CZM Rewind: Barry Black Pt. 1 & 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hey everybody, Molly Conger here. You've probably
noticed that this is a rerun. No, your podcast app
isn't glitching. There's no new guy this week. The show
hasn't been around long enough to have a huge back

(00:22):
catalog to reach into on days like this, I can't
dig through the archives and pick an episode from a
year ago that maybe you missed the first time around,
or listened to so long ago that you already forgot
how it ended. But today is the last Thursday in
the month of November, and in the United States, that's
a holiday. If it's a holiday you celebrate in whatever way,

(00:44):
I hope you're enjoying it. I'm not sure how listening
to weird little guys factors into your holiday enjoyment. That's
kind of weird. But I'm not here to tell you
what to do. Running this old episode means I got
to take a few days off this week to spend
with my family, which I'm grateful for. I know not
everybody has that luxury. Whatever you're doing today, I hope

(01:06):
you've got the day off. Rory, the brilliant mind behind
the perfect placement of all the music in the show,
and the guy with the unenviable job of editing out
all the times I burp into my microphone does not
have work today, and we should all celebrate that he
deserves a break from toiling away at the burp removal machine. Sorry, Rory.

(01:29):
So here's a weird little guy I already told you about,
and I'll be back next week with new weird guys.
In nineteen forty eight, there is a rash of cross
burnings in Suffolk. Virginia. Newspapers throughout the late forties and

(01:53):
all through the fifties assure the reader that there is
no Ku Klux Klan activity in Virginia. Ooklan groups had
more or less died out in the mid forties, and
Virginia wouldn't really see a rise in widespread organized clan
activity until the threat of integrated schools whipped aggrieved white
men back into a frenzy in the fifties. But the

(02:13):
lack of a clear leadership structure or the formal blessing
of some grand dragon or imperial wizard in some other
state didn't seem to deter the one hundred men in
robes who set fire to a twelve foot cross in
a peanut field in Nurneyville, and whether or not the
local prosecutor believed that the clan still existed. Everyone in

(02:34):
the South knows what a burning cross means, and it
was the third one in that neighborhood in recent months.
The local prosecutor had simply shrugged, it's not illegal to
burn a cross. Two thousand members of a local peanut
workers union approved a resolution demanding a response from the
governor and Attorney General, writing, we reject the hair splitting

(02:57):
thinking of some commonwealth authorities regarding what constitutes violation of
the law. The fact remains that one hundred white robed
persons burned across in the field of NH. Bradshaw. Whether
this group was the KKK or a similar organization is
not important. The tactics of intimidation and terrorism are. That

(03:19):
same year, nineteen forty eight, twin boys, Barry and Bruce
Black were born in Pennsylvania. Berry didn't burn that cross
in the peanut field. He was just a baby then
given some time to grow. Though his name would one
day become synonymous with crossburning in Virginia, he was barely

(03:40):
out of diapers when Virginia did finally outlaw cross burning
in nineteen fifty two, and he was decades into his
career as a clan leader when he lit the cross
that would take him all the way to the Supreme Court.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird. Little guys. There

(04:15):
is a story that I've been writing and rewriting for years,
digging deeper into the past while I wait for the
future to deliver some kind of ending. I have notebooks
full of scribbled transcriptions of courtroom testimony, and a hard
drive full of grainy footage, and folders upon folders labeled
with men's names, each one containing varying degrees of a

(04:38):
half baked biographical sketch of a man who lit a
torch one summer night in twenty seventeen. Lately, I'm combing
back through my notes about the events of August eleventh,
twenty seventeen, because unless something changes in the next week
or so, I'll be spending a few days in October
sitting in my favorite seat at the county courthouse. It's
the aisle seat in the second row, on the day

(05:00):
defendant's side of the bench. I don't know why that
one's my favorite, but if I can't sit there, this
is not right to date, Twelve men who march with
a torch here in Charlottesville seven years ago have been
charged under a Virginia law that makes it a felony
to burn an object with the intent to intimidate. And
I'm going to tell you about some of those men.

(05:21):
I am there is some real weird little guy behavior
going on in a lot of their backstories, but not today.
As always, we have to start before the beginning. In
the year and a half since those charges were first filed,
I've written the case citation Commonwealth v. Black in my

(05:42):
little notebook probably one hundred times. Commonwealth v. Black was
the Supreme Court case that held that the original version
of Virginia's crossburning law was unconstitutional. The law was rewritten
in response to this challenge, and the current version of
the statute is what's being used to prosecute the torch marchers.
So commonwealthy Black, that's all I really needed to know.

(06:06):
Some clansmen burned across and he challenged the law, and
he won, and we changed the law. That's good enough
to get by, But how many times can you write
a man's name without bothering to find out who he was?
So I set out to get a little more context
on the man who brought the case. But what I

(06:28):
found wasn't just some boring bit of backstory about constitutional
law and legislative history. I mean, we're definitely going to
do some of that, but what I found was a
complicated story of small town bigotry and the people who
stand up to it. Barry Black was the leader of
a clan group in Pennsylvania whose hatred touched the lives

(06:48):
of people whose stories are worth knowing. This episode is
just the first half of very black story, and we
won't even get to his precedent setting appeal until next week.
This week gets just a strange little stroll through some
of the side characters in the life of a man
who donned a pointy hood to infringe on the civil
rights of everyone around him, but just kept going to

(07:10):
court to fight for his own. So before we can
talk about a lit tiki torch on a college campus,
we have to talk about a fiery cross on a hillside.
We have to talk about Barry Black, the clansman who
fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court
and won. Barry Elton Black and his twin brother, Bruce,

(07:33):
were born two months before their mother's seventeenth birthday. Their
twenty three year old father, also named Bruce, didn't stick around.
When the boys were two, the nineteen fifty census shows
they were living with their mother at her parents' home,
and their father was living a few miles down the
road as a lodger in an elderly divorcees boarding house.

(07:55):
Barry's obituary says he was a Vietnam veteran, that he
was in the Navy. That's the only place I found
that information. Decades of newspaper articles about his clan hijinks
never mention it. I will absolutely concede that it is
entirely possible that he joined the Navy right out of
high school and maybe was on one of the earliest

(08:15):
deployments of the war. He was eighteen in nineteen sixty six,
so it's possible, But by nineteen sixty eight he was
too busy going to jail to go to war. In
the summer of nineteen sixty eight, Barry and his brother
were caught stripping parts of a car in a salvage yard.
Two years later, Barry was back in jail again. Reports

(08:38):
Arry and lack specificity as to exactly why he was
in jail in nineteen seventy. One report at the time
says it was a morals charge. Another says it was
a paternity case. A list of his arrests that appeared
in an article decades later says he was awaiting trial
in nineteen seventy on charges of bastardery and fornication. Sounds

(09:01):
like he might have just been guilty of having a
good time, but he got himself into some extra trouble
by escaping from the jail. Barry and two other inmates
climbed a pipe, crawled through an air vent, got into
the adjoining courthouse, and escaped by jumping out an open
window in the judge's chambers, and no one even noticed

(09:23):
the men were missing until Barry's brother called the sheriff
to say he'd gotten a call from Barry earlier that
afternoon and he wanted to know if his brother had
posted bond The sheriff assured Bruce that no, Barry hasn't
bonded out and he's still in a cell. But he
was not. Barry was only free for about six hours

(09:45):
after this daring jail break. The other two men hid
out in barns for over a week. Before being recaptured,
but a deputy found Barry limping around town later that
same evening. He'd broken bones in both of his feet
jumping out of the judge's window. A judge ordered him
to pay one hundred dollars fine and the medical costs
in his paternity case, and he got another year for

(10:08):
the escape. It's not clear what the paternity case entailed,
and if there is a secret child out there of
Berry Black, I couldn't find any record of it. In
nineteen seventy one, he went back to jail for a
burglary of an auto parts store, and between stints and jail,
he married his wife, Judy in nineteen seventy four, and
they had their first of six children in nineteen seventy five.

(10:32):
And then he went back to jail in nineteen seventy
six for stealing a gun from his brother. He escaped again,
this time just walking right out the front door of
the psychiatric hospital the jail had sent him to for observation.
But he was out again by nineteen seventy seven, when
he was arrested for trying to buy a car with
a check from a closed bank account. This time he

(10:53):
just caught probation, and he was given probation again when
he was convicted in nineteen eighty six for illegally possessing
a revolver. And that's all there really was to know
about Barry Black until the late eighties. He had a
couple of kids, his wife worked as a clerk, he
drove a truck, and after going to jail half a
dozen times in his twenties, he mostly stayed out of

(11:15):
trouble except for that gun charge in nineteen eighty six,
But by nineteen eighty nine he's a legal in his
local clan. Now, I don't want to sound like I'm
being dismissive of the Ku Klux Klan as a bunch
of silly guys in costumes who do live action role
playing and who would have been better off doing something

(11:37):
like joining the Society for Creative Anachronism or getting into
dungeons and Dragons. I don't know. I'm in no way
trying to minimize the decades and decades of vicious racial terror,
the violence, the lynchings, the campaigns of terror waged in
towns across the country for over a century. The clan
was very real, it was very dangerous. People died, but

(12:02):
oh my god, do they make it hard to take
them seriously with their special clan vocabulary a klegal that's
spelled like beagle, but with a KL upfront. It's an
official clan office that's basically just the local recruiter. So
in nineteen eighty nine, Barry was responsible for recruiting new

(12:24):
members to his local clan chapter. And at this point
he's still a member of the Invisible Empire of the
Ku Klux Klan. So the Invisible Empire is the overarching
national organization with an Imperial Wizard overseeing it. The Empire
is subdivided into realms by state, and each realm has
a Grand Dragon, and within each realm there are provinces.

