October 3, 2024 • 48 mins
In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that the mere act of burning a cross, absent evidence of specific intent to intimidate, is protected by the first amendment. But who was the klansman who got his case all the way to the highest court in the land? This is the first half of the story of Barry Black, a Pennsylvania Ku Klux Klan leader who won two write-in campaigns for constable, waged war on a rural gay bar, and spent decades fighting for his right to intimidate.
Sources:
https://www.salon.com/2009/07/24/liddy/
https://www.fec.gov/resources/legal-resources/litigation/berg_ac_berg_emerg_mot_proh_cert.pdf https://www.wethepeoplefoundation.org/PROJECTS/Obama/Evidence/AFFIDAVIT-Bishop.pdf
https://barthsnotes.com/2009/08/25/meet-ron-mcrae-the-birther-bishop/ https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/278475/dykudrama/ https://digdc.dclibrary.org/islandora/object/dcplislandora%3A266739/datastream/OCR/view https://archives.rainbowhistory.org/files/original/367cf04d6456e9b3c311296a806863cd.pdf https://youtu.be/o4o0tZPETAc
https://archive.org/details/BarryE.Black/mode/2up
Heibel, Todd (2004). Blame It on the Casa Nova?: “Good Scenery and Sodomy” in Rural Southwestern Pennsylvania. In Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the U.S.A. Routledge.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
In nineteen forty eight, there was a rash of crossburnings
in Suffolk. Virginia newspapers throughout the late forties and all
through the fifties assure the reader that there is no
Ku Klux clan activity in Virginia. Local clan groups had
more or less died out in the mid forties, and
Virginia wouldn't really see a rise in widespread organized clan
(00:28):
activity until the threat of integrated schools whipped aggrieved white
men back into a frenzy in the fifties. But the
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 Nurneville. And whether or not the
(00:51):
local prosecutor believed that the clan still existed, everyone in
the South knows what a burning cross means. The third
one in that neighborhood. In recent months, the local prosecutor
had simply shrugged, it's not illegal to burn across two
thousand members of a local peanut workers union approved a
(01:13):
resolution demanding a response from the Governor and Attorney General, writing,
we reject the hair splitting 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.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
And terrorism are.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
That 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 cross burning in Virginia, he
(02:02):
was barely 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.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
The Supreme Court.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, little guys. There
(02:37):
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 degree of a
(03:00):
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 defendant
(03:22):
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 the
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.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
And I'm going to tell you about some of those men.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
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
(04:04):
little notebook probably one hundred times. Commonwealthy 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 marginers.
So Commonwealthy Black, that's all I really needed to know.
(04:28):
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
(04:50):
found wasn't just some boring bit of backstory about constitutional
law and legislative history.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I mean, we're definitely going to do some of.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
That, But they 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 of people whose stories are
worth knowing. This episode is just the first half of
Barry Black's story, and we won't even get to his
(05:18):
precedent setting appeal until next week.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
This week, it's.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
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 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
(05:43):
to talk about Barry Black, the clansmen who fought the
law all the way to the Supreme Court and won.
Barry Elton Black and his twin brother, Bruce, were born
two months before their mother's seventeenth birthday. Their twenty three
year old father, also named Bruce, didn't stick around. When
(06:06):
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. 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.
(06:30):
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 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
(06:51):
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 Barry, and lacks
specificity as to exactly why he was in jail in
nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
One report at.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
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 like he might have just been guilty of having
a good time, but he got himself into some extra
(07:28):
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 the men were missing until Barry's brother called the
sheriff to say he'd gotten a call from Barry earlier
(07:51):
that afternoon and he wanted to know if his brother
had posted bond The sheriff assured Bruce that no, Barry
hasn't bonded out. He's still in his cell, but he
was not. Barry was only free for about six hours
after this daring jail break. The other two men hid
(08:11):
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
the escape. It's not clear what the paternity case entailed,
(08:34):
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 autopart 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.
