CZM Rewind: Barry Black Pt. 1 & 2

how it ended. But today is the last Thursday in the month of November, and in the United States, that's a holiday. If it's a holiday you celebrate in whatever way, I hope you're enjoying it. I'm not sure how listening to weird little guys factors into your holiday enjoyment. That's kind of weird. But I'm not here to tell you what to do. Running this old episode means I got to take a few days off this week to spend with my family, which I'm grateful for. I know not

everybody has that luxury. Whatever you're doing today, I hope you've got the day off. Rory, the brilliant mind behind the perfect placement of all the music in the show, and the guy with the unenviable job of editing out all the times I burp into my microphone does not have work today, and we should all celebrate that he deserves a break from toiling away at the burp removal machine. Sorry, Rory.

So here's a weird little guy I already told you about, and I'll be back next week with new weird guys. In nineteen forty eight, there is a rash of cross burnings in Suffolk. Virginia. Newspapers throughout the late forties and all through the fifties assure the reader that there is

no Ku Klux Klan activity in Virginia. Ooklan groups had more or less died out in the mid forties, and Virginia wouldn't really see a rise in widespread organized clan activity until the threat of integrated schools whipped aggrieved white

men back into a frenzy in the fifties. But the lack of a clear leadership structure or the formal blessing of some grand dragon or imperial wizard in some other state didn't seem to deter the one hundred men in robes who set fire to a twelve foot cross in a peanut field in Nurneyville, and whether or not the local prosecutor believed that the clan still existed. Everyone in the South knows what a burning cross means, and it was the third one in that neighborhood in recent months.

The local prosecutor had simply shrugged, it's not illegal to burn a cross. Two thousand members of a local peanut workers union approved a resolution demanding a response from the governor and Attorney General, writing, we reject the hair splitting thinking of some commonwealth authorities regarding what constitutes violation of the law. The fact remains that one hundred white robed persons burned across in the field of NH. Bradshaw. Whether this group was the KKK or a similar organization is

not important. The tactics of intimidation and terrorism are. That same year, nineteen forty eight, twin boys, Barry and Bruce Black were born in Pennsylvania. Berry didn't burn that cross in the peanut field. He was just a baby then

given some time to grow. Though his name would one day become synonymous with crossburning in Virginia, he was barely out of diapers when Virginia did finally outlaw cross burning in nineteen fifty two, and he was decades into his career as a clan leader when he lit the cross that would take him all the way to the Supreme Court. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird. Little guys. There is a story that I've been writing and rewriting for years, digging deeper into the past while I wait for the

future to deliver some kind of ending. I have notebooks full of scribbled transcriptions of courtroom testimony, and a hard drive full of grainy footage, and folders upon folders labeled with men's names, each one containing varying degrees of a half baked biographical sketch of a man who lit a

torch one summer night in twenty seventeen. Lately, I'm combing back through my notes about the events of August eleventh, twenty seventeen, because unless something changes in the next week or so, I'll be spending a few days in October sitting in my favorite seat at the county courthouse. It's the aisle seat in the second row, on the day

defendant's side of the bench. I don't know why that one's my favorite, but if I can't sit there, this is not right to date, Twelve men who march with a torch here in Charlottesville seven years ago have been charged under a Virginia law that makes it a felony to burn an object with the intent to intimidate. And I'm going to tell you about some of those men. I am there is some real weird little guy behavior going on in a lot of their backstories, but not today.

As always, we have to start before the beginning. In the year and a half since those charges were first filed, I've written the case citation Commonwealth v. Black in my little notebook probably one hundred times. Commonwealth v. Black was the Supreme Court case that held that the original version of Virginia's crossburning law was unconstitutional. The law was rewritten in response to this challenge, and the current version of the statute is what's being used to prosecute the torch marchers.

So commonwealthy Black, that's all I really needed to know. Some clansmen burned across and he challenged the law, and he won, and we changed the law. That's good enough to get by, But how many times can you write a man's name without bothering to find out who he was? So I set out to get a little more context on the man who brought the case. But what I found wasn't just some boring bit of backstory about constitutional

law and legislative history. I mean, we're definitely going to do some of that, but what I found was a complicated story of small town bigotry and the people who stand up to it. Barry Black was the leader of a clan group in Pennsylvania whose hatred touched the lives of people whose stories are worth knowing. This episode is just the first half of very black story, and we won't even get to his precedent setting appeal until next week.

This week gets just a strange little stroll through some of the side characters in the life of a man who donned a pointy hood to infringe on the civil rights of everyone around him, but just kept going to court to fight for his own. So before we can talk about a lit tiki torch on a college campus, we have to talk about a fiery cross on a hillside. We have to talk about Barry Black, the clansman who fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court

and won. Barry Elton Black and his twin brother, Bruce, were born two months before their mother's seventeenth birthday. Their twenty three year old father, also named Bruce, didn't stick around. When the boys were two, the nineteen fifty census shows they were living with their mother at her parents' home, and their father was living a few miles down the road as a lodger in an elderly divorcees boarding house. Barry's obituary says he was a Vietnam veteran, that he

was in the Navy. That's the only place I found that information. Decades of newspaper articles about his clan hijinks never mention it. I will absolutely concede that it is entirely possible that he joined the Navy right out of high school and maybe was on one of the earliest deployments of the war. He was eighteen in nineteen sixty six, so it's possible, But by nineteen sixty eight he was

too busy going to jail to go to war. In the summer of nineteen sixty eight, Barry and his brother were caught stripping parts of a car in a salvage yard. Two years later, Barry was back in jail again. Reports Arry and lack specificity as to exactly why he was in jail in nineteen seventy. One report at the time says it was a morals charge. Another says it was a paternity case. A list of his arrests that appeared in an article decades later says he was awaiting trial

in nineteen seventy on charges of bastardery and fornication. Sounds like he might have just been guilty of having a good time, but he got himself into some extra trouble

by escaping from the jail. Barry and two other inmates climbed a pipe, crawled through an air vent, got into the adjoining courthouse, and escaped by jumping out an open window in the judge's chambers, and no one even noticed the men were missing until Barry's brother called the sheriff to say he'd gotten a call from Barry earlier that afternoon and he wanted to know if his brother had posted bond The sheriff assured Bruce that no, Barry hasn't bonded out and he's still in a cell. But he

was not. Barry was only free for about six hours after this daring jail break. The other two men hid out in barns for over a week. Before being recaptured, but a deputy found Barry limping around town later that same evening. He'd broken bones in both of his feet jumping out of the judge's window. A judge ordered him to pay one hundred dollars fine and the medical costs in his paternity case, and he got another year for

the escape. It's not clear what the paternity case entailed, and if there is a secret child out there of Berry Black, I couldn't find any record of it. In nineteen seventy one, he went back to jail for a burglary of an auto parts store, and between stints and jail, he married his wife, Judy in nineteen seventy four, and they had their first of six children in nineteen seventy five. And then he went back to jail in nineteen seventy

six for stealing a gun from his brother. He escaped again, this time just walking right out the front door of the psychiatric hospital the jail had sent him to for observation. But he was out again by nineteen seventy seven, when he was arrested for trying to buy a car with a check from a closed bank account. This time he just caught probation, and he was given probation again when he was convicted in nineteen eighty six for illegally possessing

a revolver. And that's all there really was to know about Barry Black until the late eighties. He had a couple of kids, his wife worked as a clerk, he drove a truck, and after going to jail half a dozen times in his twenties, he mostly stayed out of trouble except for that gun charge in nineteen eighty six, But by nineteen eighty nine he's a legal in his

