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kkk history lesson helped convict nova scotia cross burners

beethoven

Well-known member
http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/11/15/kkk-history-lesson-helped-convict-n-s-cross-burners/

KKK history lesson helped convict N.S. cross-burners

Joe O'Connor November 15, 2010 – 11:36 am

Read more: http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/11/15/kkk-history-lesson-helped-convict-n-s-cross-burners/#ixzz15Na0YGV6

Darrell Carmichael was convinced he was right.

That Michelle Lyon, a white woman, and Shayne Howe, her black partner, were the targets of a hate crime when Justin and Nathan Rehberg planted a burning cross on their lawn in Poplar Grove, N.S., last February.

Carmichael, a Nova Scotia crown attorney, understood the magnitude of the case. Nothing on cross-burning existed on the legal books in Canada. No legal precedent had been set. And to prove a hate crime, which Carmichael ultimately did in securing convictions for the two brothers in two separate trials — one last week, the other the week before last — he had to prove that cross-burning had the potential to incite or arouse hatred, that it was done in a public space, and that it was likely to lead to a further breach of the public peace.
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Burning cross on couple's lawn still 'mind blowing' months later

So, to make his case the Crown attorney turned to a U.S. Supreme Court decision, and prepared a fascinating 15-page legal brief for the judge outlining the history of cross-burning in the South and its indelible association with the Ku Klux Klan.

The following is a summary of the Carmichael brief. You can also download and read the full brief (PDF)

The Klan was established in Tennessee in 1866. It was a fraternity that turned nasty in the aftermath of the Civil War, and began targeting newly freed blacks, progressive Southern whites and Northerners eager to make a buck in the rebuilding of the war-torn South.

Threats were uttered. Whippings were commonplace. There were murders, and terrorizing mayhem in the former Confederate states. In a bid to restore order Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, a law that effectively put the Klan out of business by the late 1870s. Alas, it would rise again in the aftermath of the 1905 publication of Thomas Dixon’s The Clansmen: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan.

Dixon’s book portrayed the Klan as the protectors of the South. They were the white knights — saving whites from blacks. Dixon’s Klansmen burned crosses to celebrate the murder of former slaves. It was a purely fictional stroke from the author. But it stuck, and became cemented to the Klan’s identity when filmmaker D. W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation in 1915.

The movie depicted cross burnings and the movie’s posters pictured a hooded Klansmen on a horse, brandishing a burning cross above his head. And, voila: in 1915 the Second Klan appeared.

Carmichael’s brief states: “From the inception of the second Klan, cross burnings have been used to communicate both threats of violence and messages of shared ideology.”

The first mass initiation ceremony for Klan members took place on Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta. Members swore an oath before a flaming 40-foot cross. Leo Frank, a prominent Jewish businessman, was lynched a month later. His murder was celebrated by the burning of another huge cross on Stone Mountain. It was “visible” in faraway Atlanta.

Cross burning became the preferred tool of intimidation for the Klan. In Miami in 1941, the Klan burned four crosses on the site of a proposed housing project, declaring to all who might hear: “we are here to keep the niggers out of your town.” Twenty years later, they burned crosses across the South in a membership drive.

“In sum,” Carmichael writes in the brief, “while burning a cross does not inevitably convey a message of intimidation, often the cross burner intends that the recipients of the message fear for their lives. And when a cross burning is used to intimidate, few if any messages are more powerful.”

A burning cross on a lawn in Nova Scotia left a mixed-race couple fearing for their lives — and the lives of their five children. A history lesson on the origins of the act, and its ties to the KKK, and the racist message of intimidation it sends, helped to prove a hate crime and added a legal precedent to the Canadian books.
 

Martin Jr.

Well-known member
I often wondered how they got the cross to burn. I read a while back that they would drill holes into the cross and stick corncobs soaked in gasoline into the holes.
 

Mike

Well-known member
Martin Jr. said:
I often wondered how they got the cross to burn. I read a while back that they would drill holes into the cross and stick corncobs soaked in gasoline into the holes.

Have seen them laying in the concrete gutter of an old dairy barn soaking in diesel for 2-3 days.

An old black guy named "Diddy" used to make them. He'd put a miter cut in each part with a bow saw and chisel it out so they would fit together like a glove. Only took one twenty penny nail to hold the two parts together. The parts were sometimes round and sometimes sawn square. They were a work of art to him.

Diddy always made them out of a "Wahoo" tree (Poplar) because the wood is light and soaked diesel very well. He'd go out the day of the rally that night, dig the hole and set it in.

The more important the rally, the taller the cross. Have seen them as high as 20 feet.

Never seen a cross burned to send a warning. They were used at rallies only as far as I knew.

All the warnings I saw were painted on the side of a building, house or barn of the recipient. There were 4 K's painted in red.

Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Most times that was all that was needed. Wife beaters, drunks, child neglectors, those who lost his whole paycheck gambling with hungry kids, etc. Black or white. Didn't matter.
 
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