And then he went back to jail in nineteen seventy
(08:56):
six for stealing a gun from his brother.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
He escaped again, this.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
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
just caught probation, and he was given probation again when
he was convicted in nineteen eighty six for illegally possessing
(09:22):
a revolver. And that's all there really was to know
about berry 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 trouble,
except for that gun charge in nineteen eighty six, but
by nineteen eighty nine he's a klegal in his local clan. Now,
(09:47):
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 like joining this
society for creative anachronism or getting into dungeons and dragons.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
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 oh my god, do they
(10:26):
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 members to his local clan
(10:47):
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. Each one is made up of,
(11:10):
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 of the goofy nineteenth century made
(11:32):
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
a point henchmen called goblins. I don't think they kept
the goblins the second time around, which just seems like
a huge loss, you know.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
But anyway, so.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
By nineteen ninety, Barry is the Grand Titan of western Pennsylvania.
Sylvania has a Grand Dragon, and the Grand Dragon appoints
the Grand Titans, and Bury's 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,
(12:15):
with an estimated three hundred members in Pennsylvania 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 and little towns all over the state
(12:35):
every year, and nobody wanted it. Nobody's 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 Carmichael's, Pennsylvania. The town fought
(12:57):
tooth and nail to prevent it, but he was to
turn to put on a show and even tried 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 Barry take them to court.
The town closed down every shop and restaurant that day
out of protest, and residents lined the streets to watch
(13:18):
a few dozen men walk about half a mile with
Barry leading them a chance of what do we want
white power?
Speaker 1 (13:25):
When do we want it now? Scoofy.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
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
the paper meant the town was depressed, like economically. It
kind of just sounds like the town was just depressed
(13:53):
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
this once and it didn't work, did it. Barry told
the paper that his marches weren't a racial thing, but
(14:14):
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
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
(14:37):
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.
The office of constable is kind of a holdover from
the olden days. It's kind of a cop, but not really.
(15:00):
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
the main roles of the constable is the destruction of
dangerous dogs. So I guess there are guys in Vermont
(15:20):
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
the office he won was for constable in a single
ward of a borough of a county, and he was
(15:40):
able to secure a victory without even really running. He
won with just a few dozen ride in votes because
no one was running. I looked up some recent voter
turnout stats for Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and Johnstown's twenty first
ward had four hundred and four registered voters in twenty
twenty three, and only one hundred and seven of them
(16:02):
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
was any kind of specific issue. The Constable of the
(16:22):
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 too Barry's six year term
as constable, Cambria County District Attorney Timothy Creeney noticed that
they had a klansman serving papers for the court. How
much he could really do about that, though it's not
(16:43):
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 Bear he removed from office
on the grounds that Pennsylvania doesn't allow people convicted of
(17:04):
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 the courthouse himself, dressed in a white robe,
(17:27):
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 courtroom with his personal bodyguard, a
man in fatigues and a black beret. He was no
longer just a legal or a grand Titan. Barry was
(17:48):
calling himself the Grand Dragon.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
Now.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Over the next few months, Barry staged several protests of
what he called this violation of his civil rights, and
he appealed at all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
In October of nineteen ninety four, that court upheld the decision.
They agreed that his criminal history made him ineligible for
the office of constable. That same month, several local papers
(18:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
See, in the pre internet days, you.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Couldn't have a website, right, so groups like the Clan
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
(18:49):
Barry Black stating that for security reasons, the time and
exact location will be announced with twelve hours notice, saying
we have gone to modern technology.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
We use fax machines, etc.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
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, it's nineteen ninety four, and
you get a fax from your local clig Grap that
the nighthawks are needed at the Satanic Halloween parade to
(19:24):
enforce white Christian morals.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
I mean, it's baffling, baffling.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Klig Grap is the title for the clan secretary, and
the nighthawks are the security cards. So I guess you
know the Kliggrap 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
(19:52):
like that. He was not planning to protest the Halloween parade.