local clan. Now, I don't want to sound like I'm being dismissive of the Ku Klux Klan as a bunch of silly guys in costumes who do live action role playing and who would have been better off doing something like joining the Society for Creative Anachronism or getting into dungeons and Dragons. I don't know. I'm in no way trying to minimize the decades and decades of vicious racial terror, the violence, the lynchings, the campaigns of terror waged in

towns across the country for over a century. The clan was very real, it was very dangerous. People died, but oh my god, do they make it hard to take them seriously with their special clan vocabulary a klegal that's spelled like beagle, but with a KL upfront. It's an official clan office that's basically just the local recruiter. So in nineteen eighty nine, Barry was responsible for recruiting new

members to his local clan chapter. And at this point he's still a member of the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan. So the Invisible Empire is the overarching national organization with an Imperial Wizard overseeing it. The Empire is subdivided into realms by state, and each realm has a Grand Dragon, and within each realm there are provinces. Each one is made up of, however many counties the Grand Dragon sees fit to assign the Grand Titan who

oversees them. The clan had two main eras, so first in the reconstruction era right after the Civil War, and then it sort of died out, and then it had a second era when it was revived in nineteen fifteen. And the second era of the clan kept a lot of the goofy nineteenth century made up words, but it seems like they lost some of the finer subdivisions. It used to be that the Grand Titan could appoint a Grand Giant, who could in turn appoint henchmen called goblins.

I don't think they kept the goblins the second time around, which just seems like a huge loss, you know. But anyway, so by nineteen ninety Barry is the Grand Titan of Western Pennsylvania. So Pennsylvania has a Grand Dragon, and the Grand Dragon appoints the Grand Titans and Burries the Grand Titan.

A nineteen ninety one report on clan activity in the United States estimates nationwide membership at about four to five thousand clansmen, with an estimated three hundred members in Pennsylvania, and with most of that activity being in the western half of the state in Barry's province. Under Barry's leadership, the clan was growing again in western Pennsylvania, and he was very active, holding multiple marches in little towns all over the state every year, and nobody wanted it. Nobody's

excited to see the clan. In January of nineteen ninety one, they marched in Westchester, Pennsylvania to protest Martin Luther King Junior Day in September of nineteen ninety one, Barry held a march in his own hometown of Carmichaels, Pennsylvania. The town fought tooth and nailed to prevent it, but he was determined to put on a show and even tried to rope the ACLU into forcing the town to give

him a permit. Ultimately, the tiny town resigned themselves to this clan invasion, and they didn't make Berry take them to court. The town closed down every shop and restaurant that day out of protest, and residents lined the streets to watch a few dozen men walk about half a mile with Barry leading them a chance of what do we want white power? When do we want it now? Scoofy. The Sener Daily Times ran a story the next day with the headline forty Clan members stage march in depressed town.

Even after reading the article, it's not actually clear whether the paper meant the town was depressed like economically. It kind of just sounds like the town was just depressed at having to look at the clan. Every resident quoted in the paper sounded very unimpressed. When man told the paper, I think they are a joke, and added Hitler tried

this once and it didn't work, did it. Barry told the paper that his marches weren't a racial thing, but that it was about bringing white people together to fight for their civil rights and against what he called the deterioration of our race. He just wanted to raise awareness about important issues, like how the banking system is controlled by a Jewish conspiracy, and how the government is giving

away white men's rights to black people and Asians. I don't know what that means, giving them away, like there's only a set number of them. Two months later, in November of nineteen ninety one, Very Black was elected to the office of constable in Johnstown, Pennsylvania's twenty first ward. The office of constable is kind of a holdover from the olden days. It's kind of a cop, but not really. Their function varies from state to state, with powers ranging

from largely ceremonial to full policing authority. In Rhode Island, constables aren't allowed to carry guns. In Vermont, one of the main roles of the constable is the destruction of dangerous dogs. So yes, there are guys in Vermont running for the office of dog murderer and in Pennsylvania. The office has undergone some reform in the last few decades, but in the nineties the constable's duties were mainly prisoner

transportation and process service. But it's an elected office, and the office he won was for constable in a single ward of a borough of a county, and he was able to secure a victory without even really running. He won with just a few dozen write in votes because

no one was running. I looked up some recent voter turnout stats for Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and Johnstown's twenty first ward had four hundred and four registered voters in twenty twenty three, and only one hundred and seven of them voted in the November twenty twenty three election. So it's not hard to imagine someone mounting a successful write in campaign by buying a few rounds at the bar. But

it wasn't meant to be. There's nothing I can find in any local news from that time that indicates there was any kind of specific issue. Constable of the twenty first ward of the Borough of a County probably doesn't have enough to do to really do much damage, But a few months in to Barry's six year term as Constable. Cambria County District Attorney Timothy Creeney noticed that they had

a clansman serving papers for the court. How much he could really do about that, though it's not against the rules to be in the clan, but Barry did have a pretty long rap sheet. He'd been arrested for burglary, he'd escaped from jail twice, and he had a conviction for illegal possession of a firearm. So Creaney filed a petition to have Barry removed from office on the grounds that Pennsylvania doesn't allow people convicted of what are called

infamous crimes to hold positions of public trust. The judge agreed, and Barry was ordered by the court to cease and desist his duties of constable in April of nineteen ninety two, just a few months after taking office. When he filed his appeal a month later, he walked the papers into the courthouse himself, dressed in a white robe, a pointy white cap, a green cape, and the kind of sunglasses

my grandmother wore when I was a kid. A dozen robed klansmen waited for him outside the courthouse, and he entered the court room with his personal bodyguard, a man in fatigues, and a black beret. He was no longer just a legal or a Grand Titan. Barry was calling himself the Grand Dragon. Now. Over the next few months, Barry staged several protests of what he called this violation of his civil rights, and he appealed it all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In October of nineteen

ninety four. That court upheld the decision. They agreed that his criminal history made him ineligible for the office of constable. That same month, several local papers quoted Barry on his plans to hold a clan rally in opposition to a Halloween parade. He didn't give the quotes to the paper himself,

but they were his words and in his voice. See, in the pre internet days, you couldn't have a website, right, so groups like the Klan would distribute flyers with a phone number on them, and nobody answers that phone when you call, but you get a pre recorded message with information about becoming a member, upcoming events, announcements, or just racist propaganda. And the Dial of Clan hotline that month offered a recorded statement from Barry Black stating that for

security reasons. The time and exact location will be announced with twelve hours notice, saying we have gone to modern technology, we use fax machines, etc. But that there would be an event that month in protest of a York Pennsylvania area Halloween celebration because as a Christian organization, the Klan felt that Halloween was Satanic. Just imagine for a second it's nineteen ninety four and you get a fax from your local clig Rap that the Nighthawks or needed at

the satanic Halloween parade to enforce white Christian morals. I mean, it's baffling, baffling. Klig Grap is the title for the clan secretary, and the Nighthawks are the security cards. So I guess the klik Grap is going to fax the Nighthawks. A few days later, after the local paper ran a story about a planned counter demonstration, Barry told the paper that he had no such plans and he never said anything like that. He was not planning to protest the

Halloween parade. He said that was just a rumor started by fellow clansman Roy Frankhauser, the leader of a splinter

group called the White Unity Party. Barry explained to the reporter that if Frankhauser wanted the White Unity Party to be allowed to join Barry's new clan organization, the Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, then Frankhauser would need to accept that he didn't have Barry's permission to be doing things like holding a press conference about Halloween parades and Roy Frankhauser is, I think, another candidate for his

own episode. He'd been acquitted earlier that year for stabbing a man with a pocket knife at a clan conference, and at one point claimed to be a government informant, although agents from the FBI and the ATF denied that on various occasions, sometimes under oath, but I'm not sold.