(12:47):
Each one is made up of, however many counties the
Grand Dragon sees fit to assign the Grand Titan who
oversees them. The clan had two main eras, so first
in the reconstruction era right after the Civil War, and
then it sort of died out, and then it had
a second era when it was revived in nineteen fifteen.
And the second era of the clan kept a lot

(13:08):
of the goofy nineteenth century made up words, but it
seems like they lost some of the finer subdivisions. It
used to be that the Grand Titan could appoint a
Grand Giant, who could in turn appoint henchmen called goblins.
I don't think they kept the goblins the second time around,
which just seems like a huge loss, you know. But anyway,

(13:31):
so by nineteen ninety Barry is the Grand Titan of
Western Pennsylvania. So Pennsylvania has a Grand Dragon, and the
Grand Dragon appoints the Grand Titans and Burries the Grand Titan.
A nineteen ninety one report on clan activity in the
United States estimates nationwide membership at about four to five
thousand clansmen, with an estimated three hundred members in Pennsylvania,

(13:56):
and with most of that activity being in the western
half of the state in Barry's province. Under Barry's leadership,
the clan was growing again in western Pennsylvania, and he
was very active, holding multiple marches in little towns all
over the state every year, and nobody wanted it. Nobody's

(14:17):
excited to see the clan. In January of nineteen ninety one,
they marched in Westchester, Pennsylvania to protest Martin Luther King
Junior Day in September of nineteen ninety one, Barry held
a march in his own hometown of Carmichaels, Pennsylvania. The
town fought tooth and nailed to prevent it, but he
was determined to put on a show and even tried

(14:39):
to rope the ACLU into forcing the town to give
him a permit. Ultimately, the tiny town resigned themselves to
this clan invasion, and they didn't make Berry take them
to court. The town closed down every shop and restaurant
that day out of protest, and residents lined the streets
to watch a few dozen men walk about half a
mile with Barry leading them a chance of what do

(15:01):
we want white power? When do we want it now? Scoofy.
The Sener Daily Times ran a story the next day
with the headline forty Clan members stage march in depressed town.
Even after reading the article, it's not actually clear whether

(15:22):
the paper meant the town was depressed like economically. It
kind of just sounds like the town was just depressed
at having to look at the clan. Every resident quoted
in the paper sounded very unimpressed. When man told the paper,
I think they are a joke, and added Hitler tried

(15:43):
this once and it didn't work, did it. Barry told
the paper that his marches weren't a racial thing, but
that it was about bringing white people together to fight
for their civil rights and against what he called the
deterioration of our race. He just wanted to raise awareness
about important issues, like how the banking system is controlled

(16:05):
by a Jewish conspiracy, and how the government is giving
away white men's rights to black people and Asians. I
don't know what that means, giving them away, like there's
only a set number of them. Two months later, in
November of nineteen ninety one, Very Black was elected to
the office of constable in Johnstown, Pennsylvania's twenty first ward.

(16:29):
The office of constable is kind of a holdover from
the olden days. It's kind of a cop, but not really.
Their function varies from state to state, with powers ranging
from largely ceremonial to full policing authority. In Rhode Island,
constables aren't allowed to carry guns. In Vermont, one of

(16:50):
the main roles of the constable is the destruction of
dangerous dogs. So yes, there are guys in Vermont running
for the office of dog murderer and in Pennsylvania. The
office has undergone some reform in the last few decades,
but in the nineties the constable's duties were mainly prisoner
transportation and process service. But it's an elected office, and

(17:14):
the office he won was for constable in a single
ward of a borough of a county, and he was
able to secure a victory without even really running. He
won with just a few dozen write in votes because
no one was running. I looked up some recent voter
turnout stats for Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and Johnstown's twenty first

(17:34):
ward had four hundred and four registered voters in twenty
twenty three, and only one hundred and seven of them
voted in the November twenty twenty three election. So it's
not hard to imagine someone mounting a successful write in
campaign by buying a few rounds at the bar. But
it wasn't meant to be. There's nothing I can find
in any local news from that time that indicates there

(17:56):
was any kind of specific issue. Constable of the twenty
first ward of the Borough of a County probably doesn't
have enough to do to really do much damage, But
a few months in to Barry's six year term as Constable.
Cambria County District Attorney Timothy Creeney noticed that they had
a clansman serving papers for the court. How much he

(18:19):
could really do about that, though it's not against the
rules to be in the clan, but Barry did have
a pretty long rap sheet. He'd been arrested for burglary,
he'd escaped from jail twice, and he had a conviction
for illegal possession of a firearm. So Creaney filed a
petition to have Barry removed from office on the grounds

(18:39):
that Pennsylvania doesn't allow people convicted of what are called
infamous crimes to hold positions of public trust. The judge agreed,
and Barry was ordered by the court to cease and
desist his duties of constable in April of nineteen ninety two,
just a few months after taking office. When he filed
his appeal a month later, he walked the papers into

(19:02):
the courthouse himself, dressed in a white robe, a pointy
white cap, a green cape, and the kind of sunglasses
my grandmother wore when I was a kid. A dozen
robed klansmen waited for him outside the courthouse, and he
entered the court room with his personal bodyguard, a man
in fatigues, and a black beret. He was no longer

(19:23):
just a legal or a Grand Titan. Barry was calling
himself the Grand Dragon. Now. Over the next few months,
Barry staged several protests of what he called this violation
of his civil rights, and he appealed it all the
way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In October of nineteen
ninety four. That court upheld the decision. They agreed that

(19:45):
his criminal history made him ineligible for the office of constable.
That same month, several local papers quoted Barry on his
plans to hold a clan rally in opposition to a
Halloween parade. He didn't give the quotes to the paper himself,
but they were his words and in his voice. See,
in the pre internet days, you couldn't have a website, right,

(20:08):
so groups like the Klan would distribute flyers with a
phone number on them, and nobody answers that phone when
you call, but you get a pre recorded message with
information about becoming a member, upcoming events, announcements, or just
racist propaganda. And the Dial of Clan hotline that month
offered a recorded statement from Barry Black stating that for

(20:28):
security reasons. The time and exact location will be announced
with twelve hours notice, saying we have gone to modern technology,
we use fax machines, etc. But that there would be
an event that month in protest of a York Pennsylvania
area Halloween celebration because as a Christian organization, the Klan
felt that Halloween was Satanic. Just imagine for a second

(20:54):
it's nineteen ninety four and you get a fax from
your local clig Rap that the Nighthawks or needed at
the satanic Halloween parade to enforce white Christian morals. I mean,
it's baffling, baffling. Klig Grap is the title for the
clan secretary, and the Nighthawks are the security cards. So

(21:16):
I guess the klik Grap is going to fax the Nighthawks.
A few days later, after the local paper ran a
story about a planned counter demonstration, Barry told the paper
that he had no such plans and he never said
anything like that. He was not planning to protest the
Halloween parade. He said that was just a rumor started

(21:36):
by fellow clansman Roy Frankhauser, the leader of a splinter
group called the White Unity Party. Barry explained to the
reporter that if Frankhauser wanted the White Unity Party to
be allowed to join Barry's new clan organization, the Keystone
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, then Frankhauser would need
to accept that he didn't have Barry's permission to be
doing things like holding a press conference about Halloween parades

(22:00):
and Roy Frankhauser is, I think, another candidate for his
own episode. He'd been acquitted earlier that year for stabbing
a man with a pocket knife at a clan conference,
and at one point claimed to be a government informant,
although agents from the FBI and the ATF denied that
on various occasions, sometimes under oath, but I'm not sold.

(22:22):
He was convicted of obstruction of justice while working for
Lyndon LaRouche in the nineteen eighties, got convicted of obstruction
again in a case involving desecration of synagogues in Massachusetts
in the nineties, and in twenty twenty one, someone made
an uncited edit to his Wikipedia page claiming that his
hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania, celebrated his death by holding a parade.