He said that was just a rumor started by fellow
clansman Roy franks Kauser, the leader of a splinter group
called the White Unity Party. Barry explained to the reporter
that if frank Kauser wanted the White Unity Party to
be allowed to join Barry's new clan organization, the Keystone
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, then frank Kauser would
(20:14):
need to accept that he didn't have Barry's permission to
be doing things like holding a press conference about Halloween
parades 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,
(20:36):
although agents from the FBI and the ATF denied that
on various occasions, sometimes under oath. But I'm not sold.
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
(20:57):
an uncited edit to his Wikipedia page claiming that his
hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania, celebrated his death by holding a parade.
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 Frankauser was beefing with Barry, And it's hard
to say with any kind of certainty, but I wonder
(21:20):
if it was Frankhauser who met with the FBI in
nineteen ninety four. Barry's FBI file has a few heavily
redacted pages about an aspiring clan informant who reported that
he was present at a clan meeting when Barry Black
said the Klan had a plan to deal harshly with traitors.
The informant told the FBI that Barry Black had automatic
(21:41):
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, though
the Pittsburgh Field Office downgraded and then ultimately closed the investigation,
fighting the tipsters quote inability to factually corroborate any of
(22:04):
his allegations to make them believable.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
So Barry is keeping pretty busy.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
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 crossburnings
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 bar was the site of
(22:44):
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 Merrik Kramer, a straight couple
in their fifties with grown children, bought an old tavern
on Route nine eighty five in nineteen ninety five. They
(23:06):
ran it as a restaurant for two years before deciding
in January of nineteen ninety seven to start catering to
gay clientel. 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 customers drive in
from as far as Maryland and West Virginia for their
(23:28):
tea dances, a kind of gay singles event whose name
is the 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, We served dinner
from four to six pm. I do all the cooking.
(23:50):
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 the early Obama years,
this may not be the first time you've heard of
(24:11):
Ron McCrae. 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. In December of
(24:33):
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
(24:53):
sourced false claim that Obama's Kenyan grandmother, 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
(25:14):
phone call Ron McCrae had with her via a translator
in October two thousand and eight, and McCray 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
(25:37):
off silly complications, like the fact that the lawsuit was
dismissed as being utterly without merit. 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
(26:00):
Obama herself rather than from McCrae, who was merely repeating
what he claimed she said to him.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
CanYa, before he gave birth to one of Berthaism'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
(26:46):
western Pennsylvania preaching the Word of God to unwilling congregants
on street corners, who 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
(27:07):
origin of mccray's street preacher's fellowship, who was a fairly
litigious collective of amateur street preachers who would scream Bible
verses on street corners until the police would intervene, and
then they would sue. And that seems like what he
was trying to do to Patricia Kramer and her customers
outside Casanova almost every weekend.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
For four years.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Ron McCrae was the loudest and most persistent opponent to
the gay bar, but he 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,
(27:55):
those are flyers 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
(28:18):
happened to 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
(28:40):
hardcore gay 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 elves, who ever made any claim
(29:01):
to have seen 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 renamed Casanova Road to Hemlock Road. In
May of nineteen ninety seven, the Penrods invited the clan
(29:23):
over Barry Black's Keystone Knights, used the Penrod's farm as
a staging area to park down their robes, and then
marched 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 Penrod's property for a cross burning. Patrons
(29:47):
at the bar would have been able to see the
glow from the flames when they pulled 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 seve he got elected constable again.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Just as he had in nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
He managed to secure a victory in Johnstown's twenty first
ward on write in votes alone. This time though he
got one. He got one vote. Nobody was running, and
I guess nobody else voted, and so he won with one.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
And I can't find.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
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. 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
(30:47):
think it would work a second time?
Speaker 1 (30:49):
And if he did do this himself, why didn't he ask.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Anyone else to do it with him? Was he surprised
when he found out he was the constable again?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
There's really no to know.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
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. There it was, and in nineteen ninety eight,
(31:27):
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 McRae
vowed to be out there every Friday and Saturday night
until the bar was forced to shut down. The Cramers
were getting death threats in the mail. The front windows
(31:50):
were smashed out with huge rocks thrown from a passing car,
but the Kramers weren't going to lie down and take it.
