A Tale of Faith, Hope and Hate

If the Rev. David Kennedy hesitated, if he felt a twinge of doubt when the tattooed homeless man asked for his help, a single glance at the children baking in the back of the pickup truck in the midday sun was enough to make up his mind.

Whippet-thin, with Confederate flags stenciled on his arms, the stranger looked like a rough character--the kind of white man who ordinarily would have little to do with an activist black preacher. Kennedy had seen him in better days hanging around the Redneck Shop, a store that sold racist paraphernalia and that Kennedy had worked to shut down.

“Can you help me out?” the young man asked. A wary Kennedy, gazing into the eyes of those children, knew the answer had to be yes. He took Mike Burden and his wife and kids to a steakhouse. Then he put them up in a motel with an offer to visit his church daily for food.

It was only later that he found out who his supplicant was. Shaking like a leaf and chain-smoking--with his wife, Judy, egging him on--Burden said he had been Grand Dragon, or statewide leader, of a Ku Klux Klan faction. What’s more, he claimed, he very recently had stalked Kennedy with the intent to kill him.

The words sent a shiver down the preacher’s spine. But the fragile, unlikely bond they forged that day last year--while difficult for some to fathom--has added an unusual twist to an age-old Southern story.

Rising out of the ugliness, outstripping even the twin curses of racial intolerance and distrust that loom so large here, is a story of redemption and forgiveness. The saga of the preacher and the klansman, whatever else it may evoke, is about the rural South as it is today--and about people struggling to overcome the tyranny of their pasts.

When Burden told Kennedy about the stalking, the 43-year-old Baptist minister didn’t know how to react. While many of Burden’s claims are impossible to verify, some had the ring of truth. He did own books on bomb making. He knew what vehicles Kennedy drove and the routes he took on his rounds. But the man sitting before him seemed to mean him no harm.

The preacher notified his lawyer and together they told authorities, who began an investigation.

Kennedy was impressed that Burden appeared willing to face the consequences. But the minister did not intend to press charges. Burden had joined his predominantly black church. “I looked at him as one of my church members, and I was his pastor,” Kennedy said recently. “I couldn’t do anything to harm my flock.”

A law enforcement official urged caution. What if this was a ploy to gain greater access? But Kennedy reasoned that Burden already had had chances to kill him. Besides, the minister was more interested in gathering evidence that he could use against the man who Burden claimed put him up to the plot: national klan leader and Redneck Shop owner John Howard.

‘Something Like a Martin Luther King’

Operating out of an abandoned movie theater on the courthouse square, Howard’s shop--with its Confederate memorabilia, racist T-shirts and a marquee touting “The World Famous Klan Museum”--put tiny Laurens on the map when it opened in February of last year. Even many of the town’s white people were embarrassed by the business and the worldwide publicity it brought.

Nobody worked harder to shut it down than Kennedy, a firebrand preacher with a record of social activism. His great-uncle had been lynched in 1913. A photograph of the dangling body adorns Kennedy’s cluttered office. For decades, he says, the rope was left hanging from a railroad trestle on the edge of the black community so that people saw it every time they went downtown. He carries the pain of that and other wrongs like fresh wounds.

Kennedy is the man in town to whom people--both black and white--turn when they are in trouble. Feel you were arrested unfairly? Call Rev. Kennedy. Think you’ve been discriminated against? Go see Rev. Kennedy.

“He’s something like a Martin Luther King here in Laurens County,” said Paul Grant, 26. “It’s great that we’ve got somebody like that.”

The minister lobbied politicians and held rallies to close down the shop. He even brought in the Rev. Jesse Jackson and threatened an economic boycott unless town officials withdrew the business license, which had been issued in Burden’s name. His efforts failed.

But now Burden was claiming that Howard wanted the preacher killed--a claim Howard denies.

“Are we in a fantasy here or what?” Howard asked indignantly in an interview. “Why would I want anybody killed? . . . Me, a grandfather of 10, a father of three, a husband, an owner of two businesses? Why would I go into a life of crime?”

Only once did Howard and Kennedy meet face to face. That was soon after the shop opened. A group of young African Americans, furious that town officials had granted a business license, told Kennedy one evening that they would take care of the problem themselves. He followed them, afraid that they might burn the building down.

After Kennedy arrived, he saw Howard come out onto his fire escape, watching the action below.

A longtime klan leader whose calm demeanor and soft voice belie a rabid racism, Howard, 51, is described in the 1978 book “The Klan,” by Patsy Sims as shy and “somewhat fragile”--a man “whose mouth probably packs more wallop than his muscles.” But put him before an audience and he is transformed. The shyness drops away. He gestures wildly, his voice and temper rising until he resembles a hate-spewing revivalist.

