Sometimes you can meet a person and feel blessed. I don’t mean touched by the hand of God. I just mean you feel renewed, restored and pretty sure there’s goodness in the world. And that, in itself, is a blessing.
The man in question is the Reverend Dr Thomas Lane Butts Jr, aged 81, retired pastor of the Uniting Methodist Church in Monroe County, Alabama. His older brother was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The Rev Butts was not.
He battled the Klan for years, but particularly in the 1950s, when Alabama and neighbouring Mississippi were the Klan heartlands. They had always been a presence, but had in recent years been sleeping lightly. Their cause was fully awoken as the Civil Rights movement began its fight in the south.
In this part of the world, turn on the car radio and you’ll need to keep hitting that search button for try to escape the good old boy preachers who rant about Satan comin’ to git ya. Their hatred for homosexuals is unconcealed.
And then you’ll need to keep pressing to get past the bad country God bands in order to find some good atheist rock.
The Rev Butts may look like a flashy southern preacher. He wears a white pin-stripe suit, white stocking socks and black patent slip on shoes with gold buckles. But his lovely southern drawl - in which you can hear the voice of Johnny Cash, who grew up next door in Mississippi—is gentle and steady. He doesn’t want your soul, or your money.
In an hour-long conversation with the Rev Butts, he didn’t mention Satan or God, except to say that he started off trying to save people but in the end realised the only person who needed saving was himself.
Tom Butts grew up on a two-mule farm near Repton, in the south-west of the state. Nowhere was race more sharply segregated than Alabama. It was not too far from here in the capital, Montgomery, where Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for not giving up her bus seat to a white passenger on a town bus. In Birmingham, white supremacists bombed black churches and businesses.
The Klan could count on the support of at least one third of the population in any town or city. They were embedded in the police forces, the city halls, and the churches.
Not all Klan members lynched, tortured, bashed and bombed. But all of them made threats. Much of their activity was subtle but grinding. They threatened simply by their very existence, but also issued intimidation in the form of menacing notes, smear campaigns and the burning of crosses.
Of course, it got much worse than that. The photo in the Birmingham Civil Rights museum of the two black teenagers hanging from a tree in a town square, while the white crowd smiles and points, depicts cruelty less fathomable than any murder carried out in times of war or civil insurrection.
There’s a white satin Klan robe in the same museum, donated by “Anonymous”. But the photo proves you didn’t need to wear white robes to be in the Klan.
“I grew up in a county where they used to say 50 per cent of the sheets had eyeholes cut in them,” says Rev Butts. “I didn’t have much direct contact with the Klan when I was growing up. I knew of their existence.
“But later my older brother became a member of the Klan in Mobile (on the coast). When I came home from graduate school in 1957, I was assigned to a church in Mobile with about 700 members, in a low-rent section of town, all of them rednecks - and I can say that, because that’s what I am - and that’s where I had my first direct confrontation with the Klan.
“I had been at that church three months. And I got a visit from three or four men from the church, who came to advise me that it was the policy of the church that every third Sunday night the Klan would visit the church.
“They said, ‘We’ll come in with our robes and our hoods on, and when you’re singing your first hymn, we’ll march down the aisle, put money on the altar, go out the side doors, take off our regalia and come back in and worship.’
My God, I was only 27 years old. I didn’t know what to say. I finally said to them: ‘I don’t have a police force. I can’t stop you. And I’m not sure I would if I could. But if you put money on the altar in my church while I’m pastor, in the name of the Klan, when you go out the side door I’m going to scoop it up and throw it out after you.
“They never came. I thought everything was cool. And then in late in December there was a group of black ministers who drew up a petition to integrate the busses in Mobile. And their petition was to the city fathers, asking that the white line be erased.
“The white line, in case you don’t know, is the line in the bus, in front of which no black person could sit. They had to sit in the back. When they got on the bus, they came to the front door, paid their fare, walked to the back door and got on. And when the back filled, no matter how many seats were vacant up front, no black person could sit there.
“So the petition asked for the white line to be erased, for black drivers to be hired. A few of us clergy decided to support our black brothers.”
The next day, the petition was front-page news in the Mobile paper. “It listed all of our names, the churches we served, and there was a scathing editorial against us for having the temerity to mess with politics as holy men.
The first night they burned a cross in front of my church. The second night they burned a cross in front of my house. A week later they called a meeting of church members. About 75 came together to fire me.
Rev Butts confronted them, explaining that the Klan did not have the power to remove him from the church. Only the bishop could do that.
