[URBAN NOTE] "The KKK Took My Baby Away"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn describes the most notable effort of the Kuy Klan Klan in Ontario, an attempt to prevent an interracial marriage in Oakville.

They saw themselves as valiant white knights of an “invisible empire,” avenging wrongs against good, solid, upstanding white Protestants. Others would say they were a sad sack collection of bigots indulging in, as American historian Frederick Allen Lewis put it, “the infantile love of hocus-pocus and mummery, that lust for secret adventure, which survives in the adult whose lot is cast in drab places.” For an interracial Oakville couple in 1930, the Hamilton branch of the Ku Klux Klan tried, but ultimately failed, to drive a wedge into their relationship.

Annie Jones turned to the Klan when she felt like she was running out of options to break up the impending nuptials of her daughter Isabel to black labourer and First World War veteran Ira Junius Johnson. When Mrs. Jones asked Oakville police to intervene, they noted their hands were tied because Isabel was legally an adult. She wanted her peers in the Salvation Army to talk sense into the couple, but Ira and Isabel refused to acknowledge house calls. Mrs. Jones later told the press she was heartbroken over the situation.

[. . .]

To the Klan, Mrs.Jones’s tale of woe sounded like a case of a Negro holding an innocent white girl captive. The couple moved into Johnson’s home on Head Street for a few days in late February 1930, until friends told him their cohabitation was causing a stir. While he stayed at home, Isabel moved into his aunt Viola Sault’s home on Kerr Street, which also housed Johnson’s parents and uncle. Despite Ms. Jones’s objections, the couple planned to marry on March 2.

When Ira and Isabel drove to New Toronto the afternoon of February 28 to get a marriage license, the Klan decided it was time to act. Around 10 p.m. that night, a caravan of 75 robed men from Hamilton drove into Oakville. They marched into downtown and planted a cross on a main street. “Maintaining order throughout,” the Globe reported, “not a word was uttered by the gowned visitors, who stood around until the last bit of timber had been consumed by the flames.”

Happy ending, fortunately.