He was convicted of obstruction of justice while working for Lyndon LaRouche in the nineteen eighties, got convicted of obstruction again in a case involving desecration of synagogues in Massachusetts in the nineties, and in twenty twenty one, someone made an uncited edit to his Wikipedia page claiming that his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania, celebrated his death by holding a parade. I'll have to dig around on that. I hope it's true,

but I have a feeling it's not. But in the nineties Roy Frank Kauser was beefing with Barry And it's hard to say with any kind of certainty, but I wonder if it was frank Kauser who met with the f in nineteen ninety four. Barry's FBI file has a few heavily redacted pages about an aspiring clan informant who reported that he was present at a clan meeting when Barry Black. Since the Klan had a plan to deal harshly with traitors, the informant told the FBI that Barry

Black had automatic weapons in hand. Grades and to their credit, the FBI seems to have taken the tip pretty seriously, and in the summer of nineteen ninety four, they opened a domestic terrorism investigation into Barry Black. After only a week, though the Pittsburgh Field Office downgraded and then ultimately closed the investigation, citing the tipster's quote inability to factually corroborate

any of his allegations to make them believable. So Barry is keeping pretty busy through the nineties with his new clan group. He's got barades to lead and picnics to attend and he's holding regular cross burnings, and by the late nineties, these cross burnings are happening across the street from the Casanova Lounge, which was Somerset County, Pennsylvania's only

gay bar. In its brief four years in operation, the bar was the site of relentless protests from neighbors, a self proclaimed Anabaptist bishop and the clan, as well as a target for shotgun blasts and Molotov cocktails. Patricia and Merrick Kramer, a straight couple in their fifties with grown children, bought an old tavern on Route nine eighty five in nineteen ninety five. They ran at as a restaurant for two years before deciding in January of nineteen ninety seven

to start catering to gay clientele. It was the only such establishment for Miles and Miles. Patricia Pat to her friends, and I'd like to be Pat's friend said. They had customers drive in from as far as Maryland and West Virginia for their tea dances, a kind of gay singles event whose name is a legacy of an era when it was illegal to sell alcohol to known homosexuals. In nineteen ninety seven, Pat Kragmer told a reporter from The

Washington Blade, we do nothing improper here. We have dancing, We served dinner from four to six p m. I do all the cooking. The DC based LGBT newspaper had reached out to the Kramers after the first time a shotgun was fired through the front door, injuring three patrons, and that's when street preacher Ron McCrae started showing up. If you're old enough to have been politically aware in the early Obama years, this may not be the first

time you've heard of Ron McCray. In two thousand and eight, and now disbarred attorney named Philip Burg filed a lawsuit alleging that Barack Obama could not legally become the president because he had been born in Kenya. A judge threw it out, calling it frivolous and not worthy of discussion, which it was, but that's never stopped a conspiracy theorist. In December of two thousand and eight, Berg filed a motion for an emergency injunction to stop the certification of

the election. In his ninety six page filing, Ron McCrae's name appears over one hundred times so if you have any familiarity at all with the birthrism conspiracy, you've probably seen some vaguely sourced false claim that Obama's Kenyan grandmother, a woman named Sarah, who was his father's stepmother, was there in the room when he was born in Mombasa.

It's not true. To be clear, Barack Obama was not born in Mombasa, but the claim originated from a selectively edited recording of a phone call Ron McCrae had with her via a translator in October two thousand and eight, and McCrae was an enthusiastic participant in this conspiracy, providing a sworn affidavit about the phone call for Berg's lawsuit.

The Supreme Court denied Berg's petition without comment, but mccray's hoax was now part of this official record, and conspiracy theorists can easily brush off silly complications, like the fact that the lawsuit was dismissed as being utterly without merit. Once a lie is born, it can become unkillable. The White House plumber himself, G. Gordon Liddy, repeated that same lie a year later on an episode of Hardball with

Chris Matthews. Conveniently blurring the facts by claiming that the sworn statement was from Sarah Obama herself rather than from McCrae, who was merely repeating what he claimed she said to him.

He was arrested a handful of times for violating noise ordinances or for disorderly conduct, and when he sued the authorities in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, nineteen ninety one for violating his rights, they paid him seventy five hundred dollars to settle and that seems to have been the origin of McCrae's street

preacher's fellowship. It was a fairly litigious collective of amateur street preachers who would screen Bible verses on street corners until the police would intervene, and then they would sue. And that seems like what he was trying trying to do to Patricia Kramer and her customers outside Casanova almost every weekend for four years. Ron McCray was the loudest and most persistent opponent to the gay bar, but he

was far from the only one. Don and Lisa Penrod lived less than a mile away on a plot of land they'd inherited from Don's family. At a town meeting shortly after the bar opened, the Penrods were among residents complaining about lewd and filthy literature found in the neighborhood. Pat Kramer tried to explain that no, those are flyers advertising a glowstick party, saying it's nothing provocative. We don't

run a dirty bar. After someone fired a shotgun through the door of the crowded bar one night in March of nineteen ninety seven, Don Penrod told the local paper that actually he'd forgotten to mention this before, But a few days before that happened. Actually, something bad happened to him too. Someone had spray painted gay haters you will all Die Love pat on his garage. The paper doesn't include a photo of this vandalism, or even mention any

claim that a photo might exist. In separate town meetings that spring, Don Penrod claimed that he found hardcore gay pornography on his front lawn, and his wife, Lisa Penrod, claimed that their child found an abandoned sex toy while playing outside. In both instances, the Penrods demand to know how they're supposed to explain this perversion to a child. I can find no evidence of anyone, aside from the Penrods themselves, who ever made any claim to have seen

either of these things. In April, the Penrods and their neighbors, who were disgusted at the idea of even having to drive on a road that shared a name with a den of sin, successfully petitioned to have the town rename Cosunova Road to Hemlock Road. In May of nineteen ninety seven, the Penrod invited the clan over Barry Black's Keystone Knights used the Penrod's farm as a staging area to park down their robes and then march down the street to

the bar. They spent an afternoon hollering at the empty establishment, it's a bar, nobody's there in the middle of the afternoon, and then they retired to the Penronz property for a cross burning. Patrons at the bar would have been able to see the glow from the flames when they pulled into the parking lot that Saturday night. Ron McCrae kept up his antics outside Casanova, but Barry had bigger things

going on. Towards the end of nineteen ninety seven, he got elected constable again, just as he had in nineteen ninety one. He managed to secure a victory in Johnstown's twenty first ward on write in votes alone. This time though he got one. He got one vote. Nobody was running, and I guess nobody else vote, and so he won with one. And I can't find any reporting on whether or not he was ever asked outright if that one vote was his own, But I think it's a safe bet.

I have to wonder if it was a joke. I mean, was he having a private joke with himself or was a friend joking about how he had done it last time. Did he really think it would work a second time? And if he did do this himself, why didn't he ask anyone else to do it with him? Was he surprised when he found out he was the constable again? There's really no way to know. So he's back in the saddle as constable. And it seems like nobody noticed.

It must not be a very demanding job if no one noticed that there were no candidates at all for the office, and no one said a word when a guy who'd been ordered by the state Supreme Court to vacate the position just unilaterally voted himself back in. But there it was. And in nineteen ninety eight, Casanova is entering its second year as Somerset County's only gay bar, and things are getting worse. There was another crossburning across

the street. They got bomb threats. Ron McCrae vowed to be out there every Friday and Saturday night until the bar was forced to shut down. The Kramers were getting death threats in the mail. The front windows were smashed out with huge rocks thrown from a passing car, but the Cramers weren't going to lie down and take it.

