Today In History, 1984: KKK Marches Through Houston’s Montrose Neighborhood

Jim Burroway

June 9th, 2016

Charles W. Lee, Grand Wizard of the Pasadena, Texas-based White Camelia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, filed for a parade permit to march down Westheimer Blvd. through the heart of Houston’s gay community. While city officials sought legal advice on how to proceed, the result was pretty much a foregone conclusion: there was nothing in the city’s parade ordinance that could stop it. What’s more, a Federal Court ruling seven years earlier held that a neo-Nazi group had a First Amendment right to march down the middle of Chicago’s predominately Jewish suburb of Skokie. That decision was upheld on appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to look into the case any further.

Lee said the Klan was marching because the city’s homosexuals “have gotten out of hand here.” He blamed local churches for failing to sound the alarm over the “prostitution” and “immorality” in the Montrose neighborhood. He also compared his planned march to those of Martin Luther King, Jr., who, he said, used marches and parades to force changes in society.

The Pasadena Klan seems to have had a rather unusual pre-occupation with homosexuals. In 1977, they ran a phone answering machine message from their Pasadena bookstore which said, in part: “While many church people are duped by their brain-washed, pinky-panty preachers into believing that we should merely pray for the homosexuals, we find that we must endorse and support the law of God, which calls for the death penalty for homosexuals.” (Aug 24)

Klan PosterThe march was scheduled to take place on a busy Saturday, June 9, right in the middle of the afternoon. Leaders from the Houston Gay Political Caucus and other organizations urged everyone to “not dignify the KKK with our attendance.” A few days before the march, local gay bars received a poster depicting a hooded Klansman saying “I want YOU, Queer — Gas Homosexuals.” A number of bars posted the poster with a suggestion that it would be better to spend Saturday voting in the city’s run-off election. “At the polls, gays win,” read a response in an LGBT magazine, “At the march, no one wins.”

Apparently, most of Houston’s LGBT residents heeded the advice. Police estimated about 2,000 observers showed up for the five block march from Waugh Drive to Mason Street. Those spectators were mostly reporters, photographers, and a few curious families from the area. One father was seen telling his five-year-old son, “See those men in white robes? They’re the bad people full of hate. We’re the good people.” At Mary’s, a legendary gay bar conveniently located where the Klan’s parade began, a loudspeaker blared “Springtime For Hitler.” Six hundred police officers lined the route to protect the crowd from the Klan — or perhaps, more accurately, the other way around — as 58 Klansmen in full regalia marched down the street. The parade itself lasted all of 16 minutes, but it cost the city about $80,000 (that’s about $185,000 in today’s dollars). Other than a few beer bottles tossed toward the marchers, there were no incidents. After the march was over, the Klan boarded their busses and rode back to Channelview, where they burned a cross and a small boat lettered with “U.S.S. Viet Cong.”

[Source: Several newspaper and magazine articles posted in “When the KKK Marched Through Montrose“, a web page of HoustonLGBTHistory.org.]

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