(22:44):
I'll have to dig around on that. I hope it's true,
but I have a feeling it's not. But in the
nineties Roy Frank Kauser was beefing with Barry And it's
hard to say with any kind of certainty, but I
wonder if it was frank Kauser who met with the
f in nineteen ninety four. Barry's FBI file has a
few heavily redacted pages about an aspiring clan informant who

(23:07):
reported that he was present at a clan meeting when
Barry Black. Since the Klan had a plan to deal
harshly with traitors, the informant told the FBI that Barry
Black had automatic weapons in hand. Grades and to their credit,
the FBI seems to have taken the tip pretty seriously,
and in the summer of nineteen ninety four, they opened
a domestic terrorism investigation into Barry Black. After only a week,

(23:32):
though the Pittsburgh Field Office downgraded and then ultimately closed
the investigation, citing the tipster's quote inability to factually corroborate
any of his allegations to make them believable. So Barry

(23:59):
is keeping pretty busy through the nineties with his new
clan group. He's got barades to lead and picnics to
attend and he's holding regular cross burnings, and by the
late nineties, these cross burnings are happening across the street
from the Casanova Lounge, which was Somerset County, Pennsylvania's only
gay bar. In its brief four years in operation, the

(24:21):
bar was the site of relentless protests from neighbors, a
self proclaimed Anabaptist bishop and the clan, as well as
a target for shotgun blasts and Molotov cocktails. Patricia and
Merrick Kramer, a straight couple in their fifties with grown children,
bought an old tavern on Route nine eighty five in

(24:42):
nineteen ninety five. They ran at as a restaurant for
two years before deciding in January of nineteen ninety seven
to start catering to gay clientele. It was the only
such establishment for Miles and Miles. Patricia Pat to her friends,
and I'd like to be Pat's friend said. They had

(25:03):
customers drive in from as far as Maryland and West
Virginia for their tea dances, a kind of gay singles
event whose name is a legacy of an era when
it was illegal to sell alcohol to known homosexuals. In
nineteen ninety seven, Pat Kragmer told a reporter from The
Washington Blade, we do nothing improper here. We have dancing,

(25:23):
We served dinner from four to six p m. I
do all the cooking. The DC based LGBT newspaper had
reached out to the Kramers after the first time a
shotgun was fired through the front door, injuring three patrons,
and that's when street preacher Ron McCrae started showing up.
If you're old enough to have been politically aware in

(25:45):
the early Obama years, this may not be the first
time you've heard of Ron McCray. In two thousand and eight,
and now disbarred attorney named Philip Burg filed a lawsuit
alleging that Barack Obama could not legally become the president
because he had been born in Kenya. A judge threw
it out, calling it frivolous and not worthy of discussion,
which it was, but that's never stopped a conspiracy theorist.

(26:10):
In December of two thousand and eight, Berg filed a
motion for an emergency injunction to stop the certification of
the election. In his ninety six page filing, Ron McCrae's
name appears over one hundred times so if you have
any familiarity at all with the birthrism conspiracy, you've probably
seen some vaguely sourced false claim that Obama's Kenyan grandmother,

(26:35):
a woman named Sarah, who was his father's stepmother, was
there in the room when he was born in Mombasa.
It's not true. To be clear, Barack Obama was not
born in Mombasa, but the claim originated from a selectively
edited recording of a phone call Ron McCrae had with
her via a translator in October two thousand and eight,

(26:58):
and McCrae was an enthusiastic participant in this conspiracy, providing
a sworn affidavit about the phone call for Berg's lawsuit.
The Supreme Court denied Berg's petition without comment, but mccray's
hoax was now part of this official record, and conspiracy
theorists can easily brush off silly complications, like the fact
that the lawsuit was dismissed as being utterly without merit.

(27:22):
Once a lie is born, it can become unkillable. The
White House plumber himself, G. Gordon Liddy, repeated that same
lie a year later on an episode of Hardball with
Chris Matthews. Conveniently blurring the facts by claiming that the
sworn statement was from Sarah Obama herself rather than from McCrae,
who was merely repeating what he claimed she said to him.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
The preponderance of the evidence is as follows. You've got
a deposition, which is a sworn statement from the step
grandmother who says I was present and saw him born
in Mombasa, CanYa.

Speaker 1 (28:05):
Before he gave birth to one of Birthaism's most stubborn lies.
Ronnie Marcus McCrae grew up in Texas and claims to
have been a police officer before turning to street preaching
in his thirties, but I can't find any particular evidence
beyond his own claims that he was ever a cop.
By the late nineteen eighties, he was in western Pennsylvania
preaching the Word of God to unwilling congregants on street corners.

(28:29):
He was arrested a handful of times for violating noise
ordinances or for disorderly conduct, and when he sued the
authorities in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, nineteen ninety one for violating his rights,
they paid him seventy five hundred dollars to settle and
that seems to have been the origin of McCrae's street
preacher's fellowship. It was a fairly litigious collective of amateur

(28:51):
street preachers who would screen Bible verses on street corners
until the police would intervene, and then they would sue.
And that seems like what he was trying trying to
do to Patricia Kramer and her customers outside Casanova almost
every weekend for four years. Ron McCray was the loudest
and most persistent opponent to the gay bar, but he

(29:13):
was far from the only one. Don and Lisa Penrod
lived less than a mile away on a plot of
land they'd inherited from Don's family. At a town meeting
shortly after the bar opened, the Penrods were among residents
complaining about lewd and filthy literature found in the neighborhood.
Pat Kramer tried to explain that no, those are flyers

(29:34):
advertising a glowstick party, saying it's nothing provocative. We don't
run a dirty bar. After someone fired a shotgun through
the door of the crowded bar one night in March
of nineteen ninety seven, Don Penrod told the local paper
that actually he'd forgotten to mention this before, But a
few days before that happened. Actually, something bad happened to

(29:57):
him too. Someone had spray painted gay haters you will
all Die Love pat on his garage. The paper doesn't
include a photo of this vandalism, or even mention any
claim that a photo might exist. In separate town meetings
that spring, Don Penrod claimed that he found hardcore gay

(30:18):
pornography on his front lawn, and his wife, Lisa Penrod,
claimed that their child found an abandoned sex toy while
playing outside. In both instances, the Penrods demand to know
how they're supposed to explain this perversion to a child.
I can find no evidence of anyone, aside from the
Penrods themselves, who ever made any claim to have seen

(30:40):
either of these things. In April, the Penrods and their neighbors,
who were disgusted at the idea of even having to
drive on a road that shared a name with a
den of sin, successfully petitioned to have the town rename
Cosunova Road to Hemlock Road. In May of nineteen ninety seven,
the Penrod invited the clan over Barry Black's Keystone Knights

(31:06):
used the Penrod's farm as a staging area to park
down their robes and then march down the street to
the bar. They spent an afternoon hollering at the empty establishment,
it's a bar, nobody's there in the middle of the afternoon,
and then they retired to the Penronz property for a
cross burning. Patrons at the bar would have been able
to see the glow from the flames when they pulled

(31:28):
into the parking lot that Saturday night. Ron McCrae kept
up his antics outside Casanova, but Barry had bigger things
going on. Towards the end of nineteen ninety seven, he
got elected constable again, just as he had in nineteen
ninety one. He managed to secure a victory in Johnstown's
twenty first ward on write in votes alone. This time

(31:51):
though he got one. He got one vote. Nobody was running,
and I guess nobody else vote, and so he won
with one. And I can't find any reporting on whether
or not he was ever asked outright if that one
vote was his own, But I think it's a safe bet.

(32:15):
I have to wonder if it was a joke. I mean,
was he having a private joke with himself or was
a friend joking about how he had done it last time.
Did he really think it would work a second time?
And if he did do this himself, why didn't he
ask anyone else to do it with him? Was he
surprised when he found out he was the constable again?

(32:36):
There's really no way to know. So he's back in
the saddle as constable. And it seems like nobody noticed.
It must not be a very demanding job if no
one noticed that there were no candidates at all for
the office, and no one said a word when a
guy who'd been ordered by the state Supreme Court to
vacate the position just unilaterally voted himself back in. But

(33:02):
there it was. And in nineteen ninety eight, Casanova is
entering its second year as Somerset County's only gay bar,
and things are getting worse. There was another crossburning across
the street. They got bomb threats. Ron McCrae vowed to
be out there every Friday and Saturday night until the
bar was forced to shut down. The Kramers were getting

(33:25):
death threats in the mail. The front windows were smashed
out with huge rocks thrown from a passing car, but
the Cramers weren't going to lie down and take it.
Speaking later to Professor Todd Hibel for his essay blame
it on the Casanova, good Scenery and sodomy in rural
southwestern Pennsylvania, pat said, McCray made a pledge to these

(33:47):
neighbors that he would have us closed in a week.
Well that never happened. Never happened because McCrae didn't know
who I was, and the Cramers weren't alone. Some neighbors
were on their side, even forming a group called Network
of Neighbors United against Hate Crimes. And I know you're
probably trying to spell that out in your mind to

(34:08):
see if that makes some kind of initialism. It doesn't.
It's n NUA HC. It doesn't spell anything. And while
the local gay community in Somerset County was pretty small,
the gay community in cities like Pittsburgh and DC were
rooting for them. A group of gay men from Pittsburgh
rented a bus to come out to Somerset County for
a theme night. They called it burn in Hell Night,

(34:31):
poking fun at the screaming preacher in the parking lot
who was always telling them that's where they were heading.
In March of nineteen ninety eight, a DC based group
called the Lesbian Avengers drove three hours to show their
support for Casanova. Washington City Paper reporter Amanda Ripley joined
them for the trip. The Avengers danced, drank, mingled, and

(34:53):
performed some comedic skits for patrons at the bar. Pat Kramer,
that straight married woman in her fifties ran the bar,
said I thought that the girls were just wonderful. We
loved them, and added even some heterosexuals offered them to
stay in their homes in the future. And Pat beamed
as she told these girls from out of town that

(35:15):
a lot of her bar's patrons just call her mother.
I've always wanted a large family, she explained. Pat's own
daughter had died a few years earlier after contracting HIV
from a blood transfusion, and now here she is with
this gay bar full of chosen family. I wonder it

(35:37):
doesn't say, but I wonder if it was at her
daughter's bedside that she first came to see the importance
of queer community. Her daughter had been infected by a
blood transfusion, but I have to imagine Pat Kramer met
patients and caregivers and grieving partners there on the Aids ward,
and she got a much more intimate look at who

(35:58):
gay people really were than those straight suburban women were
getting in nineteen ninety. Before they left DC, on the
day of their visit to Somerset County, the Lesbian Avengers
all agreed on the rules of engagement. They were headed
up there to support Casanova, and things are different out
in the country. They didn't want to make things worse

(36:19):
for the gay people who lived there, and they really
didn't want to end up in the county jail. So
the rules were no cussing, no taking off your top.
On the drive up, their lawyer, Kathy reminded them again
to quote resist the urge to strip down an arm wrestle.
This isn't DC. So they were on their best behavior

(36:43):
when they got there. They ignored Ron McCrae and the
other protesters when they swarmed the women in the parking lot,
calling them trash and wicked and failures as women, and
telling them they would never find husbands and that they
would burn in hell. I'm not sure one of those
things really bothered. But they just walked into the bar

(37:03):
and they had a great time. Ripley's article describes mccray's
teenage sons standing silently in the parking lot next to
his father, holding a sign that read Casanova customers, child molesters, strippers, whores,
cross dressers, prostitutes, sodomites, five drunkards, and a handful of wackos.

