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  When word got out about the incident, Howard denied his involvement. “Anybody could have done something like that,” he told reporters, stressing that he’d given out stacks of bumper stickers in the past. “Reverend Kennedy has used this to start more racial overtones in efforts to create media publicity for his cause.”

  Weeks earlier, Kennedy had scheduled a meeting at the church for the Monday after Easter. He’d been planning a walk to the statehouse, a demonstration that would keep his fight against the shop front and center in state lawmakers’ minds. “We’ll be standing against the Redneck Shop, racism, and the Confederate flag,” he had told reporters. “We’ll be marching for better conditions for working people. It is all connected. We want to see a better America. We want to see a coming together of all people.”

  After the sticker was discovered, however, Kennedy changed the meeting from a planning session into a unity rally. Members of the choir sang “Amazing Grace,” and the executive director of the NAACP’s state branch, Brenda Reddix-Smalls, spoke in defiance of the vandalism. “We’re not afraid of the Redneck Shop,” she said to the crowd of about sixty. “We are not afraid of the Klan.”

  Michael Burden was there, too, once again sharing his story of escaping from the Klan, urging members to protect and stand by their church. No amount of rallies and speeches, however, could change the fact that many parishioners were starting to feel afraid. Wilhelmina Bates, Kennedy’s aunt and a member of the choir, said to the Greenville News: “Every time we hear a sound, you can’t concentrate. When we open a door, is it going to blow up?”

  The Easter celebration and the next day’s rally marked a turning point at New Beginning. For the first time, Kennedy noticed that some members of his congregation had opted to stay home rather than come to services. He didn’t know it then, but that day would mark the beginning of a steady, slow decline in the church’s attendance.

  * * *

  —

  Maybe it was the sticker that finally pushed him over the edge, or the fact that the Redneck Shop was still open for business even after it had cost him so much. But as winter turned into spring, Burden was desperate. Even with continued support from the church, he couldn’t get on his feet financially, couldn’t provide for his young family. His stepchildren were still being harassed at school, and Judy was consumed with worry over how she would feed and clothe them. “We were broke and we needed money to pay rent and power, to buy food and stuff,” she said later. “I told Mike, ‘There’s only one way I can figure out how to do it at this point.’ ”

  Burden had already sold his truck for spending money. He had only one real asset left to his name—even if he was only a partial owner. Selling that asset was perhaps his only chance to turn his life around, not to mention pay Kennedy and the church back for their kindness. So one day in mid-April, a few weeks after Easter, Burden and his wife arrived at New Beginning with a proposal for the reverend: they wanted him to buy their remainder interest in the Redneck Shop.

  Kennedy was, suffice it to say, reluctant. He was uncomfortable with the implication that Burden owed him anything, or that his church had helped someone in need with the expectation of later collecting on the debt. “We were not helping you to put you in bondage to us,” he said to Burden. “We helped because it was the right thing for us to do.”

  “I know that,” Burden said. “But I want you to have it. You helped us out when nobody else would.”

  As Kennedy considered the offer, his mind flooded with thoughts. His plans for the multicultural center had never gotten off the ground because he could never raise enough money. But what if he could turn the Redneck Shop into a place meant to foster racial tolerance? In the meantime, if Kennedy owned the building, maybe he could require Howard to comply with his requests for inspections. Maybe he could get the City Council to take his concerns more seriously. What if this was the thing he’d been praying for—the chance to close down the shop for good?

  “Okay,” Kennedy said. “You want to talk business, let’s talk business. How much you asking for it?”

  Burden smiled. “One thousand dollars.”

  It took Kennedy several days to discuss the strange proposal with members of his church, to run the decision by his advisers, and to rake together the money, but on April 23, he and the Burdens visited a real estate attorney in Laurens to sign the necessary paperwork. Within days, the sale of the Redneck Shop to a predominantly black church sparked a fresh round of attention in the national press. The “redneck and the reverend,” as they were called, sat for interviews with ABC Nightly News and a slew of national newspapers, and Kennedy started to revel in having struck an unlikely blow against the Klan and John Howard. “I’m his landlord,” he told the Washington Post. “I know he’s about to go out of his mind.”

  * * *

  —

  The pride of the Piedmont Jubilee is an annual county-wide carnival in Laurens, a three-day festival featuring food, arts and crafts, live entertainment, and a fireworks show, with booths and balloons and activities set up around the square and at the county fairgrounds down on East Main Street. That year’s festivities were marred, however, by yet another incident at the Redneck Shop. Three black children, ages eleven and twelve, and a twenty-eight-year-old disabled man, also black, were standing outside the store when Dwayne Howard, John Howard’s thirty-one-year-old son, leaned out the door and blasted them with pepper spray. When police showed up and arrested him, Dwayne told them that the kids had been “aggravating him.”