Speaking later to Professor tu for his essay, blame it
on the Casanova good scenery and sodomy in rural southwestern Pennsylvania,
pat said, McCray made a pledge to these neighbors that
he would have us closed in a week. Well that
(32:12):
never happened. Never happened because McCrae didn't know who I was,
and the Kramers 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 see if that makes
some kind of initialism.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
It doesn't.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
It's an 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 you
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,
poking fun at the screaming preacher in the parking lot
(32:55):
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
performed some comedic skits for patrons at the bar. Pat Kramer,
(33:20):
that straight, married woman in her fifties who 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 a lot
of her bar's patrons just call her mother. I've always
(33:41):
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 doesn't say,
but I wonder if it was at her daughter's bedside
(34:03):
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 gay people
really were than most straight suburban women were getting in
(34:24):
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 for the gay
people who lived there, and they really didn't want to
(34:44):
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 when they got there.
(35:06):
They ignored Ron McCray 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.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
And that they would burn in hell.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
I'm not sure one of those things really bothered them,
but they just walked into the bar 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.
(35:45):
I'm not sure which of McCrae'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 lefter one, Am McCray was still there,
just as they did every weekend. The protesters were there
(36:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
But they were prepared for this.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
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,
(36:51):
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.
(37:20):
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
(37:41):
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 them on the
drive up not to do this tonight. Not here they
could get charged with public disturbed and this wasn't a
friendly place to have to fight a charge. But here
(38:05):
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 Klan
with their burning crosses, and the skinheads with their Molotov cocktails,
and the street preachers with their threats of the fires
of hell. They're always surprised when a bitch burns back.
(38:42):
Barry's Clan group had staged protests directly outside Kasanova 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.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
To Washington, d c.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Where she had testified in front of the Senate Judiciary
Committee in a hearing on hate crimes legislation. No, 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'd 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
(39:22):
the clan to have a picnic on their property. Their
farm had been the site of previous clan rallies 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
(39:46):
day affair was announced two weeks ahead of the event.
Local residents who opposed the clan 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
them 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
(40:09):
variety of sexual sins. But even Ron McCrae hated the clan.
I'm not totally sure why he hated the clan, to
be honest. I mean, his own religious beliefs included the
idea that sex outside your own race is within the
biblical definition of the sin of fornication. So it's not
(40:29):
like he's not racist. But nevertheless, he apparently enjoyed the picnic.
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
(40:50):
eye on the Penrod farm, specifically on Barry Black. Barry
would later explain to a reporter that the reason his
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
(41:11):
and just a little more clan vocabulary. Those security guards
are the Nighthawks. And while these armed guards were under
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
(41:34):
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
lawlessness going on at 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
(41:57):
the constable again, but here he is bragging about it
to a reporter, and that's going to bite him in
the ass. Later sometime that afternoon, just as it was
about time to start setting up the cross that they
were going to burn.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
When the sun went down, the nighthawks saw something.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
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. 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
(42:37):
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 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
(42:58):
else was armed to the absolute tea, 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 Emig would later 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
(43:21):
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 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
(43:42):
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 was at
this point that Bivins drew his own weapon and the
klansmen scattered. And now now the state police had a
(44:05):
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 Bendix
was found hiding under a blanket, and Adam Moyer was
also taken into custody. But it doesn't say where he
was hiding. Don Penrod was nowhere to be found that afternoon,
(44:30):
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 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,
(44:54):
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 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
(45:15):
ownership of the submachine gun. But the judge did order
the police to return Barry's ceremonial clan sword, but they
kept the guns. It took 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,
(45:40):
Michael Abraham got nine months for simple assault, and Adam
Moyer was acquitted on all accounts. One article notes that
Betecks got more 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.
(46:02):
In twenty twelve, he was the president of his local
chapter of the Pagan's Motorcycle Club when he was federally
indicted for cocaine 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
(46:24):
own property as collateral to bail out Abraham and Moyer.