Howard called out to him, Kennedy remembers, inviting him inside to pose for pictures wearing a klan robe. It seemed to Kennedy that Howard was goading him, trying to provoke violence.

Then, Kennedy said, he noticed a young man walking on the roof. It was Burden, who now claims that he was armed and waiting for a signal from Howard to shoot.

“All I needed was an eye signal or a glance [from Howard], and it was done,” he said. “That’s how mentally programmed I was--brainwashed, manipulated.”

Less than three months later, Howard and Burden had a dispute. Howard locked Burden’s family out of the Redneck Shop, where they had been living. Burden went to the police station, trying to get his belongings retrieved, when Kennedy happened by.

Burden says he asked the preacher for help because he had nowhere else to turn.

Finding Solace in Klan’s Cold Embrace

The way the former klansman tells it now, his whole life--including his seven years with Howard--had been one long search for community, for a family, for home. In the klan’s cold embrace, he said, he thought he’d found it.

This is not to suggest that his racism was never genuine. Burden hated black people and Latinos with all his heart; he enjoyed thinking up ways to harass and humiliate them. He recorded hateful messages for the klan telephone hotline, and he said he never tired of recruiting new members.

But he claims all of that changed that day he met Kennedy.

“He came to my rescue when I was down and out,” Burden said. “White people looked at me and told me I was a joke. My own family wouldn’t help me.” He said Kennedy did. “From that minute on, I don’t see skin color.”

His conversion came a tad too quickly for some people.

“I trust David’s instincts for the guy’s character to some degree,” said Kennedy’s attorney, Steven John Henry. He remains wary.

Victor Garlington, Kennedy’s uncle and a member of the church, said parishioners welcomed Burden. While mostly black, the congregation includes a few white, Asian and Latino families. “But at the same time, I think everyone is watchful,” he said.

Burden, who is 27, attributes his problems to his childhood, which was filled with wandering. He traveled mostly in the Southwest with his mother and stepfather, a welder who kept moving from one oil company plant to another.

“I grew up on the street,” Burden said.

He was an angry kid who began using drugs. Kicked out of school for assaulting a teacher when he was 16, Burden said, he joined the Army rather than go to detention.

In a tape-recorded interview with Kennedy’s lawyer last November and later in interviews with The State newspaper of Columbia, S.C., and other papers, Burden said he first met Howard in 1989. He said he was home on leave, sleeping in an abandoned car after his father, whom he was visiting, booted him out of the house. One day, he said, he ducked into Howard’s concrete company to escape the rain. Howard knew his parents and offered him a job and a place to live.

A few months later, at 19, Burden left the Army for the National Guard and moved to Laurens, taking Howard up on his offer.

In a later conversation, however, Burden said that he’d known Howard before he stopped by that rainy day. They’d first met, he said, three years earlier when he accompanied a friend to Howard’s home.

Burden says he has trouble remembering details. But these and other inconsistencies, including his changing explanations for why he left the klan, cause people to wonder. Is he really a reformed racist or is he an opportunist, willing to say anything and ally himself with anybody who can aid him?

Even Kennedy does not deliver a ringing endorsement when asked if he fully trusts Burden. He declines to answer, choosing silence rather than to publicly judge the motives of a church member. But he and Henry consider some parts of Burden’s story verifiable and beyond dispute. And while Henry said no one can know for sure if Burden ever intended to kill, he believes the part about the stalking.

“I believe David Kennedy was a thorn in John Howard’s side, and I believe he wanted him hurt,” the lawyer said. “Maybe Burden wasn’t going to kill him, but I believe he was going to confront him and rough him up a bit.”

While Burden has benefited from his relationship with Kennedy, it has not been a one-way street. Burden has provided information about alleged building code violations and business practices that may someday prove useful in closing the Redneck Shop. Also, in a quirky transaction initiated by Burden, Kennedy’s church now owns the building that houses the shop.

Burden bought the building from Howard in 1994 for $5,000, money he said he saved up from his National Guard salary. Howard retained the legal right to use it for the rest of his life.

Later, when Howard refused to loan Burden money to make a down payment on a trailer, the two had a falling out, and Howard used his legal right to evict Burden and his family.

Now, to repay Kennedy’s kindness, Burden has signed over the building to his New Beginning Baptist Church. Eventually, Kennedy wants to use it as a homeless shelter or as part of a multicultural center he’s planning. But for the time being, in an irony that is lost on no one, the predominantly black church is, in effect, landlord to a business that its membership views as vile. And there is nothing they can do about it.