(37:23):
I'm not sure which of mccray's sons that would have been,
but I don't think it was the one who would
later get arrested for inappropriate sexual contact with a lot
of underage girls. And when the Avengers walked out into
the parking lot at little after one am, McCray was
still there, just as they did every weekend. The protesters

(37:44):
were there in the parking lot, and they surrounded patrons
trying to leave the bar. They screamed and threatened and
blocked them from getting to their van. One protester got
right in the face of Beth Armitage, a member of
the Lesbian Avengers, and said, you never know, this night
might be her last. But they were prepared for this.

(38:04):
The Lesbian Avengers were no strangers to confrontation. In fact,
they reveled in it. They were only on their best
behavior that night for everyone else's sake. They kept their
heads down and refused to engage on their way into
the bar earlier that evening, But now they couldn't resist.
They promised they weren't going to make a scene, they
weren't going to engage, But it was cold and late,

(38:28):
and these men screaming slurs at them were keeping them
from the warmth of their van. So they formed a
semicircle and began to chant the Lesbian Avengers are fire eaters.

(38:58):
In September of nineteen ninety two, Hattie May Cohens, a
black lesbian, and her roommate Brian Mock, a white gay
man with an intellectual disability, were burned alive in their
home in Oregon after Neo Nazi's skinheads through Molotov cocktails
through the windows of her apartment. A month later, at
a vigil for Cohens and Mock in New York, the

(39:19):
Lesbian Avengers ate fire for the first time. The fire
will not consume us. We take it and make it
our own. Their lawyer had pleaded with him on the
drive up not to do this tonight. Not here they
could get charged with public disturbance, and this wasn't a
friendly place to have to fight a charge. But here

(39:43):
they were in the snow being told that they would burn,
so Ron McCrae got to see those lesbians eat the fire.
He was always threatening people with the Ku Klux claned
with their burning crosses, and the skinheads with their Molotov cocktails,
and the street preach with their threats of the fires
of hell. They're always surprised when a bitch burns back.

(40:20):
Barry's clan group had staged protests directly outside Casanova in
May of nineteen ninety seven, but in July of nineteen
ninety eight, he assured the Kramers that the clan's presence
in the area had nothing to do with the bar,
and nothing to do with the fact that the bar's owner,
Pat Kramer, had just returned from a trip to Washington,
d c. Where she had testified in front of the
Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing on hate crimes legislation. No,

(40:45):
it had nothing to do with that. The clan was
just in the neighborhood for an entirely unrelated cross burning.
Don and Lisa Penrod, that couple who had been active
in the protest against the bar's presence in the town,
owned a little bit of land across the street and
they invited the Klan to have a picnic on their property.
Their farm had been the site of previous clan rallies

(41:05):
and cross burnings, and on this July afternoon, they'd be
hosting the clan's White Pride Day picnic. The picnic did
not go well. I'll go ahead and spoil it. One
local paper ran the headline KKK picnic host arrested. The
two day affair was announced two weeks ahead of the event.

(41:27):
Local residents who opposed the Klan held their own competing picnic,
calling it the Unity Picnic at the Laurel Trinity Lutheran
Church a few miles away. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported
that Ron McCray himself stopped by the Unity picnic. He'd
sent the church a letter denouncing their pastor of the
week before and accusing members of the congregation of a
variety of sexual sins. But even Ron McCrae hated the clan.

(41:53):
I'm not totally sure why he hated the clan, to
be honest. I mean, his own religious beliefs include the
idea that sex outside your own race is within the
Biblical definition of the sin of fornication, so it's not
like he's not racist, but nevertheless, he apparently enjoyed the picnic.

(42:14):
About one hundred and fifty people attended, and the local
paper reported that dinner was served potluck style and speeches
were given by various state and local civil rights organizations.
Over at the clan picnic, the police were keeping an
eye on the Penrod farm, specifically on Barry Black. Barry
would later explain to a reporter that the reason his

(42:36):
family friendly picnic was crawling with burly tattooed clansmen with
pump action riot shotguns is that they were worried that
the people from the gay bar would come bother them
and just a little more clan vocabulary. Those security guards
are the Nighthawks. And while these armed guards were under

(42:57):
strict orders to prevent media or cameras of any kind
really from entering the property, Barry invited Dennis Roddy, a
reporter from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, into the picnic for
a little tour, and Barry was just so happy to
show off his event to this reporter from the big city,
and he made sure to put it on the record
that there was absolutely no reason to worry about any

(43:20):
lawlessness going on to the picnic. Not only did the
Klan count many cops from a variety of counties among
their membership, Barry himself was in law enforcement. Nobody seemed
to have noticed up until this point that Barry was
the constable again. But here he is bragging about it
to a reporter, and that's going to bite him in

(43:41):
the ass. Later sometime that afternoon, just as it was
about time to start setting up the cross that they
were going to burn when the sun went down, the
Nighthawks saw something. State Police had made no secret of
the fact that they were increasing their presence in the
area that day, just as a precaution. They didn't want
any chance of these competing picnics and countering one another.

(44:04):
But in addition to their visible presence in the area,
the state police had gotten permission from the Penrod's next
door neighbor to be on their property, and from that
neighboring property, an undercover state trooper was perched in a
tree with a telephoto lens. They were acting on a
tip that Barry was once again illegally in possession of

(44:25):
a firearm, and they wanted to see if they could
catch a glimpse of him. Handling a gun. It doesn't
sound like they ever did catch Barry holding a gun,
but almost everyone else was armed to the absolute teeth,
so when the nighthawks caught a glimpse of a guy
hiding in the tree line at the edge of the property,
they bolted for him. State Trooper George Emmig would later

(44:49):
testify that he was sitting up in that tree on
the neighbor's property when about ten picnic attendees rushed over
to the fence line. He identified himself to the armed
men as a state trooper, and he explained that he
had the neighbor's permission to be on their property. He
said it was at that point that Don Penrod pointed
the rifle at him and said, you're dead. State Police

(45:12):
Sergeant George Bivins arrived on the scene almost immediately. He'd
seen the group moving towards Emig's position, and he testified
that he'd heard Emig trying to explain to the men
that he was a police officer, and then Bivins heard
Ronald Bendix, one of the nighthawks, reply that he didn't
care and they were going to kill him anyway. It

(45:36):
was at this point that Bivins drew his own weapon
and the klansmen scattered. And now now the state police
had a reason to enter the Penrod property before they
were keeping it at the fence line, but now they're
giving chase. Michael Abraham was arrested inside the picnic tent.
Ronald Bendis was found hiding under a blanket, and Adam

(45:59):
Woyre was also taken into custody, but it doesn't say
where he was hiding. Don Penrod was nowhere to be
found that afternoon, but he was arrested a week later
when the police searched his home. The police confiscated several shotguns,
a pistol, a ceremonial clan sword, a Tommy gun, and
a bulletproof vest. But the picnic wasn't canceled. Three members

(46:23):
had been carted off to jail, but the show must
go on, and that cross wasn't going to burn itself.
A few months later, Barry's lawyer was in court arguing
for the return of those seized items. I'm not quite
sure what the legal strategy is here, Like, I don't
know if you have legal standing as the guest at

(46:44):
a picnic to challenge the search and seizure of someone
else's property, and the sword was definitely Barry's, but he
absolutely was not claiming ownership of the submachine gun. But
the judge did order the police to return Barry's Sarah
Ammonial Clan sword, but they kept the guns. It took

(47:05):
a year to sort out, but in the end Don
Penrod got six months for terroristic threats, followed by two
years of supervision for the assault. Stephen Bedecks got fourteen
months for the assault and terroristic threats, Michael Abraham got
nine months for simple assault, and Adam Moyer was acquitted
on all accounts. One article notes that Bedecks got more

(47:26):
time than the others because at the time of the
incident he was out on parole for a conviction in
a case related to his role in a cocaine trafficking
ring that would bring drugs down from New York City
and distribute them in the Lehigh Valley area. In twenty twelve,
he was the president of his local chapter of the
Pagan's Motorcycle Club when he was federally indicted for cocaine

(47:48):
trafficking again. He spent five years in prison and died
shortly after his release, but back to Barry. After those
three Nighthawks were arrested, Don Penrod used his own property
as collateral to bail out Abraham and Moyer. Bedex was
held without bond due to the prole violation, and when