  Almost immediately after purchasing Burden’s remainder interest in the Redneck Shop, Rev. Kennedy had set about trying to enforce his rights to the property, in part by investigating the condition of the building. “We would like for our attorney to lead us into an inspection,” he had explained to the Laurens County Advertiser. What he perhaps did not understand at the time of purchase, however, is that he didn’t really have many rights when it came to the store. Kennedy wasn’t really Howard’s landlord, a fact the disgruntled shop owner was quick to point out when questioned about the sale. “How can a person be your landlord if he doesn’t get any rent from you?” Howard said. And while there was some question about Howard’s official responsibilities—Kennedy had been advised that life estate owners were typically responsible for keeping their property in good repair—that was a legal issue to be determined by the courts. Kennedy and his lawyer decided not to pursue it further until after Dwayne’s assault trial.

  In the meantime, he had plenty of other issues to protest. When Kemet Corp., a local electronic parts manufacturer based in Simpsonville, announced plans to shift a thousand jobs from the Carolinas to Mexico, Kennedy was there, marching alongside twenty other members of the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment, shouting a call-and-response chant into his megaphone while parading up and down the road outside headquarters: “Who’s unfair to the workers?”

  “Kemet!”

  “Who’s sending jobs to Mexico?”

  “Kemet!”

  Weeks later, when allegations surfaced that an elderly prisoner at the Johnson Detention Center in Laurens may have been abused by guards mere hours before his death from acute pneumonia, Kennedy was there, organizing a protest of the entire Sheriff’s Department.

  However, on the afternoon in October when sixty members of the Keystone Knights decided to rally on the courthouse square, Kennedy was nowhere to be found. This time, the loudest protester in the crowd was Ed McDaniel. He shouted responses to various racist remarks, offered to debate the Klansmen “on any subject,” according to the Clinton Chronicle, and invited any of the Klansmen to shake his hand—an attempt to bridge the divide, perhaps.

  * * *

  —

  With the money from the sale of the Redneck Shop, the Burdens moved to a trailer in the neighboring town of Clinton. They had hoped it would be a fresh start, that they could get back some sense of anonymit
y, that they wouldn’t be so readily associated with the Klan and the controversy back in Laurens. “But it followed us right over there,” Judy said.

  Jobs were no easier to come by in Clinton. Every time Burden managed to land something—at a junkyard, working as a roofer—his employer would figure out his backstory and fire him. He started to travel farther and farther outside of Laurens to find work. At some point, Burden and Judy were both hired at Dispoz-O, a disposable plastics manufacturer up near Greenville. “They make the plastic sporks that you use at KFC,” Burden said. But even a thirty-mile commute wasn’t far enough. Within days, their boss had discovered the strange history of his new employees. “We didn’t get fired,” Burden explained, “we got ‘asked’ to leave.”

  On top of the job struggles, Burden also seemed to be drifting away from Kennedy’s church. In mid-June, a collection was taken up to help him and Judy cover basic expenses, but he was growing tired of relying completely on the congregation. He started attending services less and less. And then all of a sudden, he stopped showing up altogether.

  Reverend Kennedy and his deacon, Clarence, had both noticed the change in Burden’s behavior. For one, he had grown clingy, needy, much less willing to let his wife out of his sight. “Mike always wanted to hang around Judy,” Kennedy said. “He couldn’t bear to be apart from her. Sometimes he didn’t want to go to work.” The reverend had chalked up Burden’s behavior to some kind of attachment disorder. Clarence was a bit more blunt: “Jealous man can’t work.” Even Judy noticed the change. “I don’t know if he was scared he was gonna lose me or what,” she said. “Maybe I give him the ‘family that he never had’ type thing, and he was scared he was gonna lose it if he turned his back or let his guard down. I don’t know.”

  As their financial situation became increasingly dire, as things looked more and more bleak, Burden only clung to Judy harder—until, finally, he was holding on way too tight.

  * * *

  —

  In the wee hours of the morning on June 29, 1998, a Spartanburg County sheriff’s deputy was patrolling the small town of Woodruff, about twenty miles north of Laurens. He turned onto Highway 101, a two-lane back road that winds through tree-lined tunnels and acres of farmland before turning onto Main Street at the south edge of town. Just past 4:00 a.m., he noticed two men moving about inside a gas station convenience store at a time when the business was supposed to be closed. The deputy cut his lights, parked his car, and headed to the rear of the building, where he waited to arrest the burglars as they exited. When he heard the back door open, he shouted from the darkness. “Stop! Police!”

  Both men bolted for the nearby trees, but the deputy radioed for a helicopter and a team of tracking dogs. Less than a mile from the store, Michael Burden was captured by the dog team. He was released on bond the next evening.

  Burden had told Judy that he’d gotten a job doing construction out of town and that he would need to be gone for a few days. “But instead of him going to work construction he was out stealing,” she said later. “Breaking into places. He was trying to keep me and my kids in a home.”

  In fact, a string of robberies in Laurens and Spartanburg and neighboring counties—all following a specific pattern—had put the authorities on alert months prior to Burden’s initial arrest. Once he got caught in the act, law enforcement officials now had a prime suspect for more than a half dozen break-ins. “They would hit businesses like convenience stores, golf courses, and bar-type places, but their favorite was convenience stores,” Chuck Milam, an investigator with the Laurens County Sheriff’s Office, later told the Greenville News. “And they never rushed into it; they’d case the places for a couple of days.”

