The Klan had been preparing for some time. The organization was not very tight-knit, and the planning was fractious. Hiram Wesley Evans—the group’s national leader, known as the Imperial Wizard—had originally discouraged the event, but he’d eventually relented to local members in D.C. He’d lived in Texas, where he’d personally overseen racial terror and violence. He’d been present in 1921 when Klansmen in Dallas abducted Alex Johnson, a Black bellhop, and flogged the man and branded his forehead with acid, after Johnson was allegedly found in a white woman’s hotel room.
But now, with the Klan reaching for a new level of national legitimacy, Evans found it useful for the group to avow a more moderate—or at least less overtly violent—platform. If the Klan was to march through the nation’s capital, it would request the proper permissions and allow police oversight. The D.C. march was supposed to be peaceful: no vulgarity, no fights, no brandings, no lynchings. The Klan wanted to appeal to American patriotism and dazzle onlookers with its showmanship—this was to be a pageant, not a pogrom.
Even so, many residents of D.C. were not so easily sold. The federal bureaucracy had become the beginnings of a multicultural haven, providing jobs that helped build a Black middle class and opening up roles to Jews and Catholics. This was a city whose architecture bore the handprints of slaves, and where cathedrals would soon dot the stunted skyscape. The city’s ethnic and religious minorities understood well that no matter how much the Klan polished its image, its swords still cut. Sales of guns in the District soared, and newspapers reported that “the negroes” were “arming and awaiting eventualities.”
Other groups appealed to President Calvin Coolidge to stop the march, but to no avail. Klan leaders in D.C. planned—perhaps hoped—for confrontation, and the city sent out its entire police force and mobilized Marines from Quantico. But on the day of the event, white reporters said they could barely find any spectators from the supposed lesser race and figured they were hiding. One Black newspaper told a different story, of Black people going about their day as normal, peering at the commotion with “amused contempt.”