Col Zone media.
In nineteen forty eight, there was a rash of crossburnings in Suffolk. Virginia newspapers throughout the late forties and all through the fifties assure the reader that there is no Ku Klux clan activity in Virginia. Local clan 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 Nurneville. And whether or not the local prosecutor believed that the clan still existed, everyone in the South knows what a burning cross means. The third
one in that neighborhood. In recent months, the local prosecutor had simply shrugged, it's not illegal to burn across 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 cross burning 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 degree 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 defendant 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 the 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. Commonwealthy 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 marginers. 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 they 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 Barry Black's story, and we won't even get to his precedent setting appeal until next week.
This week, it's.
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 clansmen 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 Barry, and lacks 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. He's still in his 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 autopart 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 berry 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 klegal 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 this 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 a point 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. Sylvania has a Grand Dragon, and the Grand Dragon appoints the Grand Titans, and Bury's 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 and 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 Carmichael's, Pennsylvania. The town fought tooth and nail to prevent it, but he was to turn 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 Barry 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 I guess 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 ride 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. The 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 too Barry's six year term as constable, Cambria County District Attorney Timothy Creeney noticed that
they had a klansman 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 Bear he 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 courtroom 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 at 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 Clan 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 Grap that the nighthawks are 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 you know the Kliggrap 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 franks Kauser, the leader of a splinter group
called the White Unity Party. Barry explained to the reporter that if frank Kauser wanted the White Unity Party to be allowed to join Barry's new clan organization, the Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, then frank Kauser 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 Frankauser was beefing with Barry, And it's hard to say with any kind of certainty, but I wonder if it was Frankhauser who met with the FBI 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 said 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, fighting the tipsters 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 crossburnings 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 Merrik 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 it as a restaurant for two years before deciding in January of nineteen ninety seven to start catering to gay clientel. 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 the 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 pm. 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 McCrae. 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 McCray 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.
The preponderance of the evidence is as follows. You've got a deposition, which is a sworn statement from the step grandmother who says I was present and saw him born in Mombasa.
CanYa, before he gave birth to one of Berthaism's most stubborn lies. Ronnie Marcus McCrae grew up in Texas and claims to have been a police officer before turning to street preaching in his thirties, but I can't find any particular evidence beyond his own claims that he was ever
a cop. By the late nineteen eighties, he was in western Pennsylvania preaching the Word of God to unwilling congregants on street corners, who 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 mccray's street preacher's fellowship, who was a fairly litigious collective of amateur street preachers who would scream Bible verses on street corners until the police would intervene, and then they would sue. And that seems like what he was trying to do to Patricia Kramer and her customers outside Casanova almost every weekend.
For four years.
Ron McCrae 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 elves, 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 renamed Casanova Road to Hemlock Road. In May of nineteen ninety seven, the Penrods 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
marched 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 Penrod's 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 seve 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 voted, 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 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. 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 McRae vowed to be out there every Friday and Saturday night until the bar was forced to shut down. The Cramers were getting death threats in the mail. The front windows were smashed out with huge rocks thrown from a passing car, but the Kramers weren't going to lie down and take it.
Speaking later to Professor tu 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 Kramers 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 an 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 you 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 who 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 most 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 McCray 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 them, 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 McCrae'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 lefter 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 them on the drive up not to do this tonight. Not here they could get charged with public disturbed 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 Klan with their burning crosses, and the skinheads with their Molotov cocktails, and the street preachers 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 Kasanova 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'd 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 clan 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 clan 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 them 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 included 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 at 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 tea, 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 Emig 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 Bendix was found hiding under a blanket, and Adam Moyer 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 ceremonial 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 Betecks 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. Bendix 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 Bivins, 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. 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 going to 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.
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