A Flogging for the Klan

During 1951, night marauders, robed and hooded, terrorized the residents of Columbus County, N.C. Thirteen citizens --three Negroes, ten whites--were dragged out of their homes and flogged by the Ku Klux Klan (TIME, Feb. 25). The revived Klan was determined to run things in the county and the state.

The first victim was a 38-year-old Negro woman named Evergreen Flowers. Forty or 50 Klansmen stormed her house one night, chased her husband away, shot up the place with a hundred bullets, gagged the woman with her slip, tied her legs with plow lines and beat her with sticks and gun butts. Just why she was flogged was not clear. Klansmen said vaguely that she had been "running around with white men." Others were flogged for not attending church regularly, cursing near women, drinking too much.

While residents of Columbus County bolted their doors, FBI men and state police went to work. They rounded up more than threescore Klansmen, including "the big one," Thomas Hamilton, who had quit his wholesale grocery business in Leesville, S.C., to become the full-time Imperial Wizard of the Klan in the Carolinas, had boasted that he would reawaken the Klan all over the U.S.

Last week, in Whiteville, the Klan got the hardest legal flogging in its history. Superior Court Judge Clawson Williams sentenced Wizard Hamilton, who had pleaded guilty, to four years in prison for conspiracy to assault. Fifteen of Hamilton's sheet-wearers got sentences averaging three years each, and 49 others were fined a total of $18,250. Even Hamilton's top lieutenant in Columbus County, Ex-Con stable Early Brooks, already sentenced to prison, was glad to see the wizard get it. "Somebody ought to be assigned to whip hell outa him," said Brooks. "And I'd like to be the man."

Judge Williams, speaking for himself and the other North Carolina officials who . had dared to go after the organization many a Southern officeholder fears, summed up the case in a sentence: "The time has not come in North Carolina when a man must barricade himself in his home with the setting sun."

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