(48:10):
Penrod himself was arrested a few days after the picnic,
Barry walked into the jail with a ten thousand dollars
cashier's check in hand to bail him out. That same week,
Barry filed a criminal and civil complaint against state police
Sergeant Bivens, the trooper who drew his gun on the
klansmen who were pointing their guns at another state trooper,

(48:32):
and the county prosecutor filed a petition to have Barry
removed from the office of constable. It's a new prosecutor now,
that district attorney from the first time around as a
judge at this point, but the game is the same.
Barry can't be the constable because he's been convicted of
too many crimes. Complaining about the police intrusion on his picnic,
Barry told the local newspaper, the state police are like

(48:55):
the Gestapo. We are nice white people having a family picnic.
Where's our first Amendment? Rights to our beliefs, and Barry's
relationship to the First Amendment is something we'll explore in
greater detail next week, because that's where I'm gonna leave
it today. We'll pick up next time with Barry's second
court battle to keep his job as Cambria County Constable,

(49:16):
and then follow him to Virginia where he'll light the
cross that takes him all the way to the Supreme Court.
Until then, I don't know, try to love your neighbors
like Pat Kramer did, and don't bring a Tommy gun
to a family picnic. Welcome back to the second half

(49:56):
of the story of Barry Black, the Pennsylvania clansman. Barry
Black's main claim to fame as being the black in
Commonwealth of Virginia v. Black, the two thousand and three
Supreme Court case that found Virginia's crossburning statute unconstitutionally overbroad.
I set out to learn a little more about that
landmark decision and the life of the man who won it,

(50:18):
because it comes up often in some cases going on now,
the prosecutions of the torch bearing white supremacist who came
to Charlottesville in twenty seventeen, and I found a lot
more than I bargained for. I don't know what I expected,
but last week's story of a small town war and
a rural gay bar complete with side characters like a

(50:38):
notorious federal informant who worked for Lynton LaRouche and a
street preacher who was a central figure in the Obama
Birtherism conspiracy, definitely surprised me. This week, though, we'll actually
get to Barry's infamous cross burning and the Black acl
lawyer who fought for the clansmen's rights that victory.

Speaker 3 (50:59):
What worldwide? I said, case present, I said case law,
and we proved that the law does work. Yet I
can light across anywhere in the United States of America
that I want to light it.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
Barry Black fought the law and he won. But a
new law was born from the ashes of the one
Barry burned. I'm Molly Conger, this is weird, little guys.

(51:46):
When we left off last week, Barry Black and his
Keystone Knights had gotten into a little hot water at
their white bride picnic. In July of nineteen ninety eight,
Barry held a clan picnic on a farm owned by
Don and Lisa Penrod in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, when Berry
held a clan rally at Kasanova Lounge, the county's only
gay bar the year prior. The Penrod's farm was the

(52:07):
pre rally staging area and the site of the post
rally cross burning later that evening. They weren't just concerned
neighbors whose opposition to the gay bar made them unlikely
allies with the clan. They were members. Lisa Penrod in
fact commanded the women's Auxiliary Unit and served as the
Imperial Secretary of the Invisible Empire International Keystone Knights of

(52:28):
the Ku Klux Klan under Berry's leadership, and on July
twenty fifth, nineteen ninety eight, Don and Lisa Penrod were
two of the ten clan members standing at the fence
line on the Penrod farm demanding answers from a man
in their neighbour's tree. That man turned out to be
a state trooper, and Don Penrod was one of four
attendees at the clan picnic who was arrested for threatening

(52:49):
the trooper at gunpoint. Barry himself posted Don Penrod's ten
thousand dollars bond the week after the picnic. Cambria County
district attorney David Tulowitski, filed a petition with the court
to have Berry Black removed from the office of Constable,
an elected law enforcement position he'd won by a single
rite in vote the year prior. History was repeating itself.

(53:13):
Barry was elected constable of Johnstown's twenty first ward in
nineteen ninety one and was removed from office just a
few months later when the county prosecutor filed a petition
to have him removed on the grounds that his criminal
record made him ineligible to hold a position of public trust.
A judge agreed. Barry appealed that decision and fought it
all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, holding clan

(53:34):
rallies at court houses and in small towns throughout the
year and a half long appeals process. The state's highest
court told Barry in nineteen ninety three that he wasn't
allowed to be the constable and nothing in the law
had changed in the five years since. But here he
was fighting the same fight all over again. This time around,
he argued that the petition to remove him from office

(53:55):
was retaliation, pure and simple. The county was punishing him
for his clan ratal and for the complaint he'd filed
against the state troopers who arrested his friends at the picnic.
In mid August of nineteen ninety eight, the issue of
whether the clansmen could continue operating as constable was with
the courts. There was no injunction preventing him from acting
as a law enforcement official, but the county had apparently

(54:17):
instructed officers of the court to use him to serve
Warrens as sparingly as possible. In the meantime, Barry's lawyer
shrugged this off, telling the local paper, I think he's
pretty well preoccupied with his grand wizardry in the clan,
and that's true. He was keeping busy, And it was

(54:38):
in August nineteen ninety eight that Barry Black took a
road trip. This wasn't Barry's first out of state clan
field trip. Six people were arrested when the crowd got
out of control during Barry's opening prayers at a clan
rally in Millville, New Jersey, in nineteen ninety When Barry
had lined across burning in Maryland in nineteen ninety one,

(55:00):
the Washington Post printed the slurs that came out of
his mouth when clan leaders from six states converged in
Ohio in nineteen ninety five. Barry told the Cincinnati Inquirer
that it was like a family reunion and lamented that
no one ever gives the clan credit for all the
good things we do. When clansmen in South Carolina came

(55:21):
under federal investigation for burning down black churches, Barry was
there at a cross burning in Lexington in nineteen ninety six,
pledging the support of the Keystone Nights in this legal
battle to come. No, his lawyer was right. Barry was
very busy being the grand Wizard. He was always driving
off to Indiana, Ohio, Maryland, or just the other side

(55:44):
of Pennsylvania for some appearance at a clan event. This
trip to Virginia should have been like any of the others,
show up, make a scene, light across, upset the locals,
and head home again. But this time was different. The
Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan packed up their

(56:04):
white robes and their crossburning supplies and made the six
hour drive from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to Hillsville, Virginia, a small
town in Carroll County in Virginia's far southwest. Tip not
far from the North Carolina border. And here's Barry in
his own words, talking about the event in an interview
recorded in two thousand and five for Duke University School

(56:24):
of Law's Voices of American Law Project.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
What I was doing down there was starting a new den,
or starting a new clavern, giving the people the books
to read, telling the people what we expected them and
how we want them to become pillars in their community.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
Pillars of the community, he says. And when he was
placed in the back of a deputy's patrol car that night,
he offered some insight into what he meant by that
to Carroll County Sheriff's Lieutenant Rick Clark. Here's Virginia's Solicitor
Roal William Hurd relaying that statement to the Supreme Court.

Speaker 3 (57:05):
What we had in the case of Verry Black was
he heard.

Speaker 4 (57:11):
That he's from Pennsylvania.

Speaker 5 (57:13):
He heard that down in Carroll County, blacks and whites
were holding hands on the sidewalk.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
Barry Black was arrested that night, handcuffed and taken away
while the cross was still burning, because regardless of why
he came, what he'd done was a felony here in Virginia.
The first half of this story opened with a twelve
foot cross set ablaze in a peanut field in Suffolk,
Virginia in nineteen forty eight. Local agricultural union workers denounced

(57:45):
it as an act of terrorism and demanded a response
from state government officials. After being brushed off by local
law enforcement, it just wasn't a crime. Newspaper archives for
the next few years show a frustrating pattern. Crosses were
burning all over the state, and every time it happened,
it was dismissed as some isolated incident, some kind of prank,

(58:07):
some kind of childish active vandalism. Every cross that burned
in Virginia was written off by newspapers and cops here
in Virginia, But those same papers ran stories of flaming
crosses in Tennessee and South Carolina, properly identifying those as
what they were, a burning line in the sand, keeping

(58:28):
black Southerners from moving into white neighborhoods, from getting elected
to office, from gaining civil rights, and from feeling safe
in their homes. In late nineteen forty nine, a series
of cross burnings, culminating in an explosion, destroyed the construction
site for a planned housing project for black residents in Nashville.
After Judge Wade's wearing open South Carolina's previously whitees only

(58:50):
primaries to black voters, his home was targeted repeatedly with
crosses burning on his front lawn in nineteen fifty. But
the same papers that ran those wire stories from cities
and other states wrote their own local coverage of cross
burnings closer to home, with a very different tone. When
a cross burned in Nashville or Charleston, it's safe to

(59:12):
say that those cities have racial unrest. Those cities have
the clan. In the summer of nineteen fifty, several black
residents of Colonial Beach, Virginia, found a lawsuit to force
the locality to allow them to swim in a public beach.
The town relented, there was no need to go to court.
The beaches are open to all residents. But when those

(59:33):
black residents and their attorney went to the beach to
see if that was true, five hundred white men attacked
the fifteen black beach goers. Later that week, crosses burned
all down the beach. Another cross was erected and burned
outside of the Black church, accompanied by rifle fire, and

(59:53):
the letters k k K were scrawled on sidewalks all
over black neighborhoods. The town council took no official notice
of the cross burnings and said they not only had
no obligation to anticipate on the rest of the beach,
but it would in fact amount to discrimination to have
done anything to ensure those black residents could access the beach.

