The Fire Will Not Consume Us: Barry Black, Pt. 1

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Speaker 17 In 1948, there was a rash of cross burnings in Suffolk, Virginia.

Speaker 17 Newspapers throughout the late 40s and all through the 50s assure the reader that that there is no Ku Klux Klan activity in Virginia.

Speaker 17 Local Klan groups had more or less died out in the mid-40s, and Virginia wouldn't really see a rise in widespread organized Klan activity until the threat of integrated schools whipped aggrieved white men back into a frenzy in the 50s.

Speaker 17 But the lack of a clear leadership structure or the formal blessing of some grand dragon or imperial wizard in some other state didn't seem to deter the 100 men in robes who set fire to a 12-foot cross in a peanut field in Nurneyville.

Speaker 17 And whether or not the local prosecutor believed that the Klan still existed, everyone in the South knows what a burning cross means.

Speaker 17 And it was the third one in that neighborhood in recent months.

Speaker 17 The local prosecutor had simply shrugged, it's not illegal to burn a cross.

Speaker 17 2,000 members of a local peanut workers union approved a resolution demanding a response from the governor and attorney general, writing, We reject the hair-splitting thinking of some Commonwealth authorities regarding what constitutes violation of the law.

Speaker 17 The fact remains that 100 white-robed persons burned a cross in the field of N.H. Bradshaw.
Whether this group was the KKK or a similar organization is not important.

Speaker 17 The tactics of intimidation and terrorism are.

Speaker 17 That same year, 1948, twin boys Barry and Bruce Black were born in in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 17 Barry didn't burn that cross in the peanut field. He was just a baby then.

Speaker 17 Given some time to grow, though, his name would one day become synonymous with crossburning in Virginia.

Speaker 17 He was barely out of diapers when Virginia did finally outlaw crossburning in 1952.

Speaker 17 And he was decades into his career as a clan leader when he lit the cross that would take him all the way to the Supreme Court.

Speaker 17 I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 17 There is a story that I've been writing and rewriting for years. digging deeper into the past while I wait for the future to deliver some kind of ending.

Speaker 17 I have notebooks full of scribbled transcriptions of courtroom testimony and a hard drive full of grainy footage and folders upon folders labeled with men's names, each one containing varying degrees of a half-baked biographical sketch of a man who lit a torch one summer night in 2017.

Speaker 17 Lately, I'm combing back through my notes about the events of August 11th, 2017, because Unless something changes in the next week or so, I'll be spending a few days in October sitting in my favorite seat at the county courthouse.

Speaker 17 It's the aisle seat in the second row on the defendant side of the bench. I don't know why that one's my favorite, but if I can't sit there, it's just not right.

Speaker 17 To date, 12 men who marched with a torch here in Charlottesville seven years ago have been charged under a Virginia law that makes it a felony to burn an object with the intent to intimidate.

Speaker 17 And I'm going to tell you about some of those men. I am.

Speaker 17 There's some real weird little guy behavior going on in a lot of their backstories.

Speaker 17 But not today.

Speaker 17 As always, we have to start before the beginning. In the year and a half since those charges were first filed, I've written the case citation Commonwealth v.

Speaker 17 Black in my little notebook probably a hundred times. Commonwealth v.
Black was the Supreme Court case that held that the original version of Virginia's crossburning law was unconstitutional.

Speaker 17 The law was rewritten in response to this challenge, and the current version of the statute is what's being used to prosecute the torch marchers.

Speaker 17 So, Commonwealthy Black. That's all I really needed to know.
Some Klansman burned a cross, and he challenged the law, and he won, and we changed the law. That's good enough to get by.

Speaker 17 But how many times can you write a man's name without bothering to find out who he was?

Speaker 17 So, I set out to get a little more context on the man who brought the case, but what I found wasn't just some boring bit of backstory about constitutional law and legislative history.

Speaker 17 I mean, we're definitely gonna do some of that, but

Speaker 17 what I found was a complicated story of small-town bigotry and the people who stand up to it.

Speaker 17 Barry Black was the leader of a Klan group in Pennsylvania whose hatred touched the lives of people whose stories are worth knowing.