Bendix was held without bond due to the prole violation,
and when 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
(46:46):
against state Police Sergeant Bivins, the trooper who drew his
gun on the klansmen who were pointing their guns at
another state trooper, and the county prosecutor filed a petition
to have Barry removed from the office of constable. 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
(47:08):
been convicted of too many crimes. Complaining about the police
intrusion on his picnic, Barry told the local newspaper, the
state police are like 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
(47:31):
that's where I'm going to leave it today. We'll pick
up next time with Barry's second court battle to keep
his job as Cambria County Constable, and then follow him
to Virginia where he'll light the cross that takes him
all the way to the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
Until then I don't know.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Try to love your neighbors like Pat Kramer did, and
don't bring a Tommy gun to a family picnic.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Little Guys to production of cool Zone Media. For more
from cool Zone
Speaker 2 (48:03):
Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Col Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
In nineteen forty eight, there was a rash of crossburnings
in Suffolk. Virginia newspapers throughout the late forties and all
through the fifties assure the reader that there is no
Ku Klux clan activity in Virginia. Local clan groups had
more or less died out in the mid forties, and
Virginia wouldn't really see a rise in widespread organized clan
(00:28):
activity until the threat of integrated schools whipped aggrieved white
men back into a frenzy in the fifties. But the
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 Nurneville. And whether or not the
(00:51):
local prosecutor believed that the clan still existed, everyone in
the South knows what a burning cross means. The third
one in that neighborhood. In recent months, the local prosecutor
had simply shrugged, it's not illegal to burn across two
thousand members of a local peanut workers union approved a
(01:13):
resolution demanding a response from the Governor and Attorney General, writing,
we reject the hair splitting 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.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
And terrorism are.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
That 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 cross burning in Virginia, he
(02:02):
was barely 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.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
The Supreme Court.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, little guys. There
(02:37):
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 degree of a
(03:00):
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 defendant
(03:22):
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 the
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.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
And I'm going to tell you about some of those men.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
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
(04:04):
little notebook probably one hundred times. Commonwealthy 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 marginers.
So Commonwealthy Black, that's all I really needed to know.
(04:28):
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
(04:50):
found wasn't just some boring bit of backstory about constitutional
law and legislative history.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I mean, we're definitely going to do some of.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
That, But they 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 of people whose stories are
worth knowing. This episode is just the first half of
Barry Black's story, and we won't even get to his
(05:18):
precedent setting appeal until next week.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
This week, it's.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
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 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
(05:43):
to talk about Barry Black, the clansmen who fought the
law all the way to the Supreme Court and won.
Barry Elton Black and his twin brother, Bruce, were born
two months before their mother's seventeenth birthday. Their twenty three
year old father, also named Bruce, didn't stick around. When
(06:06):
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. 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.
(06:30):
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 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
(06:51):
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 Barry, and lacks
specificity as to exactly why he was in jail in
nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
One report at.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
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 like he might have just been guilty of having
a good time, but he got himself into some extra
(07:28):
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 the men were missing until Barry's brother called the
sheriff to say he'd gotten a call from Barry earlier
(07:51):
that afternoon and he wanted to know if his brother
had posted bond The sheriff assured Bruce that no, Barry
hasn't bonded out. He's still in his cell, but he
was not. Barry was only free for about six hours
after this daring jail break. The other two men hid
(08:11):
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
the escape. It's not clear what the paternity case entailed,
(08:34):
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 autopart 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.
And then he went back to jail in nineteen seventy
(08:56):
six for stealing a gun from his brother.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
He escaped again, this.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
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
just caught probation, and he was given probation again when
he was convicted in nineteen eighty six for illegally possessing
(09:22):
a revolver. And that's all there really was to know
about berry 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 trouble,
except for that gun charge in nineteen eighty six, but
by nineteen eighty nine he's a klegal in his local clan. Now,
(09:47):
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 like joining this
society for creative anachronism or getting into dungeons and dragons.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
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 oh my god, do they
(10:26):
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 members to his local clan
(10:47):
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. Each one is made up of,
(11:10):
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 of the goofy nineteenth century made
(11:32):
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
a point henchmen called goblins. I don't think they kept
the goblins the second time around, which just seems like
a huge loss, you know.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
But anyway, so.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
By nineteen ninety, Barry is the Grand Titan of western Pennsylvania.
