Outlandish as it may be as a tale of vampirism in 1930s Mississippi, with subplots including Irish traditional music and the Ku Klux Klan, the movie Sinners has macabre echoes of a dark real-life event in Indiana just over 100 years ago.
We’ll come back to that shortly. First, the film: catching up with it over Christmas, I found myself squirming a little at the implications involved in an Irish-American vampire, Remmick, apparently joining forces with the Klan in his attempts to recruit a black community to the ranks of the undead.
I needn’t have worried, it turned out. As the plot unfolds, Remmick proves to be on the side of the angels, or as near to the angels as a vampire’s afterlife assurance policy allows.
Elsewhere, meanwhile, I saw the film’s director, Ryan Coogler, explain how the idea grew out of his own obsession with Irish music “and how much that stuff is loved in our [African American] community”.
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Sure enough, Sinners features a moving rendition of Wild Mountain Thyme/Will Ye Go Lassie Go, and a rousing one of Rocky Road to Dublin.
Listening to the latter, written way back in 1862, I was struck by how well it stands up 163 years on. With its driving rhythm and quick-fire lyrics, it could be considered early Hibernian hip-hop. (In fact, I believe the rhythm is of the kind known as a “hop jig” – not to be confused with a slip jig, although it can be that too, depending on the performance.)
But getting back to Remmick and his relations with the Klan, the film reminded me of a piece I wrote here three years ago while on a visit to South Bend, Indiana, and its famously Catholic university, Notre Dame.
For all the KKK’s notoriety in the deep south, Indiana was once its strongest base. In 1924, that state was Klan central, with more members – 425,000 – than Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi combined.
The organisation bordered on respectability then in the US generally, still boosted by the 1915 cinema blockbuster The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed its members as patriots defending their communities.
In South Bend, it had offices downtown. There, as elsewhere in Indiana, it benefited from the leadership of the state’s “Grand Dragon”, DC Stephenson, a charismatic and powerful figure who promoted the image of a kinder, gentler Klan, right up to the time he was jailed for rape and murder in 1925.
In the meantime, the organisation’s primary targets locally were Catholics, and Notre Dame in particular. Hence a 1924 rally in South Bend, designed to protest against the university’s insidious threat to American values, and perhaps draw a violent response from the “Fighting Irish”.
Fearing just that, university president Fr Matthew Walsh urged his students not to fall for the trap. But the students overruled him during three nights of street battles during which Klansmen were roughed up, disrobed and generally routed.
The athleticism of the college football team played a part. When a last light bulb burned in the upstairs offices, the star quarterback was deployed to smash it with a well-aimed potato.
That was a defining moment for Notre Dame. It was from then on that the university adopted what had previously been a racial insult by rivals, henceforth exulting in the “Fighting Irish” nickname.
As for the Klansmen, they might have survived that minor humiliation had it not been for the unmasking of DC Stephenson’s true nature soon afterwards.
Like many KKK leaders, Stephenson portrayed himself as a sober, upstanding figure and a defender of “Protestant womanhood” from immigrants and other threats. In reality, he was a drunk and a thug.
On March 15th, 1925, he kidnapped at gunpoint a woman named Madge Oberholtzer, a campaigner for adult literacy he had previously pressurised into dating him. Holding her captive in his private train compartment (Stephenson had been personally enriched by Klan membership fees), he raped her repeatedly and with great violence, which – in an uncomfortable parallel with Sinners -included biting. His subsequent trial heard evidence that she appeared to have been “chewed by a cannibal”.
Oberholtzer at first survived the attack. When she threatened him with the law, Stephenson replied, as was his wont: “I am the law in Indiana.” His victim then tried to take her own life with poison. But an attending doctor later ruled that it was the bites, notably a deep one on her breast, that eventually killed her: a staphylococcal infection spreading to her lungs.
The once untouchable Stephenson did not escape justice this time. Convicted by jury of second-degree murder, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 1925 and served 31 years in prison for that and later offences.
When refused clemency by the state governor, a former friend, Stephenson retaliated by blowing the whistle on Klan-related corruption.
The Indiana Times won a Pulitzer Prize for further exposing it, as did other newspapers. By the late 1920s, the KKK’s flirtation with respectability was over. Having peaked at between four and six million in 1925, US membership plummeted within five years to 30,000.
