Just a few old pics

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1938 stand-off between the KKK and African American residents of Lakeland, Florida

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How did that end (dare I ask?)

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That's how Polk County was displayed to the nation in September 1938 when Life magazine published two photographs of a Ku Klux Klan rally in Lakeland.

"This Negro group, lined up outside a Lakeland beer parlor, is being warned by Klansmen against disturbances, threatened with hooded mass violence," stated the irony-slathered caption above Lakelander Dan Sanborn's photograph.

"The costume-wearers on this page are a small and mischievous remnant of the once mighty Ku Klux Klan," Life reported. "The Klan rides but seldom now and, in place of the Southern gentlemen who once filled its ranks, claims only the most embittered and bigoted of rural whites."

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The rally on Aug. 30, 1938, wasn't the first rally and cross-burning in Polk County, and it certainly wasn't the last. According to news reports, more than 200 KKK members from Polk, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties descended on Lakeland and paraded through the northern section of town.

"The white robed and hooded marchers frequently herded groups of Negroes together and voiced a warning against further outbreaks," the Polk County Record reported. "The parade climaxed with the burning of a wooden cross."

The rally was said to be in response to two recent slayings in the area - two black men had been killed in separate incidents in area bars, and two other black men were in custody. The Klan said it wanted to put down what it saw as a rise in black crime.

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The real reason for the rally may have been to put down union organization, Brown suggests. Unions were working hard to recruit Polk County's mostly black citrus workers in the late 1930s, and growers didn't appreciate it. Feeling that the government didn't support them, some of the growers turned to the Klan, Brown wrote.

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In either case, the Life magazine photos - one of which can be viewed on the Lakeland Public Library's Web site at www.lakelandgov.net/library/speccoll/exhibits/blackhisfolks11.html - seemed to shame Polk County residents into turning its back on the Klan for at least a time. A second rally of 150 Klan members that December in Winter Haven "met with so little support that they did not bother to burn a cross," Brown wrote.

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