Sylvania has a Grand Dragon, and the Grand Dragon appoints
the Grand Titans, and Bury's 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,
(12:15):
with an estimated three hundred members in Pennsylvania 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 and little towns all over the state
(12:35):
every year, and nobody wanted it. Nobody's 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 Carmichael's, Pennsylvania. The town fought
(12:57):
tooth and nail to prevent it, but he was to
turn to put on a show and even tried 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 Barry take them to court.
The town closed down every shop and restaurant that day
out of protest, and residents lined the streets to watch
(13:18):
a few dozen men walk about half a mile with
Barry leading them a chance of what do we want
white power?
Speaker 1 (13:25):
When do we want it now? Scoofy.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
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
the paper meant the town was depressed, like economically. It
kind of just sounds like the town was just depressed
(13:53):
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
this once and it didn't work, did it. Barry told
the paper that his marches weren't a racial thing, but
(14:14):
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
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
(14:37):
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.
The office of constable is kind of a holdover from
the olden days. It's kind of a cop, but not really.
(15:00):
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
the main roles of the constable is the destruction of
dangerous dogs. So I guess there are guys in Vermont
(15:20):
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
the office he won was for constable in a single
ward of a borough of a county, and he was
(15:40):
able to secure a victory without even really running. He
won with just a few dozen ride in votes because
no one was running. I looked up some recent voter
turnout stats for Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and Johnstown's twenty first
ward had four hundred and four registered voters in twenty
twenty three, and only one hundred and seven of them
(16:02):
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
was any kind of specific issue. The Constable of the
(16:22):
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 too Barry's six year term
as constable, Cambria County District Attorney Timothy Creeney noticed that
they had a klansman serving papers for the court. How
much he could really do about that, though it's not
(16:43):
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 Bear he removed from office
on the grounds that Pennsylvania doesn't allow people convicted of
(17:04):
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 the courthouse himself, dressed in a white robe,
(17:27):
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 courtroom with his personal bodyguard, a
man in fatigues and a black beret. He was no
longer just a legal or a grand Titan. Barry was
(17:48):
calling himself the Grand Dragon.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
Now.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Over the next few months, Barry staged several protests of
what he called this violation of his civil rights, and
he appealed at all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
In October of nineteen ninety four, that court upheld the decision.
They agreed that his criminal history made him ineligible for
the office of constable. That same month, several local papers
(18:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
See, in the pre internet days, you.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Couldn't have a website, right, so groups like the Clan
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
(18:49):
Barry Black stating that for security reasons, the time and
exact location will be announced with twelve hours notice, saying
we have gone to modern technology.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
We use fax machines, etc.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
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, it's nineteen ninety four, and
you get a fax from your local clig Grap that
the nighthawks are needed at the Satanic Halloween parade to
(19:24):
enforce white Christian morals.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
I mean, it's baffling, baffling.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Klig Grap is the title for the clan secretary, and
the nighthawks are the security cards. So I guess you
know the Kliggrap 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
(19:52):
like that. He was not planning to protest the Halloween parade.
He said that was just a rumor started by fellow
clansman Roy franks Kauser, the leader of a splinter group
called the White Unity Party. Barry explained to the reporter
that if frank Kauser wanted the White Unity Party to
be allowed to join Barry's new clan organization, the Keystone
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, then frank Kauser would
(20:14):
need to accept that he didn't have Barry's permission to
be doing things like holding a press conference about Halloween
parades 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,
(20:36):
although agents from the FBI and the ATF denied that
on various occasions, sometimes under oath. But I'm not sold.
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
(20:57):
an uncited edit to his Wikipedia page claiming that his
hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania, celebrated his death by holding a parade.
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 Frankauser was beefing with Barry, And it's hard
to say with any kind of certainty, but I wonder
(21:20):
if it was Frankhauser who met with the FBI in
nineteen ninety four. Barry's FBI file has a few heavily
redacted pages about an aspiring clan informant who reported that
he was present at a clan meeting when Barry Black
said the Klan had a plan to deal harshly with traitors.