Speaking later to Professor Todd Hibel for his essay blame it on the Casanova, good Scenery and sodomy in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, pat said, McCray made a pledge to these neighbors that he would have us closed in a week. Well that never happened. Never happened because McCrae didn't know who I was, and the Cramers weren't alone. Some neighbors were on their side, even forming a group called Network

of Neighbors United against Hate Crimes. And I know you're probably trying to spell that out in your mind to see if that makes some kind of initialism. It doesn't. It's n NUA HC. It doesn't spell anything. And while the local gay community in Somerset County was pretty small, the gay community in cities like Pittsburgh and DC were rooting for them. A group of gay men from Pittsburgh rented a bus to come out to Somerset County for

a theme night. They called it burn in Hell Night, poking fun at the screaming preacher in the parking lot who was always telling them that's where they were heading. In March of nineteen ninety eight, a DC based group called the Lesbian Avengers drove three hours to show their support for Casanova. Washington City Paper reporter Amanda Ripley joined them for the trip. The Avengers danced, drank, mingled, and

performed some comedic skits for patrons at the bar. Pat Kramer, that straight married woman in her fifties ran the bar, said I thought that the girls were just wonderful. We loved them, and added even some heterosexuals offered them to stay in their homes in the future. And Pat beamed as she told these girls from out of town that a lot of her bar's patrons just call her mother.

I've always wanted a large family, she explained. Pat's own daughter had died a few years earlier after contracting HIV from a blood transfusion, and now here she is with this gay bar full of chosen family. I wonder it doesn't say, but I wonder if it was at her daughter's bedside that she first came to see the importance

of queer community. Her daughter had been infected by a blood transfusion, but I have to imagine Pat Kramer met patients and caregivers and grieving partners there on the Aids ward, and she got a much more intimate look at who gay people really were than those straight suburban women were getting in nineteen ninety. Before they left DC, on the day of their visit to Somerset County, the Lesbian Avengers

all agreed on the rules of engagement. They were headed up there to support Casanova, and things are different out in the country. They didn't want to make things worse for the gay people who lived there, and they really didn't want to end up in the county jail. So the rules were no cussing, no taking off your top. On the drive up, their lawyer, Kathy reminded them again to quote resist the urge to strip down an arm wrestle. This isn't DC. So they were on their best behavior

when they got there. They ignored Ron McCrae and the other protesters when they swarmed the women in the parking lot, calling them trash and wicked and failures as women, and telling them they would never find husbands and that they would burn in hell. I'm not sure one of those things really bothered. But they just walked into the bar

and they had a great time. Ripley's article describes mccray's teenage sons standing silently in the parking lot next to his father, holding a sign that read Casanova customers, child molesters, strippers, whores, cross dressers, prostitutes, sodomites, five drunkards, and a handful of wackos. I'm not sure which of mccray's sons that would have been, but I don't think it was the one who would later get arrested for inappropriate sexual contact with a lot

of underage girls. And when the Avengers walked out into the parking lot at little after one am, McCray was still there, just as they did every weekend. The protesters were there in the parking lot, and they surrounded patrons trying to leave the bar. They screamed and threatened and blocked them from getting to their van. One protester got right in the face of Beth Armitage, a member of the Lesbian Avengers, and said, you never know, this night

might be her last. But they were prepared for this. The Lesbian Avengers were no strangers to confrontation. In fact, they reveled in it. They were only on their best behavior that night for everyone else's sake. They kept their heads down and refused to engage on their way into the bar earlier that evening, But now they couldn't resist.

They promised they weren't going to make a scene, they weren't going to engage, But it was cold and late, and these men screaming slurs at them were keeping them from the warmth of their van. So they formed a semicircle and began to chant the Lesbian Avengers are fire eaters.

In September of nineteen ninety two, Hattie May Cohens, a black lesbian, and her roommate Brian Mock, a white gay man with an intellectual disability, were burned alive in their home in Oregon after Neo Nazi's skinheads through Molotov cocktails through the windows of her apartment. A month later, at a vigil for Cohens and Mock in New York, the Lesbian Avengers ate fire for the first time. The fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own. Their lawyer had pleaded with him on the

drive up not to do this tonight. Not here they could get charged with public disturbance, and this wasn't a friendly place to have to fight a charge. But here they were in the snow being told that they would burn, so Ron McCrae got to see those lesbians eat the fire. He was always threatening people with the Ku Klux claned with their burning crosses, and the skinheads with their Molotov cocktails, and the street preach with their threats of the fires

of hell. They're always surprised when a bitch burns back. Barry's clan group had staged protests directly outside Casanova in May of nineteen ninety seven, but in July of nineteen ninety eight, he assured the Kramers that the clan's presence in the area had nothing to do with the bar, and nothing to do with the fact that the bar's owner, Pat Kramer, had just returned from a trip to Washington, d c. Where she had testified in front of the

Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing on hate crimes legislation. No, it had nothing to do with that. The clan was just in the neighborhood for an entirely unrelated cross burning. Don and Lisa Penrod, that couple who had been active in the protest against the bar's presence in the town, owned a little bit of land across the street and they invited the Klan to have a picnic on their property.

Their farm had been the site of previous clan rallies and cross burnings, and on this July afternoon, they'd be hosting the clan's White Pride Day picnic. The picnic did not go well. I'll go ahead and spoil it. One local paper ran the headline KKK picnic host arrested. The two day affair was announced two weeks ahead of the event. Local residents who opposed the Klan held their own competing picnic, calling it the Unity Picnic at the Laurel Trinity Lutheran

Church a few miles away. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported that Ron McCray himself stopped by the Unity picnic. He'd sent the church a letter denouncing their pastor of the week before and accusing members of the congregation of a variety of sexual sins. But even Ron McCrae hated the clan. I'm not totally sure why he hated the clan, to

be honest. I mean, his own religious beliefs include the idea that sex outside your own race is within the Biblical definition of the sin of fornication, so it's not like he's not racist, but nevertheless, he apparently enjoyed the picnic. About one hundred and fifty people attended, and the local paper reported that dinner was served potluck style and speeches were given by various state and local civil rights organizations. Over at the clan picnic, the police were keeping an

eye on the Penrod farm, specifically on Barry Black. Barry would later explain to a reporter that the reason his family friendly picnic was crawling with burly tattooed clansmen with pump action riot shotguns is that they were worried that the people from the gay bar would come bother them and just a little more clan vocabulary. Those security guards

are the Nighthawks. And while these armed guards were under strict orders to prevent media or cameras of any kind really from entering the property, Barry invited Dennis Roddy, a reporter from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, into the picnic for a little tour, and Barry was just so happy to show off his event to this reporter from the big city, and he made sure to put it on the record that there was absolutely no reason to worry about any

lawlessness going on to the picnic. Not only did the Klan count many cops from a variety of counties among their membership, Barry himself was in law enforcement. Nobody seemed to have noticed up until this point that Barry was the constable again. But here he is bragging about it to a reporter, and that's going to bite him in the ass. Later sometime that afternoon, just as it was about time to start setting up the cross that they were going to burn when the sun went down, the

Nighthawks saw something. State Police had made no secret of the fact that they were increasing their presence in the area that day, just as a precaution. They didn't want any chance of these competing picnics and countering one another. But in addition to their visible presence in the area, the state police had gotten permission from the Penrod's next door neighbor to be on their property, and from that neighboring property, an undercover state trooper was perched in a

tree with a telephoto lens. They were acting on a tip that Barry was once again illegally in possession of a firearm, and they wanted to see if they could catch a glimpse of him. Handling a gun. It doesn't sound like they ever did catch Barry holding a gun, but almost everyone else was armed to the absolute teeth, so when the nighthawks caught a glimpse of a guy hiding in the tree line at the edge of the property,

they bolted for him. State Trooper George Emmig would later testify that he was sitting up in that tree on the neighbor's property when about ten picnic attendees rushed over to the fence line. He identified himself to the armed men as a state trooper, and he explained that he had the neighbor's permission to be on their property. He said it was at that point that Don Penrod pointed the rifle at him and said, you're dead. State Police

