LANSING, Mich. — I buy old records, mostly 78s, the thick shellac discs first produced about 125 years ago.
I’m not a collector, just looking for surprises: country music recorded before anyone called it country, half-forgotten jazz bands, voice letters that everyday folks cut onto Recordio discs.
Which is why a 78 from the Imperial Quintette of Lansing caught my eye as I was sifting through the record bin at a Volunteers of America Thrift store.
It’s rare enough to find a 78 from a Michigan band (except maybe the York Brothers’ “Hamtramck Mama”). I’d never seen one by a group from Lansing. I bought it for a dollar, expecting something mediocre but maybe interesting.
Setting it on the turntable, I saw that the first song was called “The Fiery Cross in the Vale.”
What I had was a Ku Klux Klan record, mediocre but horrible.
Where had it come from? I’ve worked as a journalist in Lansing for two decades. I have no illusions about the city as a magical bubble of antiracism, but a group of musical Klansmen was more than I expected.
Tracking down the Imperial Quintette of Lansing unspooled a story about for-profit white supremacy, an Indiana recording studio that made groundbreaking jazz records and Klan records, too, and the awful ordinariness of racism and xenophobia.
Labor Day weekend, 1924
The record itself didn’t offer many clues, just the name of the group with its odd spelling of “quintette” and the two song titles.
“The Fiery Cross in the Vale” is a rewrite of a 19th century Protestant hymn called “The Church in the Wildwood,” popularized in the 1910s by a traveling gospel group called the Weatherwax Quartet and since covered by everyone from Andy Griffith to Ella Fitzgerald.
But the second song, “In the Light of the Fiery Cross,” seems to be an original. The Imperial Quintette of Lansing copyrighted the sheet music in the summer of 1924, which put the record’s likely moment of creation within a few months of the biggest Ku Klux Klan event ever to come to Lansing.
On Labor Day weekend in 1924, Lansing was the site of a Klan meeting that drew some 50,000 people. Klansmen set up tents on a former circus ground on the east side of the city. There were speeches and music, a pilot creating a burning cross in the sky and a parade of 15,000 robed Klansmen marching through the center of town.
According to the Sept. 1, 1924 edition of The State Journal, a band called the “Imperial Quintet” played right after lunch.
The 1920s Klan
The first four pages of that day’s State Journal are lost, missing from the historical record. Michigan State University history professor Lisa Fine has called their absence “an ongoing mystery.”
“One is tempted to wonder what incriminating photos might have appeared on the first few pages of this edition,” she wrote in “The Story of REO Joe,” her book about Lansing autoworkers.
But the descriptions of the Labor Day gathering in what remains of that day’s paper and next day’s, too, are distressingly ordinary, as if an avowedly white supremacist organization prone to vigilante violence fit right into the fabric of the city.
Which it likely did.
The first Ku Klux Klan, founded in Tennessee in the wake of the Civil War “was literally a terrorist organization,” said Linda Gordon, who is the author of “The Second Coming of the KKK” and a professor of history at New York University. “Its whole reason for being was to use violence to intimidate the African American population out of any attempt to do for themselves either economically or politically.”
The second coming of the Klan, which began in 1915, was something different. It was a nationwide organization, more diverse in its hatreds. It preached a doctrine of white supremacy but also railed against immigrants, Jews and Catholics. It presented itself as a patriotic organization, as a fraternal organization not so different from the Masons or the Elks, just with more pageantry and more of a penchant for vigilante violence.
It was also run for profit.
“Its rapid explosive spread was due to the fact that its first organizer hired a PR firm, to the best of my knowledge, the first time a PR firm was used to spread a social movement,” Gordon said, “and that firm came up with a recruitment by commission system.”
Meaning members got paid for bringing in new blood, part of the reason the Klan had roughly 4 million members by the mid-1920s, including about 70,000 in Michigan.
That’s roughly one of out of every 29 people in the United States and a much higher share of native-born whites.
Lansing in the 1920s
A friendly State Journal reporter was allowed to witness an initiation in the summer of 1922 after being blindfolded for the drive into the woods on the north side of Lansing. By the following year, Klan members were meeting in Prudden Auditorium, a venue controlled by the Chamber of Commerce. In the spring of 1924, a meeting the Women of the Ku Klux Klan in Lansing drew 3,000 attendees.
In Michigan’s 1924 gubernatorial primary, Ingham County was one of the few places that supported the Rev. Frederick Perry, a Klan field organizer from Lenawee County.