The informant told the FBI that Barry Black had automatic
(21:41):
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, though
the Pittsburgh Field Office downgraded and then ultimately closed the investigation,
fighting the tipsters quote inability to factually corroborate any of
(22:04):
his allegations to make them believable.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
So Barry is keeping pretty busy.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
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 crossburnings
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 bar was the site of
(22:44):
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 Merrik Kramer, a straight couple
in their fifties with grown children, bought an old tavern
on Route nine eighty five in nineteen ninety five. They
(23:06):
ran it as a restaurant for two years before deciding
in January of nineteen ninety seven to start catering to
gay clientel. 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 customers drive in
from as far as Maryland and West Virginia for their
(23:28):
tea dances, a kind of gay singles event whose name
is the 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, We served dinner
from four to six pm. I do all the cooking.
(23:50):
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 the early Obama years,
this may not be the first time you've heard of
(24:11):
Ron McCrae. 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. In December of
(24:33):
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
(24:53):
sourced false claim that Obama's Kenyan grandmother, 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
(25:14):
phone call Ron McCrae had with her via a translator
in October two thousand and eight, and McCray 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
(25:37):
off silly complications, like the fact that the lawsuit was
dismissed as being utterly without merit. 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
(26:00):
Obama herself rather than from McCrae, who was merely repeating
what he claimed she said to him.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
CanYa, before he gave birth to one of Berthaism'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
(26:46):
western Pennsylvania preaching the Word of God to unwilling congregants
on street corners, who 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
(27:07):
origin of mccray's street preacher's fellowship, who was a fairly
litigious collective of amateur street preachers who would scream Bible
verses on street corners until the police would intervene, and
then they would sue. And that seems like what he
was trying to do to Patricia Kramer and her customers
outside Casanova almost every weekend.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
For four years.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Ron McCrae was the loudest and most persistent opponent to
the gay bar, but he 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,
(27:55):
those are flyers 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
(28:18):
happened to 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
(28:40):
hardcore gay 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 elves, who ever made any claim
(29:01):
to have seen 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 renamed Casanova Road to Hemlock Road. In
May of nineteen ninety seven, the Penrods invited the clan
(29:23):
over Barry Black's Keystone Knights, used the Penrod's farm as
a staging area to park down their robes, and then
marched 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 Penrod's property for a cross burning. Patrons
(29:47):
at the bar would have been able to see the
glow from the flames when they pulled 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 seve he got elected constable again.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Just as he had in nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
He managed to secure a victory in Johnstown's twenty first
ward on write in votes alone. This time though he
got one. He got one vote. Nobody was running, and
I guess nobody else voted, and so he won with one.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
And I can't find.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
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. 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
(30:47):
think it would work a second time?
Speaker 1 (30:49):
And if he did do this himself, why didn't he ask.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Anyone else to do it with him? Was he surprised
when he found out he was the constable again?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
There's really no to know.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
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. There it was, and in nineteen ninety eight,
(31:27):
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 McRae
vowed to be out there every Friday and Saturday night
until the bar was forced to shut down. The Cramers
were getting death threats in the mail. The front windows
(31:50):
were smashed out with huge rocks thrown from a passing car,
but the Kramers weren't going to lie down and take it.
Speaking later to Professor tu for his essay, blame it
on the Casanova good scenery and sodomy in rural southwestern Pennsylvania,
pat said, McCray made a pledge to these neighbors that
he would have us closed in a week. Well that
(32:12):
never happened. Never happened because McCrae didn't know who I was,
and the Kramers 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 see if that makes
some kind of initialism.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
It doesn't.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
It's an 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 you
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,
poking fun at the screaming preacher in the parking lot
(32:55):
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
performed some comedic skits for patrons at the bar. Pat Kramer,
(33:20):
that straight, married woman in her fifties who 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 a lot
of her bar's patrons just call her mother. I've always
(33:41):
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 doesn't say,
but I wonder if it was at her daughter's bedside
(34:03):
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 gay people
really were than most straight suburban women were getting in
(34:24):
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 for the gay
people who lived there, and they really didn't want to
(34:44):
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 when they got there.