“So, in order to express their anger, they started withholding their money.” He began receiving letters addressed to “Mr” Butts, rather than Rev Butts, saying they would withhold money from the collection plate until he promised to apologise.
“It got to the point where it was hard to pay the light bill,” he says. “I was getting threatening calls.”
A man came to kill me one night. He didn’t get in any further than the back door.
Rev Butts’ older brother was working in a paper mill in Mobile. “When my name hit the papers he called me up and said, ‘You son of a bitch. I hope I never hear your name again as long as I live.’ And for several years we were estranged. But we overcame it. We were brothers. I didn’t change his mind and he never changed mine, but we were brothers. I had embarrassed him, mostly. He was embarrassed that his brother was a nigger lover.”
Rev Butts learned he had at least one white supporter in Mobile, apart from his wife. “One afternoon, I was sitting in my little office. I was looking out the window. I was thinking about how I could leave the south. I saw a woman coming across the lawn.
“She said she wanted to make a donation, handed me an envelope and kept walking. I opened it. It had two bills. I had never seen a one hundred dollar bill before. Two hundred dollars was a lot of money.
“I showed my wife. She said, ‘That’s wonderful. How are you going to get it into the system?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘You can’t take it to the treasurer because he’s a member of the Klan. You can’t put it in the offering plate.’”
Rev Butts knew a banker in a nearby town, went to see him and got the money broken down to smaller denominations.
“The lady came every Friday, bringing me between $200 to $500 in one hundred dollar bills. And every Sunday morning and every Sunday night, when every eye was closed and every head was bowed, I’d drop a $20 into each plate.
“It was my first experience laundering money. We took care of all the bills and no one ever knew how we were able to do that. They still hounded me. The bishop offered to move me. And I said, no, leave me here. I’ll either make a church out of this or they’ll break me. I ended up staying five years.”
The Klan followed the Rev Butts to his next church across the bay from Mobile in Foley. “They sent letters ahead, everywhere I’d go. They said I was a communist, or communist-inspired, or a socialist and a nigger lover and an integrationist.”
Pressure also came from the White Citizens Council. They were the equivalent of the Klan, but wore suits and ties. “Their slur was that you were a communist. I happen to be theologically and socially liberal. But I survived it. The last communication I had with the Klan was about 1984, when I was back in the Mobile area. I came home one afternoon and there was a Klan card in the door, with a note:
We are watching you, and we don’t like what we see.
“And that’s the last I ever heard of them.”
Rev Butts met Dr Martin Luther King before he became well known. King, a Baptist, stunned him with his erudition, gentleness and general brilliance. “Martin Luther King was the first black person that I ever met who was not a field hand,” says Rev Butts. “And he had a PhD from Boston.”
People sometimes ask Rev Butts how he developed his views, growing up as he did. He says his little sister taught him. “We used to sit on the front porch and wait for the little school bus to pick us up and take us to Repton, eight miles away,” he says.
“And while we were there a little group of black children would walk past our house. We knew they’d already been walking for an hour. And we knew when drove to Repton and got off our bus, they were still walking. They went to a little rundown school in Nichburg, with worn-out text books that had been used by white children and thrown out and given to black people.
“And I’ll never forget my baby sister, when she was in the first grade, saying: ‘Why can’t they get on the bus and go to school with us?’ See, she hadn’t become a racist yet. And the older people would say, ‘Well, you’ll understand when you grow up.’ But she never did understand and I never did either. There was something bad wrong.
“I did not have a black classmate till I left the south to study. Not a single one. I look back on it now and realise how really oppressive it was for black people. And what was oppressive for them was oppressive for white people too, unbeknownst to them.
“To hold someone down, you have been down there with them, holding them down. We were wounded by racism, not as much as black people, but we were wounded also.
“Integration would never have come calmly in the south. It took the shedding of blood, a revolution. When you’re holding four aces, you don’t want to re-deal. And we in the south would never have given in, had we not been forced to by the law. I’m surprised that I survived professionally in the south. I came that close to leaving. Many ministers did leave.”
Rev Butts does not feel he’s describing ancient history. The views of the south are deeply held, and many from those times are still alive and have taught their children. The battlegrounds now are the oppression of Mexican immigrants, legal or otherwise, and gay and lesbians.
He’s not a person who feels any cause is hopeless. He did his older brother’s funeral three years ago. “In the latter years of his life he joined a Pentecostal Assembly of God church, which had black preachers. But my brother sat and worshipped with black people. He was still racist, but he changed.”
Paul Toohey is News Ltd’s US Correspondent. His column, American Story, appears every Saturday on the app sites of the major News Ltd papers.
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