Editor’s note: The Tribune Chronicle published several stories Sunday on the Ku Klux Klan’s rise in the Valley, prompted by a lecture on the topic given at the McKinley Memorial in Niles on Saturday and a racial clash in Charlottesville, Va. Aug. 12.

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NILES — The train — 26 coaches long and filled with more than 1,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan — arrived and slowed to pull into the Niles depot of the Erie Railroad.

Catherine Ritter was working in the freight office for the railroad in November 1924, when the passengers tried to exit, but none were allowed off because Niles was under martial law, a designation put in place in an attempt to quell tensions between the Ku Klux Klan and groups organizing against them.

Both sides were armed, and people from all over the region had been pouring into town.

“You’re not allowed to get off under martial law. You’re not even allowed to talk to people on the streets or anything under the martial law. When we would go to work in the morning, we weren’t allowed to stop and talk to anybody. You just had to walk to work. There were no public meetings or anything in church about it. There was nothing; we were under martial law. We were under martial law at least a week,” Ritter said.

Born in 1905, Ritter was among several people interviewed in the early 1980s by Stephen Papalas as he worked toward a master’s degree at Youngstown State University. His professor, the now-retired William D. Jenkins, author of “Steel Valley Klan: The Ku Klux Klan in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley” also conducted some of the interviews. The transcripts, and recordings of some of the interviews, are available at the Maag Library at YSU.

Ritter said she was familiar with the KKK’s presence in Niles, and she and others considered the cross burnings to be an attack on their faith. On the day of the riot, Ritter said, she couldn’t sit still and pray with the others at St. Stephen Church.

“There was too much excitement going on that I didn’t want to miss,” Ritter said.

But most residents stayed inside, she said.

“A lot of people didn’t go out. You just stayed at home. You didn’t want to go out in this because you could have been shot or anything,” Ritter told Papalas.

THE RESISTANCE

Joseph Jennings Jr. was 5, living with his family above his father’s nightclub at 600 Mason St. when the disturbance rocked the city.

“I remember during the Ku Klux Klan trouble when all the Italian people got together, and the Ku Klux Klan was supposed to march into Niles and raise havoc, and they were supposed to go over and terrorize and rape the sisters of the Order of the Humility of Mary,” Jennings told Papalas in 1982.

“Everybody, all the Italian people and friends, got together and there were many guns handed out and people surrounded the convent, and none of the sisters were harmed. They were stopped here in Niles,” Jennings said.

Jennings said his father’s dance hall was the “center of the resistance” movement, and although he was too young to remember what was said at meetings preparing for the KKK’s arrival, Jennings said his mother had guns tucked into her apron and handed them out to the people against the group.

Jennings also remembered KKK uniforms were captured and dragged through the streets, tied to the back of his father’s Studebaker.

The mayor of Niles, Harvey Kistler, who gave the KKK a permit to march was “tainted” in the eyes of Jennings’ father.

“He was actually called a Ku Kluxer himself. He more or less cooperated with the Ku Klux Klan, as I understand it,” Jennings said.

“From my readings he even went so far as to hire deputies who were members of the Ku Klux Klan, and he knew it,” Papalas said to Jennings.

Niles resident Michelle Gray, whose grandparents lived in Niles during the period, recalled listening to a family legend her grandmother, Phyllis Conti, told about that time in her life.

Gray relayed the tale in a column she wrote before the Klan descended on Warren in 1998 for a rally.

Conti, who was 15 at the time, and her sister were walking past Erie Street next to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church when they passed some cars of KKK members.

“‘We went in all their cars and took the leather cases they carried their uniforms in. We threw them in the cellar of the church. There was an open window and we threw them in there. Later we took them home and my mother made us school bags out of them,”’ Gray’s grandmother told her.

Gray’s grandma didn’t remember much about the rally, but recalled a new relationship Italian and Irish residents in Niles forged with the black community in Youngstown.

The men in charge asked for support from the black community in Youngstown who in exchange asked for the unwritten ban preventing black families from living in the city be lifted, a move that made room for the first black families to move into the city, Gray reported.

VIOLENCE IN THE STREETS

Interviews with physicians at the time show numerous people were injured in the violence with gunshot wounds and blunt force trauma.

Frank E. McDermott was 19 and working out of town when news of the impending riot reached him and some other guys at a job site in Erie, Pa., he told Papalas in 1982.

McDermott’s father, John, “played a leading role in attempting to bring peace during the fall of 1924. Ironically, Frank McDermott later took part in an attack on a group of Klansmen on the eve of the Niles riot Nov. 1, 1924. In the episode that followed, he was shot twice by a Klansman when he leaped onto a running board of the man’s fleeing car,” Papalas noted at the beginning of the interview’s written transcript.

Knowledge of the impending KKK parade had everyone on edge, and so much of the violence was on the eve of the scheduled event.

The younger McDermott and some of the other guys got word Klan members were hauling ammunition into town and storing it in Rummell’s Pool Room, located where the viaduct is now. They took off running, ready to fight, but because Frank was faster, he arrived before the others, he said.

Gunfire broke out on both sides, and Frank grabbed onto the car.The first shot hit him in the left shoulder, but he continued to hold on as the car drove away. When the second bullet got his scalp and ear, he let go and rolled off.

“I got all cut up … I got all skinned up. Hit the curb,” McDermott said.

The man who shot McDermott, Rex Dunn, was the only person convicted of a crime after the riot, according to the interviews. Dunn, Frank recalled, was sentenced to a year of less at a work house in Canton. But years later, Frank recalled, he “leathered” the man good, knocking him on his back when the two crossed paths.

THE INTERVIEWER

Many of the people Papalas reached out to interview for his master’s project were not interested in speaking about that time in city history, he said.

“This was a fascinating project for me. But a lot of people were reluctant to talk about it. It was almost like a deep dark secret that everybody kept to their selves over several generations,” Papalas said. “I think it was something they wanted to put away. Because they were proud people and didn’t think it was constructive.”

As Papalas pursued the topic, he said he found the people who were anti-Klan or observers were more open and could be persuaded to go on the record.

But people who were on the side of the Klan wouldn’t open up to him, though some spoke to him on the condition he not use the conversations for the oral history project.

One man, who was connected to once-powerful city influencers, even threatened Papalas to make sure he would leave his name out of the project, Papalas said.

But, “Most of them told me they joined the Klan for jobs and to please their supervisors at work. They believed it was a way to get better shifts at the mills or because they thought the immigrants would force them out of their jobs. Most of them didn’t continue with the Klan after,” Papalas said.

The Klan’s influence collapsed in the area after the incident, Papalas said.

“I think a reason it collapsed was because they began to realize the immigrants were there for the better. They made a better society, a better country. And they were embarrassed of their actions,” Papalas said.

One thing many forget came out of the crisis, was the evolution of the still-going annual Interfaith Banquet held in Trumbull County each year.

In an attempt to sort through the tensions, church leaders of all faiths came together for a meeting, sparking the tradition, Papalas said.

Papalas said his research led him to believe it was extremists on both sides of the fight that led to the violence.

“It was a minority of people that led to this… to this explosion. It was driven by the minority factions on both sides, which is how things happen today. Most people go to work every day and come home, they don’t go to rallies and protests,” Papalas said.

rfox@tribtoday.com