I just noticed this piece by Greensboro News and Record columnist Jim Schlosser describing plans to honor Judge David Schenck (1835-1902) with an historical marker. As Schlosser’s article explains, in the late 19th century Judge Schenck was the spearhead behind development of the Guilford Courthouse National Military Park in Greensboro.
But Schlosser barely mentions Schenck’s time in Lincolnton, North Carolina, where he worked as an attorney and later served as a superior court judge. And he makes no mention at all of Schenck’s role in the Ku Klux Klan during his Lincolnton days.
His membership in the KKK is documented in testimony Schenck himself gave in December, 1871, before a Congressional body called the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. See this testimony in the North Carolina volume of the committee’s work, pp. 362-415.
If you like, you can also read a brief account of Schenck the Klansman in UNCG professor Allen Trelease’s White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, pp. 197-98. Viewing him as typical of “[m]en of public standing” who supported the Klan, Trelease quotes from Schenck’s diary (readily available to researchers at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill) stating that it
shows him to be a devoted white supremacist who felt that ”the Anglo-Saxon and the African can never be equals . . . one or the other must fall.” Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, he equated the Negro with Barbarism and the white race with Civilization. Fundamentally he approved much of the Klan’s vigilante activity, but feared its consequences in unsettling society.
Schenck’s descendants continue on in Greensboro and have considerable influence. Perhaps this explains why his association with the Klan is ignored here and in the local newspaper and his positive role in the development of the Military Park — for which I have no doubt he deserves considerable credit — is played up.
Nonetheless, given the News and Record’s reputation for liberal journalism, I can only think that Jim Schlosser must be unaware of the Klan-Schenck association.
Would the city of the Klan-Nazi killings, Truth and Reconciliation, the David Wray mess, and so on, really give old Judge Schenck a pass and let the historical marker go forward if they knew the truth?
The full-length photograph of Judge Schenck above is from my own collection — picked it up on ebay not too long ago.