Sergeant George Bivins arrived on the scene almost immediately. He'd seen the group moving towards Emig's position, and he testified that he'd heard Emig trying to explain to the men that he was a police officer, and then Bivins heard Ronald Bendix, one of the nighthawks, reply that he didn't care and they were going to kill him anyway. It was at this point that Bivins drew his own weapon

and the klansmen scattered. And now now the state police had a reason to enter the Penrod property before they were keeping it at the fence line, but now they're giving chase. Michael Abraham was arrested inside the picnic tent. Ronald Bendis was found hiding under a blanket, and Adam Woyre was also taken into custody, but it doesn't say where he was hiding. Don Penrod was nowhere to be found that afternoon, but he was arrested a week later

when the police searched his home. The police confiscated several shotguns, a pistol, a ceremonial clan sword, a Tommy gun, and a bulletproof vest. But the picnic wasn't canceled. Three members had been carted off to jail, but the show must go on, and that cross wasn't going to burn itself. A few months later, Barry's lawyer was in court arguing

for the return of those seized items. I'm not quite sure what the legal strategy is here, Like, I don't know if you have legal standing as the guest at a picnic to challenge the search and seizure of someone else's property, and the sword was definitely Barry's, but he absolutely was not claiming ownership of the submachine gun. But the judge did order the police to return Barry's Sarah

Ammonial Clan sword, but they kept the guns. It took a year to sort out, but in the end Don Penrod got six months for terroristic threats, followed by two years of supervision for the assault. Stephen Bedecks got fourteen months for the assault and terroristic threats, Michael Abraham got nine months for simple assault, and Adam Moyer was acquitted

on all accounts. One article notes that Bedecks got more time than the others because at the time of the incident he was out on parole for a conviction in a case related to his role in a cocaine trafficking ring that would bring drugs down from New York City and distribute them in the Lehigh Valley area. In twenty twelve, he was the president of his local chapter of the Pagan's Motorcycle Club when he was federally indicted for cocaine trafficking again. He spent five years in prison and died

shortly after his release, but back to Barry. After those three Nighthawks were arrested, Don Penrod used his own property as collateral to bail out Abraham and Moyer. Bedex was held without bond due to the prole violation, and when Penrod himself was arrested a few days after the picnic, Barry walked into the jail with a ten thousand dollars

cashier's check in hand to bail him out. That same week, Barry filed a criminal and civil complaint against state police Sergeant Bivens, the trooper who drew his gun on the klansmen who were pointing their guns at another state trooper, and the county prosecutor filed a petition to have Barry removed from the office of constable. It's a new prosecutor now, that district attorney from the first time around as a judge at this point, but the game is the same.

Barry can't be the constable because he's been convicted of too many crimes. Complaining about the police intrusion on his picnic, Barry told the local newspaper, the state police are like the Gestapo. We are nice white people having a family picnic. Where's our first Amendment? Rights to our beliefs, and Barry's relationship to the First Amendment is something we'll explore in greater detail next week, because that's where I'm gonna leave

it today. We'll pick up next time with Barry's second court battle to keep his job as Cambria County Constable, and then follow him to Virginia where he'll light the cross that takes him all the way to the Supreme Court. Until then, I don't know, try to love your neighbors like Pat Kramer did, and don't bring a Tommy gun to a family picnic. Welcome back to the second half

of the story of Barry Black, the Pennsylvania clansman. Barry Black's main claim to fame as being the black in Commonwealth of Virginia v. Black, the two thousand and three Supreme Court case that found Virginia's crossburning statute unconstitutionally overbroad.

I set out to learn a little more about that landmark decision and the life of the man who won it, because it comes up often in some cases going on now, the prosecutions of the torch bearing white supremacist who came to Charlottesville in twenty seventeen, and I found a lot

more than I bargained for. I don't know what I expected, but last week's story of a small town war and a rural gay bar complete with side characters like a notorious federal informant who worked for Lynton LaRouche and a street preacher who was a central figure in the Obama Birtherism conspiracy, definitely surprised me. This week, though, we'll actually get to Barry's infamous cross burning and the Black acl lawyer who fought for the clansmen's rights that victory.

gay bar the year prior. The Penrod's farm was the pre rally staging area and the site of the post rally cross burning later that evening. They weren't just concerned neighbors whose opposition to the gay bar made them unlikely

allies with the clan. They were members. Lisa Penrod in fact commanded the women's Auxiliary Unit and served as the Imperial Secretary of the Invisible Empire International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan under Berry's leadership, and on July twenty fifth, nineteen ninety eight, Don and Lisa Penrod were two of the ten clan members standing at the fence line on the Penrod farm demanding answers from a man

in their neighbour's tree. That man turned out to be a state trooper, and Don Penrod was one of four attendees at the clan picnic who was arrested for threatening the trooper at gunpoint. Barry himself posted Don Penrod's ten thousand dollars bond the week after the picnic. Cambria County district attorney David Tulowitski, filed a petition with the court to have Berry Black removed from the office of Constable, an elected law enforcement position he'd won by a single

rite in vote the year prior. History was repeating itself. Barry was elected constable of Johnstown's twenty first ward in nineteen ninety one and was removed from office just a few months later when the county prosecutor filed a petition to have him removed on the grounds that his criminal record made him ineligible to hold a position of public trust.

A judge agreed. Barry appealed that decision and fought it all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, holding clan rallies at court houses and in small towns throughout the year and a half long appeals process. The state's highest court told Barry in nineteen ninety three that he wasn't allowed to be the constable and nothing in the law had changed in the five years since. But here he

was fighting the same fight all over again. This time around, he argued that the petition to remove him from office was retaliation, pure and simple. The county was punishing him for his clan ratal and for the complaint he'd filed against the state troopers who arrested his friends at the picnic. In mid August of nineteen ninety eight, the issue of whether the clansmen could continue operating as constable was with

the courts. There was no injunction preventing him from acting as a law enforcement official, but the county had apparently instructed officers of the court to use him to serve Warrens as sparingly as possible. In the meantime, Barry's lawyer shrugged this off, telling the local paper, I think he's pretty well preoccupied with his grand wizardry in the clan, and that's true. He was keeping busy, And it was in August nineteen ninety eight that Barry Black took a

road trip. This wasn't Barry's first out of state clan field trip. Six people were arrested when the crowd got out of control during Barry's opening prayers at a clan rally in Millville, New Jersey, in nineteen ninety When Barry had lined across burning in Maryland in nineteen ninety one, the Washington Post printed the slurs that came out of his mouth when clan leaders from six states converged in

Ohio in nineteen ninety five. Barry told the Cincinnati Inquirer that it was like a family reunion and lamented that no one ever gives the clan credit for all the good things we do. When clansmen in South Carolina came under federal investigation for burning down black churches, Barry was there at a cross burning in Lexington in nineteen ninety six, pledging the support of the Keystone Nights in this legal battle to come. No, his lawyer was right. Barry was

very busy being the grand Wizard. He was always driving off to Indiana, Ohio, Maryland, or just the other side of Pennsylvania for some appearance at a clan event. This trip to Virginia should have been like any of the others, show up, make a scene, light across, upset the locals,

and head home again. But this time was different. The Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan packed up their white robes and their crossburning supplies and made the six hour drive from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to Hillsville, Virginia, a small town in Carroll County in Virginia's far southwest. Tip not

far from the North Carolina border. And here's Barry in his own words, talking about the event in an interview recorded in two thousand and five for Duke University School of Law's Voices of American Law Project.