(35:06):
They ignored Ron McCray 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.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
And that they would burn in hell.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
I'm not sure one of those things really bothered them,
but they just walked into the bar 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.
(35:45):
I'm not sure which of McCrae'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 lefter one, Am McCray was still there,
just as they did every weekend. The protesters were there
(36:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
But they were prepared for this.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
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,
(36:51):
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.
(37:20):
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
(37:41):
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 them on the
drive up not to do this tonight. Not here they
could get charged with public disturbed and this wasn't a
friendly place to have to fight a charge. But here
(38:05):
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 Klan
with their burning crosses, and the skinheads with their Molotov cocktails,
and the street preachers with their threats of the fires
of hell. They're always surprised when a bitch burns back.
(38:42):
Barry's Clan group had staged protests directly outside Kasanova 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.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
To Washington, d c.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Where she had testified in front of the Senate Judiciary
Committee in a hearing on hate crimes legislation. No, 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'd 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
(39:22):
the clan to have a picnic on their property. Their
farm had been the site of previous clan rallies 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
(39:46):
day affair was announced two weeks ahead of the event.
Local residents who opposed the clan 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
them 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
(40:09):
variety of sexual sins. But even Ron McCrae hated the clan.
I'm not totally sure why he hated the clan, to
be honest. I mean, his own religious beliefs included the
idea that sex outside your own race is within the
biblical definition of the sin of fornication. So it's not
(40:29):
like he's not racist. But nevertheless, he apparently enjoyed the picnic.
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
(40:50):
eye on the Penrod farm, specifically on Barry Black. Barry
would later explain to a reporter that the reason his
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
(41:11):
and just a little more clan vocabulary. Those security guards
are the Nighthawks. And while these armed guards were under
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
(41:34):
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
lawlessness going on at 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
(41:57):
the constable again, but here he is bragging about it
to a reporter, and that's going to bite him in
the ass. Later sometime that afternoon, just as it was
about time to start setting up the cross that they
were going to burn.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
When the sun went down, the nighthawks saw something.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
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. 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
(42:37):
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 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
(42:58):
else was armed to the absolute tea, 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 Emig would later 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
(43:21):
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 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
(43:42):
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 was at
this point that Bivins drew his own weapon and the
klansmen scattered. And now now the state police had a
(44:05):
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 Bendix
was found hiding under a blanket, and Adam Moyer was
also taken into custody. But it doesn't say where he
was hiding. Don Penrod was nowhere to be found that afternoon,
(44:30):
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 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,
(44:54):
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 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
(45:15):
ownership of the submachine gun. But the judge did order
the police to return Barry's ceremonial clan sword, but they
kept the guns. It took 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,
(45:40):
Michael Abraham got nine months for simple assault, and Adam
Moyer was acquitted on all accounts. One article notes that
Betecks got more 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.
(46:02):
In twenty twelve, he was the president of his local
chapter of the Pagan's Motorcycle Club when he was federally
indicted for cocaine 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
(46:24):
own property as collateral to bail out Abraham and Moyer.
Bendix was held without bond due to the prole violation,
and when 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
(46:46):
against state Police Sergeant Bivins, the trooper who drew his
gun on the klansmen who were pointing their guns at
another state trooper, and the county prosecutor filed a petition
to have Barry removed from the office of constable. 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
(47:08):
been convicted of too many crimes. Complaining about the police
intrusion on his picnic, Barry told the local newspaper, the
state police are like 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
(47:31):
that's where I'm going to leave it today. We'll pick
up next time with Barry's second court battle to keep
his job as Cambria County Constable, and then follow him
to Virginia where he'll light the cross that takes him
all the way to the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
Until then I don't know.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Try to love your neighbors like Pat Kramer did, and
don't bring a Tommy gun to a family picnic.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Little Guys to production of cool Zone Media. For more
from cool Zone
Speaker 2 (48:03):
Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Molly Conger
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