Arts High Students Confront the Realities of Newark’s Klan Years

Here at Arts High, educators are working hard to provide our academically and artistically talented students with the best education possible. As a history teacher, I strive to impart to them that the adult world is not one typically of absolutes, of “good” and “evil,” but instead of many grays, many opinions, many forces. I want them to look at American history with a critical eye. In class we carefully examine primary sources, debating their authenticity and detecting bias. History is complex, and emotional judgments will usually skew a scholar’s quest to find out “what really happened.” Therefore, I try to keep my immediate opinions away from my instruction.

But there are exceptions.

And one of the greatest of exceptions, at least in American history, and especially in Newark’s history, is the Klan. The Ku Klux Klan. Yes, The Klan, my students now know, was an historical force to be reckoned with in the Brick City, especially in the 1920’s. Today the image of tens of thousands of hooded, hateful white supremacists marching down Broad Street in front of our majestic City Hall is absurd. But in the Roaring 20’s, you literally couldn’t throw a stone during a downtown parade without hitting one of those imbeciles. Newark was Klan Central.

Teaching Newark’s students about this time in American history is essential, because my students need to realize that white supremacy, racism and anti-Semitism are significant factors in modern history. Just because people in the present-day regard such forces as tired, discredited and nearly dead, it wasn’t always that way, and things could change in the near future. These destructive ideas crested many times in modern American history, and they have returned to contemporary Europe in a big way (but more on that later). Newark students need to know that life doesn’t stand still, and you need to know your enemy. And if you’re an open-minded, aspiring artist and/or scholar in this day and age, you enemy is the Klan.

Historically, Americans usually associate the Klan with the South and racial segregation. In the late 1860’s and early 1870’s, this was certainly the case. But as I stated earlier, the Ku Klux Klan was a national and local movement that attracted over 3 million members in the otherwise “Roaring 20’s.” The Klan of that era was the result of several factors, many of them directly affecting Newark and greater Essex County.

In the wake of the First World War, millions of African-Americans, tired of Jim Crowism and a lack of economic opportunity in the segregated South were heading north. Industrialized cities like New York, Jersey City, and of course, Newark, were prime destinations. Racism lived in those places too, but there were jobs, good jobs. While Newark always had an African-American presence, black neighborhoods really weren’t predominant until the early 20th century. By that time African-Americans had established their own schools, self-help societies, and, of course, churches. Even today the Black Church is an important, progressive presence in Newark’s cultural and political life.

At the same time, Italians were fleeing their impoverished homeland by the hundreds of thousands, and many found a home in Newark. Here they established their churches, social clubs and neighborhoods. By the end of World War I, Newark, a city founded by Puritans, was developing a real Catholic presence.

And let us not forget the Jews…by 1920 there were over 50,000 of them in the Brick City. These Jews were unlike the German Jews of the mid-1800’s who had long assimilated into American culture. This new wave of Jewish people originated in Imperial Russia. Crushed by anti-Semitic laws that limited their lives and possibilities, they fled Russia and never looked back. This community would build great synagogues and gathering places of brick and mortar throughout Newark, especially along what is now Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard (High Street back then). This community would bring its entrepreneurial spirit, its Yiddish language and culture (especially theater), and its respect for learning.

So out of this immense demographic change, and due to the Klan’s misleadingly positive portrayal in the first blockbuster movie “Birth of a Nation,” by the early 20’s the Klan was back…and on a much larger scale. Its message was this: America was rightfully white and Protestant. Conformity should be the nation’s highest ideal. White America’s enemies were clearly defined: Jews, Catholics, African-Americans, and Immigrants.

New Jersey’s Klan movement, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands, made Newark its headquarters. From there, it did what it would do best: terrorize its opponents by working within and outside of the law. Openly, it “branded” itself as a patriotic, fraternal organization. Legally, it held marches, rallies, published a newspaper and endorsed politicians running for office. It lobbied the legislature and demanded closure of all religious day schools, especially ones teaching Catholicism and Judaism. By 1923 it had prominent supporters in Trenton, and especially in D.C. One of the major reasons why the “Golden Door” of America closed in this era was due to the hateful political efforts of the Klan and its allies.  

But it was more than a legal organization. The Klan acted with brutal intent all over the Garden State, its menacing tentacles stretching out from its Newark base. In October of 1924 Klansman unleashed a wave of terror, bombing Catholic Churches and targeting Catholic teens in Essex and Bergen counties during social events. In 1923-24 they held nine massive cross-burning “ceremonies” in Newark alone in their efforts to terrify local Jews, Catholics and African-Americans.

As the Klan grew in popularity and wealth, the organization’s destructive nature began to catch up with it. The Klan’s demise would be swift and self-inflicted. Its finances were corrupt, its membership drives exposed as greedy pyramid schemes, and worst of all, its Indiana Grand Wizard was convicted of a brutal murder in 1924. By the late 20’s, the Klan was nearly finished in the Garden State. Its membership dissolved, its monies dried up. But its legacy of hatred and white supremacy would live on in the 1930’s with a new, large political movement in New Jersey: The Nazi Party (or the “Jersey Bund”). That, however, is a shocking story for another day.   

While the National Klan was in its death throes in the late 20’s, the city of Newark had an answer to its hatred, its isolationism, and its suffocating conformity. Newark would build a new school devoted to the Arts, to individual self-expression and acceptance. The Brick City would make a statement in stone. The message would be clear: New Jersey’s foremost metropolis would be a place of diversity, creativity and culture. By decade’s end construction had begun on the city’s art deco masterpiece: Arts High School.

My students really didn’t believe all of this when I first taught it to them; it all seemed so dramatic. Then they read and analyzed the many articles I found for them from the New York Times Historical Database. The facts were indisputable. It had all happened, all here on the same streets that they walk every day. On that corner, in 1923, teens were arrested for egging a Klan rally…on that street, Klansman marched calling for an end to all immigration.

What really surprised my students about the Klan lesson was that it didn’t end where they thought it would (with the bad guys forever defeated). Many were surprised when I explained that today, in Europe, there is a rising tide of White Supremacy and Neo-Nazi hatred. Right now, in Hungary and Greece, a sizable minority of elected lawmakers are openly Neo-Nazi and Fascist. They go by different names in different countries. In Hungary they call themselves Jobbiks, in Greece, Golden Dawn. It’s all the same though. It’s all organized thuggery and coerced conformity.   

I think my students got a lot out of the Klan lessons. Again, my efforts to demonstrate that Newark’s history is America’s history were there, but I was really pleased at how the students connected the primary sources to places they see and pass through daily. The students understood the message that time stands still for no one person or place or even a city. When the day comes that such hateful organizations return, as they already have in Europe, decent people must be ready to recognize and confront them.