law enforcement, it just wasn't a crime. Newspaper archives for the next few years show a frustrating pattern. Crosses were burning all over the state, and every time it happened, it was dismissed as some isolated incident, some kind of prank,

some kind of childish active vandalism. Every cross that burned in Virginia was written off by newspapers and cops here in Virginia, But those same papers ran stories of flaming crosses in Tennessee and South Carolina, properly identifying those as what they were, a burning line in the sand, keeping black Southerners from moving into white neighborhoods, from getting elected to office, from gaining civil rights, and from feeling safe

in their homes. In late nineteen forty nine, a series of cross burnings, culminating in an explosion, destroyed the construction site for a planned housing project for black residents in Nashville. After Judge Wade's wearing open South Carolina's previously whitees only primaries to black voters, his home was targeted repeatedly with

crosses burning on his front lawn in nineteen fifty. But the same papers that ran those wire stories from cities and other states wrote their own local coverage of cross burnings closer to home, with a very different tone. When a cross burned in Nashville or Charleston, it's safe to say that those cities have racial unrest. Those cities have

the clan. In the summer of nineteen fifty, several black residents of Colonial Beach, Virginia, found a lawsuit to force the locality to allow them to swim in a public beach. The town relented, there was no need to go to court. The beaches are open to all residents. But when those black residents and their attorney went to the beach to see if that was true, five hundred white men attacked the fifteen black beach goers. Later that week, crosses burned

all down the beach. Another cross was erected and burned outside of the Black church, accompanied by rifle fire, and the letters k k K were scrawled on sidewalks all over black neighborhoods. The town council took no official notice of the cross burnings and said they not only had no obligation to anticipate on the rest of the beach, but it would in fact amount to discrimination to have done anything to ensure those black residents could access the beach.

There was no KKK in Virginia nineteen fifty. Just look at any newspaper anywhere in the state. When a woman had found a cross burning on her front porch in Noffolk in September of nineteen fifty, the police told then Offolk Ledger Dispatch that it was only a small cross, just two feet high, and quote, the clan usually puts on a bigger show. There had been eight cross burnings in neighboring Nansaman County in just the last few months.

But this was probably just mischievous kids. The Bristol, Virginia, Tennessee And reported in October of nineteen fifty that the twelve foot cross burned on a hillside near the reservoir, where it was visible to hundreds of residents, was just a prank. There's no way to know what those men in hoods were doing up there. A police captain told the paper that the Confederate flag left behind was evidence

that this was obviously just a prank. That same newspaper had been running coverage of a clan march in South Carolina just six weeks earlier. After letting up across in Myrtle Beach, the clan marched into town, surrounding a black dance hall. There was a riot. Charlie Fitzgerald stood in the doorway of his bar with a gun, but he never had a chance to fire it before the mob beat him and shoved him into the trunk of a car.

The clansmen emptied their guns into the sides of the building, riddling the walls with bullet holes and shattering all of the windows. Amidst all this chaos, one of their own took a stray bullet to the back. When his robes were removed to the hospital where he died, he was

wearing a policeman's uniform Underneath. These stories running in the same paper may give you some insight into a small town police officer's eagerness to explain away these flames on a hillside, But you can draw your own conclusions the clan was thriving again across the South. In January of nineteen fifty one, the state of Georgia outlawed crossburning in an effort to stem the tide of this white robed violence.

In February of nineteen fifty one, crosses were lit outside the homes and businesses of black residence in Guchland and in Raiko Counties in Virginia. Black families reported seeing half a dozen men firing their guns into the air as they ran back to their cars after lighting the flames. The FBI said it was a local matter. The sheriff said it was pranksters. When the local NAACP demanded an investigation, the county prosecutor said there is definitely no racial relations

question connected to the recent cross burnings. By June of nineteen fifty one, Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina had joined Georgia in banning cross burning across the South. The crosses burned, and there was no question about what it meant except when it happened here. The same papers that ran the wire stories about the legislative attempts to combat clan activity everywhere else said the six foot cross doused and gasoline in the middle of Route one in Stafford was just

a prank. It was just kids messing with traffic. In August of that year, a widow and Appamannox was awoken in the middle of the night by the sound of an explosion. The cross burning on her front lawn had ignited the dynamite late at its base. A postcard from the clan was left to the scene. The newspaper ran the headline crossfire lacks motive, with the sheriff quoted saying, my office dropped the matter. It was probably a personal

thing or just some children. In my haphazard search of newspaper archives, I found nearly a hundred of these pranks in Virginia in the nineteen fifties. A white cop tells white reporter that there's nothing to worry about here. It's only a joke. As a black family douses the burning embers on their law. No one could see the racial terror we already had here at home. It was always kids,

or vandals or pranksters. But in nineteen fifty two, the Virginia State Legislature was finally ready to act, responding to reports that Florida Clan leader Bill Hendrix was planning a rally in Richmond, and South Carolina clan leader Thomas Hamilton was planning to start chapters in more than a dozen towns. In Virginia, a bill was introduced to outlaw the wearing of masks in public at the urging of religious groups,

a ban on crossburning was added. The threat of these out of town clansmen pushed the bill through without significant pushback, and it was signed by Governor John Battle in April nineteen fifty two. But changing the law didn't change anyone's attitudes. Throughout the nineteen fifties, most of the crossburning stories I could find were dismissed as pranks, and if I'm being

entirely honest, some of them might have been. There were several crossburnings in Newport News that teenage boys eventually confessed to, with one cross being placed on the law of a state delegate by mistake. The boys said they were pranking their high school teachers, and I did find at least three stories of high school teachers and Newport News who

had crosses burned on their lawn. The boys' names were never published, so I don't know what they got up to later in life, and I have to wonder exactly what kind of pranks these were. It's the fifties. Had those teachers expressed support for integration, Did they go on dates with black women or rent property to black tenants? It wasn't unheard of for behavior like that to earn a white man a visit from those seeking to enforce

the established social order. But it's impossible to say seventy years later what prompted those nighttime visits from their students. And I tell you about these ones that maybe were pranks, because I don't think any of them being pranks really helps explain it at all. If anything, it underscores how widespread and commonly understood this was as a symbol. You didn't have to be a klansman to know what it meant. You didn't have to mean it yourself to know how

it would be read. In nineteen sixty five, George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, ran for governor here in Virginia. He didn't win, obviously, he got nearly six thousand votes, though one percent of the total cast. The new governor was Mills Godwin, once a staunch segregationist who had distanced himself from the political machine of Harry Bird. Whether he had a change of heart or just saw the writing on the wall after the failure of Virginia's

massive resistance to school desegregation is impossible to say. But in December of nineteen sixty six, Governor Mills Godwin announced a one thousand dollars reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of crossburners. In response, the klan burned across outside the Governor's mansion.

