Raleigh, July 3—Parade of the Ku Klux here tomorrow in the Fourth of July celebration has aroused the late and lamented supporters of John W. Hinisdale to bitter retrospect. They lost their golden issue.
The papers have announced that the kluckers will parade in their night shirts and keep ‘em on. The mayor gave his blessing to the peculiar glorification of the flag. The Raleigh Times doesn’t discuss the political slant to the demonstration—it refrained from attack on the Evans candidacy for solicitor because the paper hadn’t satisfactory evidence that the kluckers were backing Evans. It consequently does not attack them or him now, but it demands as a citizen a reason from Mayor Eldridge for allowing unnamed celebrants to parade the streets in their nighties-looking habiliments.
The Hinsdale men were many times on the point of attacking the Evans candidacy on the ground of the overwhelming percentage of kluckers supporters who were very vocative for Evans. Stories that the kluckers were whipping people in Franklin county naturally raised speculation. What would Mr. Evans do if these cases were brought to him? Kluckers advised that he would prosecute the robed cowards to the limit. Moreover, members of the klan who were supporting Hinsdale deplored attack because they thought Hinsdale could reasonably expect half the support of the klansmen. Of course he didn’t get a tenth of it.
The thing that galls the Hinsdale people is that they regard the klucker demonstration as an Evans celebration. Republicans look upon it with great resentment because they have regarded the kluckers for a long time as the natural ally of the Democracy, which encouraged might make it very vicious toward the majority. So far as anybody has been able to see there has been not the slightest wrong done by the kluckers in Wake. But the klan has been credited with gross excesses in franklin. The very babies could see that the klan was in local politics, Candidate Evans, barring his devoute thanks for being made a white man and waiving his splendid generalization for the sanctity of the home, allowed no utterance of his to convict him of any klucker bias.
The Times demands that the mayor withdraw his consent for the parade and force the kluckers who affect to be celebrating Fourth of July to do it as their fathers did and as becomes men willing to do good and bee good without cover of darkness. “The acquiescence of Mayor Eldridge and his brother commissioners in this vicious travesty on ‘Americanism’ is inexplicable,” the Times says.
The defeated Hinsdale men now believe that if they had been less discreet and had gone before ethe people with the suggestion that in this district now beatings are going on and that almost without exception men known to be ku klux members were aggressively and intolerantly supporting Evans candidacy, notwithstanding the popular understanding that Mr. Evans himself is not a member, the district would have overwhelmed Evans.
And they find it difficult to look on the Fourth of July parade as a glorification of Old Glory.
From the front page of The Durham Morning Herald, July 4, 1922
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