Filmore Watt Daniels [sic] and Thomas F. Richards [sic] were lynched near Mer Rouge, Morehouse Parish, Louisiana by black robed Ku Klux Klan members on August 24, 1922. According to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary they were the 47th and 48th of 61 lynchings during 1922 in the United States.[1] There were five lynchings in the state of Louisiana and of the 61 lynchings they were 2 of 6 white victims.[2]
The Ku Klux Klan was extremely powerful in Louisiana since its revival in 1915. By 1924, there were thousands of Klan members in Louisiana, with each member paying $10 ($150 in 2022) to join.[3] In 1922, Louisiana Governor John M. Parker pleaded with J. Edgar Hoover (then Assistant Director of the Bureau of Investigation) to help him as he wrote, "the Ku Klux Klan has grown so powerful in my state that it effectively controls the northern half. It has already kidnapped, tortured, and killed two people who opposed it…and it has threatened many more."[3]
In Morehouse Parish, Louisiana there was a fierce rivalry between Mer Rouge and the larger community of Bastrop. In Bastrop, there existed a shadow Ku Klux Klan organization, Klan No 34, who held a powerful role as a morality vigilanty group. With the approval of Sheriff Fred Carpenter, they frequently attacked houses of prostitution, illegal liquor stills (Prohibition in the United States made alcohol illegal from 1920-1933) and other "vices".[4][5] Klan No 34 was led by Cyclops J.K. Skipwith, a civil war veteran.[6]
In Mer Rouge there were vocal critics of the Klan No 34's actions, some of which included:
70-year-old J.L. Daniel a wealthy Mer Rouge landowner
Filmore Watt Daniel, J.L. Daniel's son, a graduate of Louisiana State University
Thomas F. Richards a garage mechanic and good friend of F. Watt Daniel
W.C. Andrews
C.C. "Tot" Davenport
They objected to Klan No 34 imposing their morality on residents of Mer Rouge.[5]
Lynching
Cartoon from the December 28, 1922, St Louis Post-Dispatch titled "When Klanhood Was In Flower"
In Bastrop, on August 24, 1922, Morehouse Parish, Louisiana held a festival called the "good roads bond rally."[7] Events included a picnic and baseball game. After the event, a group of around 50 cars returned from Bastrop to Mer Rouge around 5:00 PM. At the halfway mark between the towns, the convoy was stopped by heavily armed black-robed KKK men who searched every vehicle. At gunpoint, they forced five men from their cars Watt Daniel, Thomas F. Richard, J.L. Daniel, W.C. Andrews and C.C. "Tot" Davenport from their cars. That was the last time F. Watt Daniel and Thomas F. Richard were seen alive. After being released in Collinston, Louisiana, a town 7.5 miles (12.1km) away, Andrews and J.L. Daniel later stumbled into town with whipping injuries on their back, C.C. "Tot" Davenport returned unharmed.[7]
Witnesses testified in later investigations that near Lake Lafourche they saw a truck filled with black-hooded men guarding two blindfolded men in the bed of the truck. The same witnesses later saw the truck return minus the two blindfolded men about 45 minutes later.[7]
Aftermath
In the photo with the diver is Agent Rooney, and to the far left C.C. "Tot" Davenport, kidnaped at the same time, beaten and released.
Local Bastrop authorities, heavily infiltrated by the KKK, covered up the killings. Relatives of the missing had to appeal to State officials to get help in discovering the fate of the missing men, Filmore Watt Daniel and Thomas F. Richard.
Events came to a head when on December 19, 1922, Governor John M. Parker declared Morehouse Parish under martial law.[8] Divers searching for the bodies of F. Watt Daniel and Thomas F. Richard had to be guarded by Louisiana National Guardsmen. On December 24, 1922, a "mysterious explosion" brought the badly decomposed bodies of two men to the surface of Lake Lafourche. New Orleans pathologists brought in specially by the Governor identified the bodies by noting that one wore a belt buckle with the initials "F.W.D." (F. Watt Daniel) and the other had clothing that Richard reportedly wore the night he went missing.[9] Both bodies evidenced premortem torture that included bone fractures at regularized intervals; the body bearing clothing and personal items belonging to F. Watt Daniel had been subjected to surgical castration.[10]
There was much speculation on the motive behind the lynchings but the silence of those involved limited why the men were killed. The leading theory was related to an alleged attack on the car of Dr. B. M. McKoin, a top official in the Klan No 34 enforcement squad. The survivors of the lynchings said they were questioned about this event but professed their innocence.