A Battle Over Burden’s Allegiance

A spokesman for South Carolina’s State Law Enforcement Division said authorities are investigating Burden’s claims that Howard asked him to kill Kennedy and gave him ammunition.

The spokesman declined to comment on the scope or results of a polygraph test the department gave Burden. Burden and Kennedy said the test indicated he answered every question truthfully except one about whether Howard asked him to stalk and kill Kennedy.

Burden insists he failed that one because of the way it was phrased.

He also has claimed Howard forced him to work without pay for seven years in the Redneck Shop and in the concrete business--and took advantage of him.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” said Burden. “He could ask me to jump and I’d ask him how high--I was that manipulated. . . . At the time I thought what he was doing was showing me friendship.”

Howard reacted with surprise and anger to these charges, which he said he’d never heard before.

Henry thinks that Judy, whom Burden married in May 1996, is pushing him to get his story out, “to tell the whole truth, if this is the whole truth.”

She is the one person in whom Henry and Kennedy seem to have total faith. She is seen as instrumental in Burden’s decision to turn against the klan.

Judy has had relatives in the klan--her great-grandfather took part in lynchings, she says. But she says she has little patience for racists. She pursued a relationship with Burden, knowing of his klan involvement, because she said she could see through his hard exterior to the gentle person inside.

She allowed Burden to induct her 12-year-old into a junior klan group because he said it would “keep kids out of trouble.” She took her son out, she said, after Howard allegedly gave him and a friend pocketknives and told them to go to school and cut “black meat.”

According to the Burdens, Judy Burden and Howard long had been involved in a tug of war over her husband’s allegiance.

Finally, she said, “I gave him an ultimatum. It was either John Howard or me. I wasn’t going to take a back seat to anybody.” Burden chose Judy. They were married the next day.

Now, Burden says, in Judy and her three children, he has found the family he has searched for. His “greatest achievement,” he said, was marrying Judy, “to have her with me the rest of my life, to love me for who I am and what I am.”

“I think if Judy left him he’d go right back to the klan,” said Henry.

Despite their many problems, the Burdens seem determined to make their union work. They live in a cramped trailer that belongs to one of Kennedy’s church members in a black neighborhood not far from downtown. Burden claims he had a hard time finding work as a house painter because of the controversy. Most white friends shun them, he said.

Shortly after Burden told him of the alleged plot against him, Kennedy organized a black community forum so that Burden could apologize for past deeds and racism. After that, Burden said, he became a pariah among whites. “I can be driving down the street and get the finger,” he says. “I’m not very well-liked in this town or this state.”

Judy’s daughter by a former marriage has been harassed by children at school. Burden said the family’s dependence on the busy Kennedy for transportation and other basics has caused friction.

He said he does not doubt that he did the right thing in leaving the klan.

Black Customers at Redneck Shop

At the Redneck Shop on a recent weekday, Howard’s wife, Hazel, was behind the counter when an unfamiliar black man walked in.

“Just let me know if there’s anything I can help you with,” she said pleasantly as he looked over the merchandise, which includes Confederate flags, pickaninny figurines and T-shirts.

One shirt labeled “Affirmative Action” depicted a blond boy in a klan robe urinating on a black child eating fried chicken and watermelon.

Black customers come in from time to time, she said. “Why shouldn’t [blacks] come? We’re just a little shop like all the rest. Black people fought and died for the Confederacy along with the whites.”

Another part of the building houses a museum that Burden says contains photographs of lynchings, among other displays. He said klan meetings also were held in the building.

Henry said he is holding off on trying to get the shop closed until after Howard’s 31-year-old son stands trial for a recent incident in which he fired pepper spray on black youngsters at the store. Howard contends the youths came in causing a ruckus. Henry is representing a disabled man who said he was sprayed while sitting on the curb.

In the meantime, Burden has found a job as a house painter and is talking of moving to a bigger trailer.

Recently, the former klan leader and enforcer sat holding a baby bird that his stepdaughter had found in the woods. Dipping his finger in a glass, he let drops of water fall into the bird’s beak.

Suddenly, his mood changed. Anti-black and anti-immigrant rhetoric began to spew from his mouth--the kind found daily on some talk-radio shows. It was an unsettling transformation.

Judy argued with him, attacking his logic. But then her husband flashed a smile as if to say, “just kidding.” He was only demonstrating his klan recruiting abilities, he said. As quickly as the racist persona had appeared, he put it away.

A slight aura of menace still hung in the air from his performance. Which Burden was real?

“To be honest, I’m a completely different person,” he said. Where before he’d been full of hatred and venom, “I actually care about things now.”