and a stack of clan literature. Barry Black wasn't the first clansman to fight this law and win. Price had his conviction overturned by the Virginia Supreme Court a year later, with the court ruling that technically the law didn't apply here. The Prices had burned that cross on public property, on the sidewalk, not on the property of another, as stated in the statute. The Virginia General Assembly amended the law that year to include a bannon crossburning on public property

as well. In nineteen sixty eight, the state Supreme Court seemed to believe that the purpose of banning crossburning was to protect private property. The law didn't protect people, it protected their laws, and with this amendment, the legislature clarified their intention. The law isn't about property or trustpass or the possibility of danger from the flames themselves. It is

intended to prevent a particular act of intimidation. But in their efforts to close off this avenue of attack, they accidentally created another This amendment to the statute also added language that quote, the unlawful burning of a cross shall be prima facia evidence of the intention to intimidate a person or group of persons. This language was likely intended to get around the defense of whill it was just

a prank. Burning across is such a heinous act with no other purpose than to intimidate that if you can prove it was done at all, then the starting assumption is that it was done to intimidate. So this amendment to the law shifts the burden of proof to the

party trying to prove otherwise. So when Barry lit that cross in Carroll County on August twenty second, nineteen ninety eight, the law on the books read, it shall be unlawful for any person or persons, with the intent of intimidating any person or group of persons, to burn, or cause to be burned across on the property of another, a highway or other public space. Any person who shall violate

this section shall be guilty of a classic felony. Any such burning of a cross shall be primophacia evidence of an intent to intimidate a person or group of persons, and Barry had done that. When the sheriff's lieutenant arrived, he asked who lit this cross, and Barry stepped forward and claimed responsibility. He was charged in Carroll County and released on bond, but he was having a hell of a time finding a lawyer. Most lawyers in the area

wouldn't even return his calls. But then, as in so many cases of extremists trying to force their way into the conversation about civil rights, the ACLU stepped up without even having to be asked.

You have my word on that, sir. He says, I'll defend you to the end, and life is good enough.

the explicit intention of curtailing clan activity. The anti masking statute was upheld by the Virginia Supreme Court, and the actual Supreme Court declined to hear Hernandez's case. In nineteen ninety four, ACLU attorney David Baugh went to Batford Barry, and he spent years on the case. When the pair first appeared in court together, the Richmond Times Dispatch ran

the headline crowd likely as black defends clansmen. The news stories can be a little tough to parse sometimes because our klansman's name is black, and the African American attorney representing him is being referred to often in these newspapers as a black and the case was getting a lot of publicity. This tiny town of just twenty seven hundred was suddenly swarming with reporters and lawyers. The state Attorney General's office sent a team to assist the local prosecutor.

Carroll County District Court clerk Christine Beck told the paper, it's going to be a circus, and added, I guess some things are just fascinating, like the sex lies of the president. This would have been right around the time the Star report was released to the public, and everyone was just in a frenzy about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The last few months of nineteen ninety eight were hectic

for Barry. Now he was fighting his own case down in Virginia, but the four klansmen arrested at the White Bride picnic were still fighting their cases at home in Pennsylvania. A few weeks after this cross burning, Barry was kicked out of the courtroom during a hearing in Don Penrod's case for pointing his rifle at that state trooper, and Barry had to appear in court repeatedly in his fight to keep his job as Constable. He's under more scrutiny

than ever. His local prosecutor, state troopers, and the courts in Virginia were just waiting for Barry to make a mistake. In March of nineteen ninety nine, a judge in Virginia ruled against emotion to dismiss Barry's criminal case, rejecting the argument that crossburning was protected First Amendment conduct. A few days later, Barry was back in court in Pennsylvania, railing against the corrupt judicial system trying to take away his

job as constable. He told reporters in the hallway after the hearing that if they would just let him keep the job, he would be too busy working to keep up his clan activities. That's not really a great argument if you ask me, you know, just let me be a cop and I'll be too busy to do crime. I don't know that that's very convincing. And while we're on the subject of guys who probably should not be cops, I want to pick up a thread from the story

last week. Barry's involvement in the war on the Casanova Lounge doesn't really factor into this week's story. He's too busy with his own problems at this point to be bothering with that gay bar But the situation was ongoing, and it was around this time in the spring of nineteen ninety nine that something the bar's patrons had long suspected was proved to be true. The bigots had an

inside man. Ron Immler, the police chief and neighboring Connamau Township, had been running license plates for the protesters and supplying them with the names and home addresses of the people who visited the gay bar. Imler denied these accusations, but

he suddenly retired. The Pennsylvania State Police Bureau of Technology Service informed the town's supervisors in a letter that Ron Immler had violated state and federal law by providing confidential information obtained through state computer databases to an unauthorized person. It's not clear to me if Immler was ever charged or prosecuted for this. There's no record in the online information system for Pennsylvania's courts. It could be that this

is very old. I did find other records from that year. It could be that he had it sealed or expunged.

But it's possible that he was just never charged. So we do have on record that the state police informed the township that their police chief had broken the law, but it's not clear that the local prosecutor ever brought those charges, so it's not always as literal as that dead clansman in South Carolina who was wearing his police uniform under his robes, and Barry wasn't the only law enforcement official in the area whose vision of law and

order did at harassing that bar out of existence. But back to Barry, things didn't improve much for Barry as nineteen ninety nine, wore On Don Penrod and two other clansmen were convicted for threatening those state troopers at the White Pride picnic, and Barry was once again removed from the office of Constable by the courts. He tried to appeal the decision as he had the first time around,

but it didn't work out. He filed a federal lawsuit against the state police, but his case got tossed before

it even got off the ground. He had to bail his son, Barry Junior, out of the local jail three times that year, including one night after the younger Barry was arrested for threatening someone with a gun, and in June of nineteen ninety nine, an old white jury in Carroll County deliberated for just twenty five minutes before finding Barry Black guilty of cross burning under that Virginia statute.

They had the option of giving him up to five years behind bars for this CLASSICX felony, but the jury decided on just a twenty five hundred dollars fine.

Virginia's crossburning law was unconstitutional. The opinion noted that similar statutes in Maryland and South Carolina had been ruled unconstitutional in recent years, and the law on the books was indistinct, inquishable from the Minnesota law struck down in the nineteen ninety two Supreme Court case rav versus City of Saint Paul. The issue here arises in that nineteen sixty eight amendment to the law about the act itself being sufficient evidence

of intent, and just a quick side note here. I don't want a Monday morning quarterback the State Supreme Court, but they are mistaken about something here. The opinion incorrectly states that the prima fascia evidence of intent language was added in nineteen seventy five, but it was nineteen sixty eight. And I can promise you that I pulled copies of the Acts of the General Assembly for every legislative session

that this code section was touched. The prima facial requirement was inserted when the law was amended in nineteen sixty eight, after the State Supreme Court overturned Wilson Price's conviction. I think the origin of this error is that the code section does show a revision was made in nineteen seventy five, but if you pull the full text of the nineteen seventy five session, it's because everything in Title eighteen was

technically amended in nineteen seventy five. Because they rearranged and recodified the entire criminal Code, so the language of the statute stayed the same between nineteen sixty eight nineteen seventy five. They just changed the numbers. That doesn't matter at all. I didn't need to tell you that. I'm just flexing on some court clerk from twenty four years ago. I guess sorry. But anyway, this decision rested on that language.

The law couldn't be content neutral if this baked in assumption of intent rested on the historical context of crossburning. So basically, the court is saying, you can't have it both ways. Either the law is constitutional because it is content neutral it applies to everyone regardless of their motivation, or you can justify the inference of intimidation by relying on the history of the clan. But both of those

things can't be true at the same time. And because Barry wasn't the only person arrested for burning across in Virginia in nineteen ninety eight, this appeal to the State Supreme Court was actually three cases rolled up into one. So the court wasn't just reversing Barry's conviction in this opinion, they were also throwing out convictions against Richard Elliott and Jonathan O'Mara, two men had been convicted for burning across on a black family's lawn. Now Barry has an argument here.

I don't like it. I don't have to like it, but it's true. There wasn't really a victim in this case. He was on private property at the invitation of the owner, and they didn't really intend for anybody to see what they were doing. The landowner's niece by marriage, who was living elsewhere on the property, did testify in the original case that she saw the cross burning and had been frightened, but she was arguably not any kind of intended audience. It's not even clear if they knew she was there.