(01:00:15):
There was no KKK in Virginia nineteen fifty. Just look
at any newspaper anywhere in the state. When a woman
had found a cross burning on her front porch in
Noffolk in September of nineteen fifty, the police told then
Offolk Ledger Dispatch that it was only a small cross,
just two feet high, and quote, the clan usually puts
on a bigger show. There had been eight cross burnings

(01:00:38):
in neighboring Nansaman County in just the last few months.
But this was probably just mischievous kids. The Bristol, Virginia,
Tennessee And reported in October of nineteen fifty that the
twelve foot cross burned on a hillside near the reservoir,
where it was visible to hundreds of residents, was just
a prank. There's no way to know what those men

(01:00:58):
in hoods were doing up there. A police captain told
the paper that the Confederate flag left behind was evidence
that this was obviously just a prank. That same newspaper
had been running coverage of a clan march in South
Carolina just six weeks earlier. After letting up across in
Myrtle Beach, the clan marched into town, surrounding a black

(01:01:18):
dance hall. There was a riot. Charlie Fitzgerald stood in
the doorway of his bar with a gun, but he
never had a chance to fire it before the mob
beat him and shoved him into the trunk of a car.
The clansmen emptied their guns into the sides of the building,
riddling the walls with bullet holes and shattering all of
the windows. Amidst all this chaos, one of their own

(01:01:40):
took a stray bullet to the back. When his robes
were removed to the hospital where he died, he was
wearing a policeman's uniform Underneath. These stories running in the
same paper may give you some insight into a small
town police officer's eagerness to explain away these flames on
a hillside, But you can draw your own conclusions the

(01:02:03):
clan was thriving again across the South. In January of
nineteen fifty one, the state of Georgia outlawed crossburning in
an effort to stem the tide of this white robed violence.
In February of nineteen fifty one, crosses were lit outside
the homes and businesses of black residence in Guchland and
in Raiko Counties in Virginia. Black families reported seeing half

(01:02:24):
a dozen men firing their guns into the air as
they ran back to their cars after lighting the flames.
The FBI said it was a local matter. The sheriff
said it was pranksters. When the local NAACP demanded an investigation,
the county prosecutor said there is definitely no racial relations
question connected to the recent cross burnings. By June of

(01:02:48):
nineteen fifty one, Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina had joined
Georgia in banning cross burning across the South. The crosses burned,
and there was no question about what it meant except
when it happened here. The same papers that ran the
wire stories about the legislative attempts to combat clan activity

(01:03:09):
everywhere else said the six foot cross doused and gasoline
in the middle of Route one in Stafford was just
a prank. It was just kids messing with traffic. In
August of that year, a widow and Appamannox was awoken
in the middle of the night by the sound of
an explosion. The cross burning on her front lawn had
ignited the dynamite late at its base. A postcard from

(01:03:32):
the clan was left to the scene. The newspaper ran
the headline crossfire lacks motive, with the sheriff quoted saying,
my office dropped the matter. It was probably a personal
thing or just some children. In my haphazard search of
newspaper archives, I found nearly a hundred of these pranks

(01:03:55):
in Virginia in the nineteen fifties. A white cop tells
white reporter that there's nothing to worry about here. It's
only a joke. As a black family douses the burning
embers on their law. No one could see the racial

(01:04:24):
terror we already had here at home. It was always kids,
or vandals or pranksters. But in nineteen fifty two, the
Virginia State Legislature was finally ready to act, responding to
reports that Florida Clan leader Bill Hendrix was planning a
rally in Richmond, and South Carolina clan leader Thomas Hamilton
was planning to start chapters in more than a dozen towns.

(01:04:45):
In Virginia, a bill was introduced to outlaw the wearing
of masks in public at the urging of religious groups,
a ban on crossburning was added. The threat of these
out of town clansmen pushed the bill through without significant pushback,
and it was signed by Governor John Battle in April
nineteen fifty two. But changing the law didn't change anyone's attitudes.

(01:05:10):
Throughout the nineteen fifties, most of the crossburning stories I
could find were dismissed as pranks, and if I'm being
entirely honest, some of them might have been. There were
several crossburnings in Newport News that teenage boys eventually confessed to,
with one cross being placed on the law of a
state delegate by mistake. The boys said they were pranking

(01:05:32):
their high school teachers, and I did find at least
three stories of high school teachers and Newport News who
had crosses burned on their lawn. The boys' names were
never published, so I don't know what they got up
to later in life, and I have to wonder exactly
what kind of pranks these were. It's the fifties. Had

(01:05:53):
those teachers expressed support for integration, Did they go on
dates with black women or rent property to black tenants?
It wasn't unheard of for behavior like that to earn
a white man a visit from those seeking to enforce
the established social order. But it's impossible to say seventy
years later what prompted those nighttime visits from their students.

(01:06:15):
And I tell you about these ones that maybe were pranks,
because I don't think any of them being pranks really
helps explain it at all. If anything, it underscores how
widespread and commonly understood this was as a symbol. You
didn't have to be a klansman to know what it meant.

(01:06:35):
You didn't have to mean it yourself to know how
it would be read. In nineteen sixty five, George Lincoln Rockwell,
the founder of the American Nazi Party, ran for governor
here in Virginia. He didn't win, obviously, he got nearly
six thousand votes, though one percent of the total cast.

(01:07:00):
The new governor was Mills Godwin, once a staunch segregationist
who had distanced himself from the political machine of Harry Bird.
Whether he had a change of heart or just saw
the writing on the wall after the failure of Virginia's
massive resistance to school desegregation is impossible to say. But
in December of nineteen sixty six, Governor Mills Godwin announced

(01:07:21):
a one thousand dollars reward for information leading to the
arrest and conviction of crossburners. In response, the klan burned
across outside the Governor's mansion.

Speaker 4 (01:07:35):
The clan did rear its head in certain areas of
Virginia in that period, even to the extent that they
burned a cross on the sidewalk right behind the Governor's mansion.
And we made some arrest and there were some sentences
meeted out to those that were convicted, and it had

(01:07:57):
a real deterring effect.

Speaker 1 (01:08:01):
A rash of cross burnings followed. Crosses burned all over
the state of Virginia in protest of Governor Godwin's declaration
of war against the Clan. On New Year's Day nineteen
sixty seven, Wilson Ralph Price and his wife, Nanny Jane
Price were arrested for burning across on a sidewalk in Richmond,
all three of their young children were waiting for them

(01:08:23):
in their parked car, where police found several loaded guns,
a second cross they intended to burn elsewhere later that day,
and a stack of clan literature. Barry Black wasn't the
first clansman to fight this law and win. Price had
his conviction overturned by the Virginia Supreme Court a year later,
with the court ruling that technically the law didn't apply here.

(01:08:48):
The Prices had burned that cross on public property, on
the sidewalk, not on the property of another, as stated
in the statute. The Virginia General Assembly amended the law
that year to include a bannon crossburning on public property
as well. In nineteen sixty eight, the state Supreme Court

(01:09:09):
seemed to believe that the purpose of banning crossburning was
to protect private property. The law didn't protect people, it
protected their laws, and with this amendment, the legislature clarified
their intention. The law isn't about property or trustpass or
the possibility of danger from the flames themselves. It is

(01:09:29):
intended to prevent a particular act of intimidation. But in
their efforts to close off this avenue of attack, they
accidentally created another This amendment to the statute also added
language that quote, the unlawful burning of a cross shall
be prima facia evidence of the intention to intimidate a

(01:09:51):
person or group of persons. This language was likely intended
to get around the defense of whill it was just
a prank. Burning across is such a heinous act with
no other purpose than to intimidate that if you can
prove it was done at all, then the starting assumption
is that it was done to intimidate. So this amendment

(01:10:14):
to the law shifts the burden of proof to the
party trying to prove otherwise. So when Barry lit that
cross in Carroll County on August twenty second, nineteen ninety eight,
the law on the books read, it shall be unlawful
for any person or persons, with the intent of intimidating
any person or group of persons, to burn, or cause

(01:10:35):
to be burned across on the property of another, a
highway or other public space. Any person who shall violate
this section shall be guilty of a classic felony. Any
such burning of a cross shall be primophacia evidence of
an intent to intimidate a person or group of persons,
and Barry had done that. When the sheriff's lieutenant arrived,

(01:10:57):
he asked who lit this cross, and Barry stepped forward
and claimed responsibility. He was charged in Carroll County and
released on bond, but he was having a hell of
a time finding a lawyer. Most lawyers in the area
wouldn't even return his calls. But then, as in so
many cases of extremists trying to force their way into

(01:11:18):
the conversation about civil rights, the ACLU stepped up without
even having to be asked.

Speaker 3 (01:11:28):
Well, I walked into the courthouse. I just looked at him.
He says, is there something wrong here? And I says
you're David Ball He said yeah. I says you're black.
He says yeah. I said, are you going to fight
for me? Are you going to give me one hundred
and fifty one percent? He says, I'm not going to

(01:11:48):
change your views, He says, in my views about you
aren't the greatest in the world either. He says, but
I will give you one hundred and fifty one percent.
You have my word on that, sir. He says, I'll
defend you to the end, and life is good enough.

