At first glance, it appears cartoonish, a vaudevillian spoof, the car costumed as a horse, the rider under a sheet. But a closer look unmasks something sinister. This isn’t Casper; it’s a Klansman. And he’s clutching a shotgun.
It’s Saturday, November 17, 1923, at the University of Minnesota. There have been whisperings about the Klan’s activity on campus, Minnesota Daily articles speculating on the clandestine organization’s reach. Not unfounded, since the Ku Klux Klan was reasserting itself and had targeted Minnesota for expansion.
Earlier in 1923, the Klan had brazenly put forward Roy Miner, the chapter leader for North Star Klan No. 2, in the Minneapolis mayoral race, running on a platform to eliminate the city’s vices of gambling and prostitution. Miner, also editor of the local newspaper Voice of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, smeared the incumbent mayor, George Leach, with accusations of drunkenness and lechery. The Klan wanted Leach out because he had barred police officers from joining the secret society and had investigated its alleged activities at the university. Even though a jury convicted Miner and four other Klan members of libel, he still nearly defeated Leach.
Only about 4,000 African Americans lived in Minneapolis in 1920—just one percent of the city’s population—but the KKK managed to alarm white residents with its gospel of fear. In the cross burnings, parades, and outdoor socials that proliferated around the state, the Klan positioned itself as a political power as well as a social movement, intent on moral cleansing. Membership swelled to 30,000 statewide at its peak in the 1920s.
The photo depicts the float the Klan entered in the university’s homecoming parade in November 1923, a coming-out of its presence at the state’s flagship higher education institution. In that context, the image, far from comical, assumes a deeper level of sinisterness.
The handful of white male observers who appear in the photo seem unmoved, but I wonder how Catholic, Jewish, and African American students along the parade route reacted to the Klan’s float. Did they flinch at the sight? Squirm under the gaze of the hooded man pointing a shotgun their way?
Almost a hundred years later, it seems unthinkable that university president Joan Gabel would allow the Klan to enter a float in the homecoming parade. Yet over the past three years, white supremacist groups have steadily increased their recruitment efforts on college campuses. How long until a “White Lives Matter” float is proposed for the parade?
© John Rosengren