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  • Description is exactly "More research needs to be done however it doesn’t appear as though Florence actually had a Klavern, or Klan chapter, until April of 1925 because public sentiment in Florence-Lauderdale was generally opposed to the Klan. According to the Florence Herald in September of 1921 “Florence turned down the organization.” In 1921 city officials of Florence supported by the Florence Herald and Florence Times repudiated the Klan specifically because of its secretive, violent, vigilante nature (though not specifically for its racism).

    On September 16, 1921, Florence Times editor Ambrose Camper wrote an editorial denouncing the Klan in which he stated:

    "This paper was one of the first to take up the cudgels [sic] against it [the Klan], and the more we see of its movements and effects, the more we are against it. It is calculated to do infinite damage to the south, and can be productive of no good, but of much harm."

    The Florence Herald, too, came out against the Klan, on September 23, 1921 stating that, "There is no longer any reason for the Ku Klux Klan in this country. . . . We are glad Florence turned down the organization—refused to have anything to do with it."

    Local clubs and service organizations such as Florence’s Rotary Club also publicly" repudiated the Klan and in the 1926 Lauderdale county elections Republican candidates publicly accused several Democratic nominees for county and city offices of being backed by the Klan, asking voters if they wanted elected officials who were responsible to all of the electorate, or only to “that unknown element and invisible force” known as the Ku Klux Klan.” Thus Florence’s relationship with the Ku Klux Klan seems to have been ambivalent at best.

    Unfortunately despite all of this, by April of 1925 (possibly, even earlier, in May of 1923) Florence Klan No. 37, Realm of Alabama had been founded. Thankfully no reports of Klan violence against minorities in Lauderdale has been discovered (though on one occasion in July of 1925 Klan No. 37 used tactics designed to intimidate two houses of prostitution, one on East Sweetwater Street and the other—probably Kate Nelson’s—on South Seminary). If such racially motivated violence occurred, it went unreported. We need to do more research but Klan No. 37 seems to have fizzled out by 1928; no reference to it has been located in local papers after August of 1927, again, possibly because public sentiment in Florence, led by the press and city officials, was against it.

    The first appearance of the Klan in Colbert County occurred in Sheffield. on Saturday night, November 25, when a group of out-of-town Klansmen in fifteen automobiles, with covered license plates, from "the east" staged a parade through the Streets of Sheffield."
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