Speaker 1 (01:12:04):
The Virginia ACLU was no stranger to this strange Bedfellow's
type of attorney client relationship. Just a few years earlier,
they'd taken on the case of Buddy Hernandez, a clansman
who was arrested in nineteen eighty nine for handing out
clan literature while wearing full clan regalia, including a hood
that covered his face. Like the cross burning law, Virginia's

(01:12:24):
anti masking statute was adopted in nineteen fifty two with
the explicit intention of curtailing clan activity. The anti masking
statute was upheld by the Virginia Supreme Court, and the
actual Supreme Court declined to hear Hernandez's case. In nineteen
ninety four, ACLU attorney David Baugh went to Batford Barry,

(01:12:46):
and he spent years on the case. When the pair
first appeared in court together, the Richmond Times Dispatch ran
the headline crowd likely as black defends clansmen. The news
stories can be a little tough to parse sometimes because
our klansman's name is black, and the African American attorney

(01:13:08):
representing him is being referred to often in these newspapers
as a black and the case was getting a lot
of publicity. This tiny town of just twenty seven hundred
was suddenly swarming with reporters and lawyers. The state Attorney
General's office sent a team to assist the local prosecutor.

(01:13:28):
Carroll County District Court clerk Christine Beck told the paper,
it's going to be a circus, and added, I guess
some things are just fascinating, like the sex lies of
the president. This would have been right around the time
the Star report was released to the public, and everyone
was just in a frenzy about the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

(01:13:51):
The last few months of nineteen ninety eight were hectic
for Barry. Now he was fighting his own case down
in Virginia, but the four klansmen arrested at the White
Bride picnic were still fighting their cases at home in Pennsylvania.
A few weeks after this cross burning, Barry was kicked
out of the courtroom during a hearing in Don Penrod's
case for pointing his rifle at that state trooper, and

(01:14:12):
Barry had to appear in court repeatedly in his fight
to keep his job as Constable. He's under more scrutiny
than ever. His local prosecutor, state troopers, and the courts
in Virginia were just waiting for Barry to make a mistake.
In March of nineteen ninety nine, a judge in Virginia
ruled against emotion to dismiss Barry's criminal case, rejecting the

(01:14:33):
argument that crossburning was protected First Amendment conduct. A few
days later, Barry was back in court in Pennsylvania, railing
against the corrupt judicial system trying to take away his
job as constable. He told reporters in the hallway after
the hearing that if they would just let him keep
the job, he would be too busy working to keep

(01:14:53):
up his clan activities. That's not really a great argument
if you ask me, you know, just let me be
a cop and I'll be too busy to do crime.
I don't know that that's very convincing. And while we're
on the subject of guys who probably should not be cops,

(01:15:13):
I want to pick up a thread from the story
last week. Barry's involvement in the war on the Casanova
Lounge doesn't really factor into this week's story. He's too
busy with his own problems at this point to be
bothering with that gay bar But the situation was ongoing,
and it was around this time in the spring of
nineteen ninety nine that something the bar's patrons had long

(01:15:35):
suspected was proved to be true. The bigots had an
inside man. Ron Immler, the police chief and neighboring Connamau Township,
had been running license plates for the protesters and supplying
them with the names and home addresses of the people
who visited the gay bar. Imler denied these accusations, but

(01:15:58):
he suddenly retired. The Pennsylvania State Police Bureau of Technology
Service informed the town's supervisors in a letter that Ron
Immler had violated state and federal law by providing confidential
information obtained through state computer databases to an unauthorized person.
It's not clear to me if Immler was ever charged

(01:16:19):
or prosecuted for this. There's no record in the online
information system for Pennsylvania's courts. It could be that this
is very old. I did find other records from that year.
It could be that he had it sealed or expunged.
But it's possible that he was just never charged. So
we do have on record that the state police informed
the township that their police chief had broken the law,

(01:16:42):
but it's not clear that the local prosecutor ever brought
those charges, so it's not always as literal as that
dead clansman in South Carolina who was wearing his police
uniform under his robes, and Barry wasn't the only law
enforcement official in the area whose vision of law and
order did at harassing that bar out of existence. But

(01:17:03):
back to Barry, things didn't improve much for Barry as
nineteen ninety nine, wore On Don Penrod and two other
clansmen were convicted for threatening those state troopers at the
White Pride picnic, and Barry was once again removed from
the office of Constable by the courts. He tried to
appeal the decision as he had the first time around,
but it didn't work out. He filed a federal lawsuit

(01:17:27):
against the state police, but his case got tossed before
it even got off the ground. He had to bail
his son, Barry Junior, out of the local jail three
times that year, including one night after the younger Barry
was arrested for threatening someone with a gun, and in
June of nineteen ninety nine, an old white jury in
Carroll County deliberated for just twenty five minutes before finding

(01:17:50):
Barry Black guilty of cross burning under that Virginia statute.
They had the option of giving him up to five
years behind bars for this CLASSICX felony, but the jury
decided on just a twenty five hundred dollars fine.

Speaker 3 (01:18:04):
I can't just say, hey, no, here's twenty five hundred dollars,
forget it. If I did that, I'm letting my race down.
I have to make people know that America is still
a land of opportunity, that America is still a land
of democracy, and that the Constitution United States of America
still means something.

Speaker 1 (01:18:24):
His attorney, David Ball, vowed to appeal the conviction, saying
the cross was burned as part of their ceremony, not
because they wanted to intimidate anyone, and the first appeal
didn't go their way. In December of two thousand, the
Virginia Court of Appeals upheld Barry's conviction, but they kept fighting.
A year later, the Virginia Supreme Court agreed with Barry

(01:18:48):
Virginia's crossburning law was unconstitutional. The opinion noted that similar
statutes in Maryland and South Carolina had been ruled unconstitutional
in recent years, and the law on the books was indistinct,
inquishable from the Minnesota law struck down in the nineteen
ninety two Supreme Court case rav versus City of Saint Paul.
The issue here arises in that nineteen sixty eight amendment

(01:19:10):
to the law about the act itself being sufficient evidence
of intent, and just a quick side note here. I
don't want a Monday morning quarterback the State Supreme Court,
but they are mistaken about something here. The opinion incorrectly
states that the prima fascia evidence of intent language was
added in nineteen seventy five, but it was nineteen sixty eight.

(01:19:33):
And I can promise you that I pulled copies of
the Acts of the General Assembly for every legislative session
that this code section was touched. The prima facial requirement
was inserted when the law was amended in nineteen sixty eight,
after the State Supreme Court overturned Wilson Price's conviction. I
think the origin of this error is that the code

(01:19:55):
section does show a revision was made in nineteen seventy five,
but if you pull the full text of the nineteen
seventy five session, it's because everything in Title eighteen was
technically amended in nineteen seventy five. Because they rearranged and
recodified the entire criminal Code, so the language of the
statute stayed the same between nineteen sixty eight nineteen seventy five.

(01:20:18):
They just changed the numbers. That doesn't matter at all.
I didn't need to tell you that. I'm just flexing
on some court clerk from twenty four years ago. I
guess sorry. But anyway, this decision rested on that language.
The law couldn't be content neutral if this baked in

(01:20:38):
assumption of intent rested on the historical context of crossburning.
So basically, the court is saying, you can't have it
both ways. Either the law is constitutional because it is
content neutral it applies to everyone regardless of their motivation,
or you can justify the inference of intimidation by relying

(01:20:59):
on the history of the clan. But both of those
things can't be true at the same time. And because
Barry wasn't the only person arrested for burning across in
Virginia in nineteen ninety eight, this appeal to the State
Supreme Court was actually three cases rolled up into one.
So the court wasn't just reversing Barry's conviction in this opinion,

(01:21:21):
they were also throwing out convictions against Richard Elliott and
Jonathan O'Mara, two men had been convicted for burning across
on a black family's lawn. Now Barry has an argument here.
I don't like it. I don't have to like it,
but it's true. There wasn't really a victim in this case.

(01:21:42):
He was on private property at the invitation of the owner,
and they didn't really intend for anybody to see what
they were doing. The landowner's niece by marriage, who was
living elsewhere on the property, did testify in the original
case that she saw the cross burning and had been frightened,
but she was arguably not any kind of intended audience.

(01:22:03):
It's not even clear if they knew she was there.
For Elliot and O'Mara, though their cases did not rely
on prima facia evidence of intent, there was actual proof
of intent. There was a victim here. They absolutely intended
to intimidate that family and should rightfully be punished under
this law. So the State of Virginia appealed the state

(01:22:25):
Supreme Court ruling to the Supreme Court, and all three
of these cases rolled right on up together. And I'll
admit that before I started picking this story apart, my
sort of general understanding of Commonwealth feed Black was that
the Supreme Court ruled Virginia's cross burning law was unconstitutional,
and that is what happened. But it's not entirely straightforward.

(01:22:48):
Even the men's own lawyer, Rodney Smola, wasn't sure what
to make of the decision the day he read it.

Speaker 3 (01:22:55):
I'm reading, and I read the first sentence, and I think, well,
no I want, says no.

Speaker 1 (01:22:59):
I lost.

Speaker 3 (01:22:59):
And then I get through the first set of opinions
by Justice O'Connor, and I wasn't sure.

Speaker 1 (01:23:07):
The decision announced by Justice Sandrada O'Connor was kind of
a mixed bag. The court ruled it. Yes, the Virginia
Supreme Court was right about the prima facia element of
the law, making it unconstitutional.

