Once the recruit replied “yes,” he was commanded to swear that he would never reveal anything about the organization or its activities, that he would “accept an order and go to your death, if necessary, to carry it out,” and that he would “forget your party and vote for the best man if ordered to do so by your superior officer.” A “chaplain” proclaimed: “We class as our enemies all Negros, Jews, Catholics, and anyone owing any allegiance to any foreign potentate. We fight as gorillas [sic] using any weapon that may come to our hand, preferably the ballot, and if necessary, by bearing arms.” He made explicit the group’s goals: “Our purpose is to tear down, lay waste, destroy and kill our enemies without mercy as long as one enemy remains alive or breath remains.” After the recruit swore to the oaths, he was taught the password — “elect only members to office” — and handed a 38-caliber gun cartridge to keep as a reminder of both his oath and what would befall him should he betray it.
By 1935, around five thousand white men in the town of Lima, Ohio, out of a total population of 42,267, had sworn to those oaths. The organization they joined was known as the Black Legion. It was an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, which had boomed and then largely collapsed during the 1920s. By the mid-1930s, the Black Legion grew to between a hundred thousand and a million members all over the United States — no one really knows how many — and was especially strong in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Illinois, as well as West Virginia and Indiana. In Detroit, its members reportedly included the police commissioner, dozens of police, a prosecutor, and the mayor of an adjoining city. It killed at least fifty people: some of them white, some African American, some of them union organizers and leftists. Malcolm X and his family always suspected that the Black Legion had killed his father in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1931 and left him in the street to be run over by a streetcar.
Only when brave police investigators in Detroit got a perpetrator to squeal in May 1936 did national news break about the Black Legion and its activities, and a few prosecutions finally begin. National alarm erupted, driven by daily headlines, as twelve members of the Black Legion were tried in Detroit for killing a white Works Progress Administration worker named Charles Poole. Hollywood even made two films about the Legion.