Layton Aves, a former Reo Motor Car Co. worker interviewed by Fine, told her that the Klan had been instrumental in unionizing the plant.
“In order to join the union, you had to be a member of the KKK,” he told her.
His father, he said, returned from the successful 1937 sit-down strike with “a sword with a KKK emblem on it.”
As a for-profit enterprise, Gordon noted, the Klan “sold an enormous amount of paraphernalia.”
Gennett, jazz and the Klan
What is shocking about the 1920s Klan is not just its size but “how embedded in everyday life it was,” said Felix Harcourt, author of the book “Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s” and a professor of history at Austin College in Texas, “that you could go to the newsstand and buy a Klan newspaper, that you could go to the record store and buy a Klan record.”
The Klan was savvy about spreading its message through popular culture. The organization owned sports teams and radio stations. Local chapters staged beautiful baby contests and public concerts, including one in the spring of 1924 that filled Lansing’s Prudden Auditorium twice. Members published novels and made films.
And they made records: sermons, speeches, repurposed Gospel songs.
“There were joke records, ragtime or jazzy records. There was a song called ‘Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan,’” said Kyle Barnett, a professor of media studies at Bellarmine University in Kentucky and the author of “Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry.”
“What’s so weird about this is that a lot of the musical styles they’re pulling from when you’re doing that those recordings are from African American, Irish Catholic and Eastern European musical traditions,” he added, “which I don’t think probably ever occurred to the folks recording those records.”
The Imperial Quintette record gives no indication of where it was made, but Barnett said one recording studio is a likely candidate.
Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana, made some of the first recordings of Black jazz and blues artists, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Charley Patton among them.
But Gennett also had a side business making “personal records…small run, one-time print, cash for boxes of records,” Barnett said.
Indiana was a Klan stronghold. When Klan members wanted to record, they often went to Gennett. Members of the Gennett family, who were Italian and not members of the Klan, accepted the business.
There are plenty of reasons to criticize that choice, Barnett said, but “you could look at it another way and say some of the money that the Klan paid for those recordings to be printed up actually went into the funding of some of jazz’s foundational recordings.”
The Quintette
The Imperial Quintette of Lansing didn’t put their names on the record they made, but they did include them when they filed for copyright on the music for “In the Light of the Fiery Cross.”
They were Roscoe Howland, James Pearse, Stanley Pearse, Cass Baker and Earl Harton. Those men also performed together as the Wolverine Quartet; on the REO Motor Car Co. radio station; with the REO Motor Car band; at a Masonic rally representing Capital chapter, No. 9, Royal Arch Masons; at churches and Thanksgiving celebrations.
A photograph of them published in The State Journal in 1926 shows them in tuxedos, all but one wearing serious expressions, young men whose enthusiasm for a hateful organization didn’t make them outsiders in their community.
Harriet Vaugeois knew Cass Baker. She is his granddaughter. She didn’t know about his association with the Klan before I reached out to her family.
She has no patience for the likes of the Klan.
“Misguided and easily indoctrinated people are still being told that they are unhappy and their lives are being ruined, and they’re being told who is responsible for their own failures and those responsible are ‘the others,’ the people who don’t look like them,” she wrote in an email.
She knew her grandfather as an “inventor and artist,” as a role model “for appreciating and embracing what ‘others’ bring to our lives.”
He didn’t teach his children “to hate Black-skinned people,” she wrote, “and those children became our parents, who did not teach us to hate and fear Black-skinned people.”
Mistakes
Old racist records sell for a fair amount of money. At an online auction in December, the starting bid for a copy of the Imperial Quintette’s record was $99.
I talked with a dealer in Texas who sells old Klan records. He insisted they’re “just history.” But “just history” feels like it’s covering a lot of sins.
I don’t want the record. I won’t sell it. I won’t throw it in the trash, either.
I’m giving it to the Historical Society of Greater Lansing, because our mistakes are worth remembering, especially when we keep making them.
This story was originally published on MLive.com. Matthew Miller did a portion of the reporting while working as the executive producer at FOX 47.
Want to see more local news? Visit the FOX47News Website.
For more news in your neighborhood, go to the In Your Neighborhood page on our website.
Stay in touch with us anytime, anywhere.
Sign up for newsletters emailed to your inbox.
Select from these options: Neighborhood News, Breaking News, Severe Weather, School Closings, Daily Headlines, and Daily Forecasts.
