A New Justice
The Ku Klux Klan in Denton operated as an open secret. By and large, the people of Denton County knew the names of the members of Klavern 136 for the same reason that they knew who was a member of the Masonic lodge: they told them. But, in an era where history will not stay subterranean, where mass graves are excavated and national memorial museums are built to chronicle the horrors beyond language committed against Black bodies while white families ate picnics and white children collected bone fragments as souvenirs, there appears to be no serious effort made to identify the true criminals of the lynching era. The purpose of this map is to sift through the destroyed records and selective historical silence to name the white men who killed Black Dentonites from the close of the Civil War until the brave grief of Mamie Till cut through white apathy in 1955.
In 1922, the Ku Klux Klan used masks, hoods, and the darkness of night to obscure their identities. Since that time, members and descendents of Klavern 136 have shifted to record destruction, selective memory, and denialism. The result is the same: modern obscurist technologies construct a foundation for Ku Klux apologism. Without active effort to uncover what lurks in our shared historical shadows, we allow the mass-produced masks of the 1920s Klan to obscure and distort our understanding of the present.
So, please play with this map. Sort and trace connections, dig through the sources presented here and those tucked in the corner of your great-aunt's attic so that together, we can work toward a new justice.
Rethinking Violence