’fightin’.

I can believe that my grandmother was told that. I’m less convinced that my grandfather wasn’t fully aware of the reputation of the Klan when he joined.

I just finished reading A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan. The anti-Catholic aspect of the Klan was nominally a worry over divided loyalties (presumably brought over by British colonists, since that concern went back to the time of Henry VIII and earlier). But the more relevant issue in the 1920s was an anti-immigrant hostility directed against the Irish and the Italians.

I remember that when I was a child, I wondered about why there were so few black people in Tipton, Indiana.

A research article published in the September 1999 issue of Indiana Magazine of History explains that. “The Klan Comes to Tipton” was written by Allen Safianow, a professor of history at Indiana University in Kokomo, Indiana.

Present-day Tipton residents acknowledge that the county has long had the reputation of being inhospitable to blacks, and during the 1920s Tipton, like a number of other Hoosier communities, still observed unwritten “sundown laws,” rooted in the custom that blacks would not be permitted to remain overnight. “Colored” baseball teams, minstrel shows, bands, and singing groups occasionally appeared in Tipton and smaller county villages, but articles in the Tribune indicate that the “sundown law” was being strictly enforced. (p. 223)

That’s exactly what I suspected after reading The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson and Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen.

The “Klan Comes to Tipton” lists Klan activities in Tipton County in 1923, when my grandfather turned 34 years old and was a farmer with five children.

In 1923 alone there were at least seventeen public Klan demonstrations throughout the county. On April 24, at an event described by the Tribune as “immense in every phase,” a reported crowd of two thousand robed klansmen gathered in Tipton to attend a rally and parade that featured three visiting bands, two drum corps, horsemen, American flags, and the fiery cross, as well as the initiation of four hundred Klan candidates and an address by E. J. Bulgin. (p. 209)

A couple of months later, “the KKK band leased the Martz theater to show D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which celebrated the original post-Civil War Klan.” (p. 209)

The film The Birth of a Nation is very clear in its celebration of the white supremacist, anti-black roots of the KKK.

Ku Klux Klan / Tipton, IN. / Text on back says “Summer – 1923 at the park – the evening The Rev. Bu????? was there” / ID: 1212 From Tipton Genealogy | Flickr under Creative Common License

I stand by my declaration from when I was eight. The Ku Klux Klan is bad. At age 61, no one can tell me to shut up about it. Of the negative responses that we get to the weekly Black Lives Matter vigil that I attend, I’m most amused by the headshaking from old white men. I worked my whole life to not be cowed by the disapproval of old white men and I finally achieved it.

Unfortunately, I no longer believe that everyone knows that the Ku Klux Klan is bad. During a Black Lives Matter vigil last month, a woman shouted at us from a car, “The KKK rules!”

One hundred years after my grandfather was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, we continue to need to speak up for humanity, equality, and justice. America’s highest ideals must be defended against America’s continued white supremacist violence.