Both Richard and Daniel were vocally anti-Klan. Daniel was engaged in an amorous relationship with a mulatto woman, Lollie Bell Olive, from Galion, Louisiana. She bore his son, Fillmore Watt Daniels, two months after his death.[11] Since McKoin's post-graduate specialization was genito-urinary medicine,[12] he would have had the surgical expertise to mutilate the young man in the manner the pathologists described.
Trial
After the discovery of the bodies as many as 50 witnesses testified during January 1923 that members of Klan No 34 including Sheriff Fred Carpenter and all deputies of the Morehouse Parish Sheriff's Office, District Attorney David Garrett, the local postmaster, T. Jeff Burnett, former Deputy Sheriff, and the leader of Klan no 34, J.K. Skipwith, were behind the kidnapping, torture and murder of Daniel and Richard. However, the infiltration of the local grand jury system by Klan members allowed them to dismiss the case for "insufficient evidence".[13]
Louisiana Attorney General Adolphe V. Coco was able to eventually bring minor charges in April of 1923 on the Klan and 17 of its associates. This briefly caused them to flee the state until most of the charges were dropped.[14][13] These attempts to seek justice ended in late 1923 when Governor Parker had retired and Attorney General Coco lost his reelection bid.[13]
↑ John T. Rogers (1923). The Murders of Mer Rouge: The True Story of an Atrocity Unparalleled in the Annals of Crime. St. Louis: by the author.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
↑ He studied in Baltimore with Johns Hopkins/Brady Urological Institute's Dr. Hugh H. Young. See: "His Plans for the Future are Uncertain, Says Dr. B.M. McKoin." The Daily Advertiser February 17, 1923
The Ku Klux Klan, commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is the name of several historical and current American white supremacist, far-right terrorist organizations and hate groups. The Klan was "the first organized terror movement in American history." Their primary targets are African Americans, Hispanics, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Italian Americans, Irish Americans, and Catholics, as well as immigrants, leftists, homosexuals, Muslims, atheists, and abortion providers.
Morehouse Parish is a parish located in the U.S. state of Louisiana. As of the 2020 census, the population was 25,629. The parish seat is Bastrop. The parish was formed in 1844.
Mer Rouge is a Village in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, United States. The name is French for "Red Sea". The population was 491 at the 2020 census, down from 628 in 2010.
David Curtis "Steve" Stephenson was an American Ku Klux Klan leader, convicted rapist and murderer. In 1923 he was appointed Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan and head of Klan recruiting for seven other states. Later that year, he led those groups to independence from the national KKK organization. Amassing wealth and political power in Indiana politics, he was one of the most prominent national Klan leaders. He had close relationships with numerous Indiana politicians, especially Governor Edward L. Jackson.
Thomas Jefferson Terral was an American attorney and the 27th governor of Arkansas, serving one term from 1925 to 1927.
A Kleagle is an officer of the Ku Klux Klan whose main role is to recruit new members and must maintain the three guiding principles: recruit, maintain control, and safeguard.
The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is a novel published in 1905, the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas Dixon Jr.. Chronicling the American Civil War and Reconstruction era from a pro-Confederate perspective, it presents the Ku Klux Klan heroically. The novel was adapted as a play and a film, first by the author as a highly successful play entitled The Clansman (1905), and a decade later by D. W. Griffith in the 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation.
This is a partial list of notable historical figures in U.S. national politics who were members of the Ku Klux Klan before taking office. Membership of the Klan is secret. Political opponents sometimes allege that a person was a member of the Klan, or was supported at the polls by Klan members.
Ku Klux Klan auxiliaries are organized groups that supplement, but do not directly integrate with the Ku Klux Klan. These auxiliaries include: Women of the Ku Klux Klan, The Jr. Ku Klux Klan, The Tri-K Girls, the American Crusaders, The Royal Riders of the Red Robe, The Ku Klux balla, and the Klan's Colored Man auxiliary.
John T. Rogers won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Reporting, based on his coverage of the inquiry leading to the impeachment of federal judge George W. English. He was a journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Johnny Lee Clary was an American former professional wrestler, white supremacist, and later preacher. Clary served as a Ku Klux Klan leader before he became a Pentecostal Christian, traveling around the world preaching the gospel and teaching against racism and hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and the Aryan Nations. Clary, under the stage name Johnny Angel, also wrestled in the National Wrestling Federation (NWF) during the 1980s.
Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), also known as Women's Ku Klux Klan, and Ladies of the Invisible Empire, held to many of the same political and social ideas of the KKK but functioned as a separate branch of the national organization with their own actions and ideas. While most women focused on the moral, civic, and educational agendas of the Klan, they also had considerable involvement in issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and religion. The women of the WKKK fought for educational and social reforms like other Progressive reformers but with extreme racism and intolerance.
The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a Ku Klux Klan organization which is active in the United States. It originated in Mississippi and Louisiana in the early 1960s under the leadership of Samuel Bowers, its first Imperial Wizard. The White Knights of Mississippi were formed in December 1963, when they separated from the Original Knights after the resignation of Imperial Wizard Roy Davis. Roughly 200 members of the Original Knights of Louisiana also joined the White Knights. The White Knights were not interested in holding public demonstrations nor were they interested in letting any information about themselves get out to the masses. Similar to the United Klans of America (UKA), the White Knights of Mississippi were very secretive about their group. Within a year, their membership was up to around six thousand, and they had Klaverns in over half of the counties in Mississippi. By 1967, the number of active members had shrunk to around four hundred.
The Monroe–Ruston–Bastrop Combined Statistical Area is made up of four parishes in northern Louisiana. The statistical area consists of the Monroe Metropolitan Statistical Area, the Ruston Micropolitan Statistical Area, and the Bastrop Micropolitan Statistical Area. As of the 2010 census, the CSA had a population of 251,155.
The Indiana Klan was a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret society in the United States that organized in 1915 to promote ideas of racial superiority and affect public affairs on issues of Prohibition, education, political corruption, and morality. It was strongly white supremacist against African Americans, Chinese Americans, and also Catholics and Jews, whose faiths were commonly associated with Irish, Italian, Balkan, and Slavic immigrants and their descendants. In Indiana, the Klan did not tend to practice overt violence but used intimidation in certain cases, whereas nationally the organization practiced illegal acts against minority ethnic and religious groups.
The Ku Klux Klan has had a history in the U.S. state of New Jersey since the early part of the 1920s. The Klan was active in the areas of Trenton and Camden and it also had a presence in several of the state's northern counties in the 1920s. It had the most members in Monmouth County, and operated a resort in Wall Township.
Ku Klux Klan (KKK) nomenclature has evolved over the order's nearly 160 years of existence. The titles and designations were first laid out in the original Klan's prescripts of 1867 and 1868, then revamped with William J. Simmons's Kloran of 1916. Subsequent Klans have made various modifications.
The Silver Dollar Group was an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan white nationalist terrorist group, composed of cells that took up violent actions to support Klan goals. The group was largely found in Mississippi and Louisiana, and was named for their practice of identifying themselves by carrying a silver dollar. The group is believed to have had only some twenty members. The group formed in 1964 at the Shamrock Motor Hotel in Vidalia, Louisiana by Raleigh Jackson "Red" Glover, amidst dissatisfaction at the lack of forceful action by Klan groups in the region.
Oscar Haywood was an American Baptist preacher, orator, and politician from North Carolina. He was a pastor at Baptist churches in Tennessee, Connecticut, and New York City and then travelled widely giving speeches advocating for the Ku Klux Klan. He was also a book collector and had first editions and correspondence with various influential people in his collection at the Haywood Plantation house.
Roy Elonzo Davis was an American preacher, white supremacist, and con artist who co-founded the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. Davis was Second Degree of the KKK under William J. Simmons and later became National Imperial Wizard (leader) of the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He worked closely with Simmons, and was a co-author of the 1921 KKK constitution, bylaws and rituals. Davis spent decades as a KKK recruiter, at one point being named "Royal Ambassador" and an "Official Spokesperson" of the KKK by Simmons. Davis and Simmons were both expelled from the KKK in 1923 by Hiram Wesley Evans, who had ousted Simmons as leader. Simmons started the Knights of the Flaming Sword branch of the KKK and with Davis's help retained the loyalty of many KKK members. Davis was later reappointed second in command of the national KKK organization by Imperial Wizard Eldon Edwards, a position he held until being elected national leader by 1959.
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