Speaker 5 (01:23:21):
The act of burning across may mean that the person
is engaging in constitutionally proscribable intimidation, or it may mean
only that the person is engaged in core political speech.
The prima facie provision blurs the line between these meanings.
The First Amendment does not permit such a shortcut. Thus

(01:23:45):
Black's conviction cannot stand and the judgment as to him
is affirmed.

Speaker 1 (01:23:52):
But they were also clear in their opinion that Virginia
can enforce a law banning cross burning so long as
that law requires an intent to intimidate. If it can
be proven that the act was carried out with such
an intent, it's not free speech anymore. It's a true threat,
and threats are not protected by the First Amendment.

Speaker 5 (01:24:14):
We hold that a state consistent with the First Amendment
may ban crossburning carried out with the intent to intimidate.
While a burning cross does not always convey a message
of intimidation, often the crossburner intends that the recipients of
the message fear for their lives, and when a cross

(01:24:37):
burning is used to intimidate, few, if any, messages are
more powerful.

Speaker 1 (01:24:45):
Very one. His conviction was overturned. The highest court in
the land agreed it was his constitutional right to light
that cross. The Supreme Court did reverse the Virginia Supreme
Court rulings that had overturned Richard Elliott and Jonathan O'Mara's convictions.
Their cases were kicked back down to the lower courts,

(01:25:06):
and ultimately they were convicted and did serve time. And
after a lifetime of fighting losing battles, you might think
Barry came away from this emboldened, empowered, ready to ride
this victory into more marches, more recruiting, more cross burnings,
more anything. But he didn't really. He was fifty five

(01:25:32):
the year the Supreme Court gave him their blessing to
burn crosses. He probably did burn a few more, but
none of them made the news. He'd planted some seeds
as an Imperial Wizard, but none of them really thrived.
Corporate entities with names that seemed to tie them to
Barry's Keystone Nights existed in several states, but most of

(01:25:54):
them withered and died. The International Keystone Knights of the
Realm of Ohio registered with the State of Ohio in
two thousand and two, but they stopped filing annual paperwork
in twenty thirteen. The Invisible Empire International Keystone Knights of
the Ku Klux Klan, Incorporated was registered in Indiana by
Barry himself in nineteen ninety seven. The South Carolina based

(01:26:19):
nonprofit Barry Incorporated in nineteen ninety nine technically still exists
on paper, despite the deaths of both Barry and the
local clansmen he ran it with a Virginia chapter of
the Keystone Knights Incorporated. A few months after the Supreme
Court victory in two thousand and three, but there's no
record I can find of the chapter getting up to anything,
and all record of the entity disappears entirely after two

(01:26:41):
thousand and eight. Stephen Dnkle, the one time leader of
a Keystone Nights chapter in Alabama, was convicted of a
federal hate crime in twenty fourteen for a cross burning.
After his release, he was convicted again for a federal
firearms related offense, and in twenty seventeen, he was sentenced
to ten years for sexually assaulting an incapacitated woman. A

(01:27:04):
man named Willis Fraser still files annual paperwork with the
IRS for the Indiana based entity using the Keystone Knights name.
In two thousand and four, Fraser tried to sue the
state of Arkansas after he was fired from his job
as a prison guard for being a member of the
Keystone Knights, but his suit was dismissed. The only place
the Keystone Knights have popped up in recent years was

(01:27:26):
their legal battle with the state of Georgia over the
denial of their application to the state's adopt a Highway program.
The ACLU stepped in to help secure the clan's right
to put their name on a sign on the side
of a Georgia highway. That Keystone Knights chapter in Georgia
seems to be the only one that really still exists,
with Willis Fraser's name on some of that paperwork, tying

(01:27:48):
it all the way back to Barry. The Keystone Knights
are more or less dead, and Barry Black is entirely dead.
He passed away in twenty eighteen. He lived a life
of hatred. He spent most of his life feeling persecuted
and aggrieved, fighting what he saw as a righteous battle

(01:28:09):
for his civil rights. His right to disrupt life in
a small town with his clan rallies, his right to
serve as constable, his right to lead armed mobs that
threatened to shoot cops, his right to burn crosses, his
right to make his bigotry your problem. The part of
Barry's legacy I'm most interested in, though, is the law

(01:28:33):
written to stop the next Berry Black. While Barry Black's
cross burning appeals were working their way through the appeals process,

(01:28:54):
the Virginia General Assembly had already corrected the problem. They
knew the law they used to prosecute Barry wasn't going
to hold up, and instead of amending the existing statute,
they passed a new law in two thousand and two.
The language about prima fascia evidence of intent was gone,
of course, but there was another huge change. The cross

(01:29:20):
itself was missing. This new law outlawed burning anything if
it was done with the intent to intimidate. It's still
understood to be a cross burning law, but it doesn't
actually say that. It doesn't say that at all. Cross

(01:29:41):
burnings never stopped. Of course, they still happen here from
time to time. In twenty twenty, a man named James
Brown burned a cross outside the home of a black
teenager who'd been involved in organizing Black Lives Matter protests
in Marion, Virginia. He served eighteen months for criminal interference
with federally protected rights. Darryl Orange was convicted in twenty

(01:30:04):
ten under the original cross burning law, which was left
on the books for some reason, after he burned a
cross on his neighbor's lawn in Bedford, Virginia. Many crossburnings
go unsolved or unprosecuted, and some of them are still
dismissed as pranks. This new law has never really been

(01:30:25):
tested until last year. I can only find a single
case where it's ever even been used to charge someone.
On the fourth of July and twenty nineteen, a man
in Williamsburg pulled up in front of a wal Mart,
got out of his car, put an American flag on
the ground, and set it on fire. He didn't threaten anyone,

(01:30:46):
He just lit it up, shouted a bit about how
he hated America, and drove off. Wasn't shouting in anyone
in particular, He wasn't particularly close to anyone or anything,
and no one was injured and nothing was really damaged.
The charge almost certainly would not have held up to

(01:31:07):
any kind of scrutiny in this particular case. The local
cops outright said that they probably wouldn't even have arrested
him at all if he'd burned a towel instead of
a flag. It was the flag that had people worked up,
but the First Amendment right to burn a flag is
well trod legal territory. He ultimately pled down to a

(01:31:29):
misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, So the court hasn't really ever
had to deal with this burning object law until now.
You see, seven years ago, hundreds of torch bearing white
supremacists marched through the grounds of the University of Virginia.

(01:31:50):
They'd come to Charlesville from across the country, taking Friday
morning flights or taking turns at the wheel for cross
country drives, and rented vans with guys they met on
message board. Arriving early before the big event the next day,
they gathered in a field near the tennis courts and
lined up two by two, torches in hand. Men with

(01:32:12):
walkie talkies clipped to their belts, some with wired earpieces
barked orders. Elliott Kleine, an ambitious young white nationalist organizer
calling himself Eli Moseley after twentieth century British fascist Oswald Moseley,
shouted at the crowd as they formed into a line.
So we're going around right through, and anyone who we

(01:32:33):
packed for the journey, let us know if we can
do it all right, We're picking big guys, no female.
Klein was selecting the biggest marchers to lay down their torches,
they might need their hands free. The march wound its
way through the university grounds, up the lawn, and then
up the steps of the University of Virginia's iconic rotunda

(01:32:57):
on the other side of the rotunda, gathered near a
statue Thomas Jefferson, a small group of anti racist activists waited.
In her testimony during a later civil trial, one of
the women who was terrorized that night said, when we
heard the roaring of the approaching crowd, we just linked
arms and held hands and started to sing. She said

(01:33:22):
at first it sounded like thunder, like the earth was growling.

(01:33:49):
As the sound grew closer, but before she could see
the light of the torches, she began to make out
the chance hundreds of voices raised in unison, shouting blood
and soil. Testifying about that night years later, she said
she still hears it in her nightmare sometimes, and by

(01:34:09):
the time that small group of mostly students realized the
magnitude and ferocity of the approaching mob, it was too late.
They were surrounded at the base of the statue by
hundreds of torch wielding white supremacists for just a few minutes,
minutes that those trapped at the base of the statue
said they believed might be their last, as they were

(01:34:31):
doused in lighter fluid, maced, kicked, and punched. There was
a melee after the crowd dispersed that night and after
the deadly rally the next morning, those men went home.
Some started businesses, some joined the military, others got kicked

(01:34:52):
out of the military, and some did both. Some died
of heart attacks and drug overdoses and self inflicted gunshot wounds.
They beat their wives and choked their girlfriends, went to
grad school, went to prison, trafficked drugs, started families, got divorced,
ran for office, tried to overturn a presidential election, left

(01:35:15):
the movement, tried to lead the movement, or just tried
to disappear. There are as many stories as there were
flames in the night when their voices joined us, one
shouting Jews will not replace us, and then dousing the flames,
going their separate ways back to the communities they came from.

(01:35:39):
Last year, the Algumorole County Prosecutor's office decided to put
this law to the test. This mom had burned objects,
they had intimidated people with them. If this law was
meant to punish anyone for anything, it was meant for
men like this with their flaming torches. And if you're

(01:36:01):
listening to this the day it came out, the odds
are pretty good that I'm sitting in a little county
courtroom with one of them right now. Weird Little Guys
is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched,
written and recorded by me Long Kunger. Our executive producers

(01:36:25):
are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is edited
by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was
composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird
Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it.
It's nothing personal. I don't answer any of my emails.

(01:36:46):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guy's subreddit. Just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys.

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