For Elliot and O'Mara, though their cases did not rely on prima facia evidence of intent, there was actual proof of intent. There was a victim here. They absolutely intended to intimidate that family and should rightfully be punished under this law. So the State of Virginia appealed the state Supreme Court ruling to the Supreme Court, and all three

of these cases rolled right on up together. And I'll admit that before I started picking this story apart, my sort of general understanding of Commonwealth feed Black was that the Supreme Court ruled Virginia's cross burning law was unconstitutional, and that is what happened. But it's not entirely straightforward. Even the men's own lawyer, Rodney Smola, wasn't sure what to make of the decision the day he read it.

and ultimately they were convicted and did serve time. And after a lifetime of fighting losing battles, you might think Barry came away from this emboldened, empowered, ready to ride this victory into more marches, more recruiting, more cross burnings, more anything. But he didn't really. He was fifty five the year the Supreme Court gave him their blessing to burn crosses. He probably did burn a few more, but

none of them made the news. He'd planted some seeds as an Imperial Wizard, but none of them really thrived. Corporate entities with names that seemed to tie them to Barry's Keystone Nights existed in several states, but most of them withered and died. The International Keystone Knights of the Realm of Ohio registered with the State of Ohio in two thousand and two, but they stopped filing annual paperwork

in twenty thirteen. The Invisible Empire International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Incorporated was registered in Indiana by Barry himself in nineteen ninety seven. The South Carolina based nonprofit Barry Incorporated in nineteen ninety nine technically still exists on paper, despite the deaths of both Barry and the local clansmen he ran it with a Virginia chapter of

the Keystone Knights Incorporated. A few months after the Supreme Court victory in two thousand and three, but there's no record I can find of the chapter getting up to anything, and all record of the entity disappears entirely after two thousand and eight. Stephen Dnkle, the one time leader of a Keystone Nights chapter in Alabama, was convicted of a federal hate crime in twenty fourteen for a cross burning.

After his release, he was convicted again for a federal firearms related offense, and in twenty seventeen, he was sentenced to ten years for sexually assaulting an incapacitated woman. A man named Willis Fraser still files annual paperwork with the IRS for the Indiana based entity using the Keystone Knights name. In two thousand and four, Fraser tried to sue the state of Arkansas after he was fired from his job as a prison guard for being a member of the

Keystone Knights, but his suit was dismissed. The only place the Keystone Knights have popped up in recent years was their legal battle with the state of Georgia over the denial of their application to the state's adopt a Highway program. The ACLU stepped in to help secure the clan's right to put their name on a sign on the side

of a Georgia highway. That Keystone Knights chapter in Georgia seems to be the only one that really still exists, with Willis Fraser's name on some of that paperwork, tying it all the way back to Barry. The Keystone Knights are more or less dead, and Barry Black is entirely dead. He passed away in twenty eighteen. He lived a life of hatred. He spent most of his life feeling persecuted and aggrieved, fighting what he saw as a righteous battle

for his civil rights. His right to disrupt life in a small town with his clan rallies, his right to serve as constable, his right to lead armed mobs that threatened to shoot cops, his right to burn crosses, his right to make his bigotry your problem. The part of Barry's legacy I'm most interested in, though, is the law written to stop the next Berry Black. While Barry Black's cross burning appeals were working their way through the appeals process,

the Virginia General Assembly had already corrected the problem. They knew the law they used to prosecute Barry wasn't going to hold up, and instead of amending the existing statute, they passed a new law in two thousand and two. The language about prima fascia evidence of intent was gone, of course, but there was another huge change. The cross itself was missing. This new law outlawed burning anything if

it was done with the intent to intimidate. It's still understood to be a cross burning law, but it doesn't actually say that. It doesn't say that at all. Cross burnings never stopped. Of course, they still happen here from time to time. In twenty twenty, a man named James Brown burned a cross outside the home of a black teenager who'd been involved in organizing Black Lives Matter protests in Marion, Virginia. He served eighteen months for criminal interference

with federally protected rights. Darryl Orange was convicted in twenty ten under the original cross burning law, which was left on the books for some reason, after he burned a cross on his neighbor's lawn in Bedford, Virginia. Many crossburnings go unsolved or unprosecuted, and some of them are still dismissed as pranks. This new law has never really been tested until last year. I can only find a single case where it's ever even been used to charge someone.

On the fourth of July and twenty nineteen, a man in Williamsburg pulled up in front of a wal Mart, got out of his car, put an American flag on the ground, and set it on fire. He didn't threaten anyone, He just lit it up, shouted a bit about how he hated America, and drove off. Wasn't shouting in anyone in particular, He wasn't particularly close to anyone or anything, and no one was injured and nothing was really damaged. The charge almost certainly would not have held up to

any kind of scrutiny in this particular case. The local cops outright said that they probably wouldn't even have arrested him at all if he'd burned a towel instead of a flag. It was the flag that had people worked up, but the First Amendment right to burn a flag is well trod legal territory. He ultimately pled down to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, So the court hasn't really ever had to deal with this burning object law until now.

You see, seven years ago, hundreds of torch bearing white supremacists marched through the grounds of the University of Virginia. They'd come to Charlesville from across the country, taking Friday morning flights or taking turns at the wheel for cross country drives, and rented vans with guys they met on message board. Arriving early before the big event the next day, they gathered in a field near the tennis courts and

lined up two by two, torches in hand. Men with walkie talkies clipped to their belts, some with wired earpieces barked orders. Elliott Kleine, an ambitious young white nationalist organizer calling himself Eli Moseley after twentieth century British fascist Oswald Moseley, shouted at the crowd as they formed into a line. So we're going around right through, and anyone who we packed for the journey, let us know if we can do it all right, We're picking big guys, no female.

Klein was selecting the biggest marchers to lay down their torches, they might need their hands free. The march wound its way through the university grounds, up the lawn, and then up the steps of the University of Virginia's iconic rotunda on the other side of the rotunda, gathered near a statue Thomas Jefferson, a small group of anti racist activists waited.

In her testimony during a later civil trial, one of the women who was terrorized that night said, when we heard the roaring of the approaching crowd, we just linked arms and held hands and started to sing. She said at first it sounded like thunder, like the earth was growling. As the sound grew closer, but before she could see the light of the torches, she began to make out the chance hundreds of voices raised in unison, shouting blood

and soil. Testifying about that night years later, she said she still hears it in her nightmare sometimes, and by the time that small group of mostly students realized the magnitude and ferocity of the approaching mob, it was too late. They were surrounded at the base of the statue by hundreds of torch wielding white supremacists for just a few minutes, minutes that those trapped at the base of the statue said they believed might be their last, as they were

doused in lighter fluid, maced, kicked, and punched. There was a melee after the crowd dispersed that night and after the deadly rally the next morning, those men went home. Some started businesses, some joined the military, others got kicked out of the military, and some did both. Some died of heart attacks and drug overdoses and self inflicted gunshot wounds.

They beat their wives and choked their girlfriends, went to grad school, went to prison, trafficked drugs, started families, got divorced, ran for office, tried to overturn a presidential election, left the movement, tried to lead the movement, or just tried to disappear. There are as many stories as there were flames in the night when their voices joined us, one shouting Jews will not replace us, and then dousing the flames, going their separate ways back to the communities they came from.

Last year, the Algumorole County Prosecutor's office decided to put this law to the test. This mom had burned objects, they had intimidated people with them. If this law was meant to punish anyone for anything, it was meant for men like this with their flaming torches. And if you're listening to this the day it came out, the odds are pretty good that I'm sitting in a little county courtroom with one of them right now. Weird Little Guys

is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Long Kunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it. It's nothing personal. I don't answer any of my emails.

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