'We will parade anyhow'
Klansmen, women, and children marched in Washington D. C. on August 8, 1925. [silent film]
On Monday, December 19, 1921, 330 hooded Klansmen marched in the streets of Denton from Robert E. Lee High School, where they put on their regalia, to the courthouse square where Mayor H. V. Hennan addressed the crowd of hooded attendees. 
Several thousand people watched the procession as Klansmen carried a burning cross and a sign that said “Denton Klan, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” This was the first official action of Klavern 136.
Fraternal orders were both common and popular in the post-WWI years, many of which attempted to emulate the Masons. The Ku Klux Klan, however, had what the Masons did not: a boldness rooted in masked identities. The practice of marching through town squares, sometimes in defiance of government officials, was empowering to the Klan and spectacular to its streetside audience. Klan members lined up in wide-spaced rows, occasionally even in a single-file line, to increase the perception of their membership. The parades were silent which lent to both the solemn ritual of the Klan and the eerie goosebumps of spectators. Where the Reconstruction Era Ku Klux Klan fumbled in its costumery (more Insane Clown Posse concert-goer than mysterious specter by modern standards, perhaps?), the Second Ku Klux Klan appeared ghost-like by cross light in its parades at dusk which seemed to invoke a mystic sense of divine justice in its violent acts at night.
Parades and initiations went hand in hand. The day of a parade would close with a nighttime initiation in a field or pasture, lit by the headlights of ditch-parked cars and, perhaps a burning cross. The excitement of a dual-event-filled day satiated the motto for Colonel Mayfield's Weekly (a Klan newspaper out of Houston) "Just to Pep Up the Game; This Slow Life Is Killing Me."
Klan parades were not always peaceful. After a department-wide effort to prevent the Klan from marching in McKinney, the Collin County Sheriff's Department started a fisticuff with the Ku Klux Klan during their December 1922 parade. Press reports vary widely (based upon Klan sympathies or antipathies on the editorial board), but it seems likely two Collin County Deputy Sheriffs unmasked a marching member of the Klan as he walked by in the procession. The parade devolved into a "free-for-all rock throwing fight" between two members of the Klan-rebuking Collin County Sheriff's Department and the marching Klansmen. One report asserted, "several klansmen received bruised heads" from the "flying missiles" (rocks) as a result of the fight. Many Denton Klansmen attended as well as others from the interurban line, many of whom participated in the McKinney parade.
However, in his 1962 book Crusade for Conformity, Charles C. Alexander asserted such protests to Klan parades were rare. "The great majority of local officials either belonged to the order and encouraged the demonstrations, bowed before the Klan's power in their communities, or did not even know the events were going to occur until the Klansmen appeared." Alexander's explanation agrees with H. P. Fry's 1922 exposé, The Modern Ku Klux Klan. On the issue of Klan parades, Fry recalled a conversation with the King Kleagle of Tennessee where Fry asked how the Ku Klux Klan intended to get around the mask ban imposed by the Code of Tennessee. The King Kleagle replied:
"Oh that's all right. When we are fully organized the Klan will control the politics of this town. We will apply for a permit, and if we don't get it, we will parade anyhow. Nobody will dare stop us."
"America is in danger!" bellowed Presbyterian minister Dr. E. L. McEldowney from Denton town square one hour before the Klan parade began. McEldowney was brought in from West Virginia as the official Ku Klux Klan lecturer for Denton's parade, introduced to the busy crowd by Denton's own medical official, Dr. H. G. Fleming. McEldowney explained the Klan's concerns with Russian immigrants and that they were not necessarily opposed to Catholics or Jews but, "the Catholic church is opposed to the Bible and in some states the Bible can not be read to the students in the public schools." McEldowney continued his firebrand, shifting to foreign-born criminals who, according to his speech, account for "forty-eight per cent of the inmates in the jails, penitentiaries, and houses of prostitution in this country."
"During the Revolution our fathers sang 'The Star Spangled Banner,' during the Civil War 'Dixie' was sung, but while the world war was raging, while our boys were giving their lives in France, while the world was being drenched in blood, what did we sing? We sang 'Good Bye Broadway. Hello France.'"
Forty-five minutes after dusk, a woman on a small white horse escorted by two klansmen (on foot, one on each side) approached the town square. Shortly after, two mounted klansmen carried American flags as they rode. The trio of horses were followed by two lighted crosses (one electric and one adorned with flares) which led the path of a car filled with masked and unmasked women. Unmasked men rode on the fenders of the female-filled automobile and the whole crowded car scene was followed by "thirteen hooded women on foot." Finally, the double column of klansmen arrived - 125 rows deep - with seemingly-random klansmen on horseback interspersed throughout.
The klansmen marched from East Hickory Street near a cotton-yard to the square, around it, and out West Hickory Street where a "sandwich fest" awaited the marchers at nearly 10pm.
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