  Burden was arrested again in early August by the Laurens County Sheriff’s Department, after they amassed enough evidence to charge him with four counts of burglary and three counts of grand larceny. Within weeks, additional charges were handed down by the Clinton police. His bail was set at $35,000.

  “I think they’ve been doing this for a couple years,” Milam said. “They just got careless.”

  Burden sat in jail until his October indictment by a grand jury. In all that time, though, he never reached out to the reverend—or to anyone else. “I was on my own,” he said later. “I got into it. It was my problem, and I was gonna get out of it.”

  This was one situation, however, that he couldn’t talk his way out of. In February 1999, as part of a negotiated sentence, Burden pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to fifteen years, with three years of that suspended, plus five years of probation. He was under no illusions that his marriage would survive—he was still shy of thirty years old; his wife was just thirty-five, with two children to care for. “That’s something I told her in the beginning,” he said. “Go on with life. I didn’t expect her to stay, waitin.” But Judy was devastated. All of the suffering, the fights, and the energy she had spent willing Michael Burden to leave the Klan behind and start a new life, and now it was over. “I put my arms around him and I gave him a kiss goodbye,” she said. “And that was it.”

  nine

  THE SUBSTANCE OF THINGS HOPED FOR, THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN

  FALL 2007

  “I know you wanted to get a copy of that deed,” she said.

  Reverend Kennedy had arrived at the Laurens County Clerk of Court’s office, a beige industrial-looking building on Hillcrest Drive, to file some paperwork on behalf of his church. New Beginning owned, or in some cases had inherited, a slew of properties in the greater Laurens area—several parcels of undeveloped land, an old nursing home, a few vacant houses. It wasn’t unusual for the reverend to pop into the office as often as two or three times a month. On that particular afternoon, Kennedy had asked one of the assistants to pull a copy of his deed to the Echo theater for his files. The assistant, however, was visibly distressed.

  “There’s two or three deeds on top of your deed,” she said, holding a small stack of papers in her hand.

  Kennedy waved her off. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “But there’s two deeds on top of it. You need to pay close attention to that.”

  Kennedy leaned forward and glanced at the papers she was holding, two additional deeds to the Echo theater, filed in 2006 and 2007, nearly a decade after he’d purchased the remainder interest from Michael Burden. He furrowed his brow. He hadn’t made any changes to his ownership status, hadn’t sold or even thought about selling his interest in the property.

  “Rev,” the assistant whispered, “are you sure you the owner?”

  * * *

  —

  Michael Burden’s comeuppance—a twelve-year prison sentence—should have been cause for celebration among the Klansmen he’d betrayed. Instead, it passed with little notice. By the time Burden was being shipped off to the maximum-security Kirkland Correctional Institution for reception and evaluation, Klan chapters all across the state were busy with troubles of their own.

  In July, four members of Barry Black’s Keystone Knights had been arrested for threatening the life of a police officer at a small rally in Boswell, Pennsylvania. A month later, Black himself was arrested in Hillsville, Virginia, for burning a cross “with the intent to intimidate”—a violation of an obscure statute that nonetheless carried a five-year prison sentence. The case would spend years winding its way through the legal system (going all the way to the Supreme Court, where his conviction was ultimately vacated), but in the summer of 1998, Black’s future—and the future of his Keystone Knights—was anything but certain.

  The Keystone Klan’s troubles paled in comparison, however, to those facing the Christian Knights. Two years after filing suit, the Southern Poverty Law Center was finally bringing its arson case on behalf of Macedonia Baptist church to trial. In his opening statement, Morris Dees pointed across the crowded courtroom at a stoic Horace King and described a man consumed by hate, a man who offered his
followers “protection” from their crimes, only to cut them loose when they got caught. Gary Christopher Cox and Timothy Welch, the men charged with setting the fires, testified in exchange for slightly reduced sentences; both said they regretted having been driven to violence by the Klan. “We were told we would not go to jail,” Welch said on the stand. “We were convinced we were untouchable.”

  It was a strong case on those merits alone—but the SPLC’s star witness turned out to be none other than Horace King himself. Dees played a video for the jury, taken at a rally in Clarendon County just a few weeks before Macedonia burned to the ground, in which King ranted and raved and shook with fury. “I tell you one thing,” he screeched into the microphone, “the county I live in and the neighborhood I live in, they ain’t no bubble-headed niggers livin in it…If you got a nigger livin on side of you, it’s your fault.”

  And another, filmed during a rally in Washington, D.C.: “If we had this garbage in South Carolina, we would burn the bastards out!”

  Video after video played to the stunned courtroom, revealing the ferocity of King’s rhetoric and the brutal truth of his intent. In the end, it was an easy victory for the SPLC. The jury deliberated for all of forty-five minutes before handing down the largest verdict against a hate group in U.S. history: $37.8 million in actual and punitive damages—$12 million more than even Macedonia’s lawyers had requested. Horace King was deemed personally responsible for $15 million, an unimaginable sum for a retiree in poor health living on little more than disability and Klan dues. His farm and his seven acres were deeded over to Macedonia, and investigators for the SPLC made it plain that any other assets, including future assets, would be seized in order to satisfy the judgment.