UVA and the History of Race: When the KKK flourished in Charlottesville

By the early 1920s, with close to 60 local chapters statewide, visible Klan activity was part of the fabric of life in Charlottesville and Albemarle.

In April and June 1924, another traveling KKK speaker, an attorney from St. Louis, lectured at the courthouse downtown. On a Friday night in May 1924, the Klan burned a large cross atop Montalto; the fire lasted two hours and was visible for miles.The next day, the KKK paraded in full regalia from Belmont down Main Street to the Midway atop the African American Vinegar Hill neighborhood, with thousands lining the sidewalks.

That evening, Charlottesville resident Thomas Lafayette Rosser Jr. noted that as the town prepared for a celebration of Confederate veterans and the “unveiling of the Lee statue…the Klu Klux had a parade” and “some students pelted them with eggs.”

The egging did not represent opposition to the KKK, as “the students put handkerchiefs over their faces and called themselves ‘Klu Klux’s’ and had a snake dance down Main Street, stopping street cars and all traffic.”

In the same month, the local KKK demonstrated in Crozet, Keswick and Scottsville. All three events included cross burnings. The local paper remarked that “the hooded order is quite active here.”

The KKK’s activities locally, supported by many whites, were explicitly about promoting and enforcing white supremacy. In late June 1924, as reported in the Daily Progress, “fifty klansmen, only about six of them masked,” set off “heavy explosions from three bombs” and then burned a large cross on a Saturday night “near the colored church just west of Mechum’s River,” which may have been Mount Salem Church near Crozet, Virginia.

Although the Klan was technically a secret organization, local membership was clearly an open secret – no masks or hoods were necessary. The paper additionally indicated that the Klan’s “action is commended by the people” of the area and “the good citizens of that part of the county.”

Many students at UVA supported the Klan’s white supremacist ideology. Law student William Saunders Gibson argued that “if there is in America one college of pure Anglo-Saxon heritage, it is the University of Virginia.”

Gibson drew on the “Anglo-Saxon conservatism” of Jefferson and Wilson as proof that: “in the University of Virginia, the Anglo-Saxon boy can find his true soil.”