Speaker 17 This episode is just the first half of Barry Black's story, and we won't won't even get to his precedent-setting appeal until next week.

Speaker 17 This week, it's just a strange little stroll through some of the side characters in the life of a man who donned a pointy hood to infringe on the civil rights of everyone around him, but just kept going to court to fight for his own.

Speaker 17 So, before we can talk about a lit tiki torch on a college campus, we have to talk about a fiery cross on a hillside.

Speaker 17 We have to talk about Barry Black, the Klansman who fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court and won.

Speaker 17 Barry Elton Black and his twin brother Bruce were born two months before their mother's 17th birthday.

Speaker 17 Their 23-year-old father, also named Bruce, didn't stick around.

Speaker 17 When the boys were two, the 1950 census shows they were living with their mother at her parents' home, and their father was living a few miles down the road as a lodger in an elderly divorcee's boarding house.

Speaker 17 Barry's obituary says he was a Vietnam veteran and that he was in the Navy.

Speaker 17 That's the only place I found that information. Decades of newspaper articles about his clan hijinks never mention it.

Speaker 17 I will absolutely concede that it is entirely possible that he joined the Navy right out of high school and maybe was on one of the earliest deployments of the war.

Speaker 17 He was 18 in 1966, so it's possible.

Speaker 17 But by 1968, he was too busy going to jail to go to war.

Speaker 17 In the summer of 1968, Barry and his brother were caught stripping parts off a car in a salvage yard. Two years later, Barry was back in jail again.

Speaker 17 Reports vary and lack specificity as to exactly why he was in jail in 1970.

Speaker 17 One report of the Times says it was a morals charge. Another says it was a paternity case.

Speaker 17 A list of his arrests that appeared in an article decades later says he was awaiting trial in 1970 on charges of bastardry and fornication.

Speaker 17 Sounds like he might have just been guilty of having a good time, but he got himself into some extra trouble by escaping from the jail.

Speaker 17 Barry and two other inmates climbed a pipe, crawled through an air vent, got into the adjoining courthouse, and escaped by jumping out an open window in the judge's chambers.

Speaker 17 And no one even noticed the men were missing until Barry's brother called the sheriff to say he'd gotten a call from Barry earlier that afternoon, and he wanted to know if his brother had posted Bond.

Speaker 17 The sheriff assured Bruce that, no, Barry hasn't bonded out, and he's still in his cell.

Speaker 17 But he was not.

Speaker 17 Barry was only free for about six hours after this daring jailbreak.

Speaker 17 The other two men hid out in barns for over a week before being recaptured, but a deputy found Barry limping around town later that same evening.

Speaker 17 He'd broken bones in both of his feet jumping out of the judge's window.

Speaker 17 A judge ordered him to pay $100 fine and the medical costs in his paternity case, and he got another year for the escape.

Speaker 17 It's not clear what the paternity case entailed, and if there is a secret child out there of Barry Black, I couldn't find any record of it.

Speaker 17 In 1971, he went back to jail for a burglary of an auto part store. And between stints in jail, he married married his wife Judy in 1974, and they had their first of six children in 1975.

Speaker 17 And then he went back to jail in 1976 for stealing a gun from his brother.

Speaker 17 He escaped again, this time just walking right out the front door of the psychiatric hospital the jail had sent him to for observation.

Speaker 17 But he was out again by 1977 when he was arrested for trying to buy a car with a check from a closed bank account.

Speaker 17 This time he just caught probation, and he was given probation again when he was convicted in 1986 for illegally possessing a revolver.

Speaker 17 And that's all there really was to know about Barry Black until the late 80s.

Speaker 17 He had a couple of kids, his wife worked as a clerk, he drove a truck, and after going to jail half a dozen times in his 20s, he mostly stayed out of trouble except for that gun charge in 1986.

Speaker 17 But by 1989, he's a Kliegel in his local clan.

Speaker 17 Now, I don't want to sound like I'm being dismissive of the Ku Klux Klan as a bunch of silly guys in costumes who do live-action role-playing and who would have been better off doing something like joining the Society for Creative Anachronism or getting into Dungeons and Dragons.

Speaker 17 I don't know.

Speaker 17 I'm in no way trying to minimize the decades and decades of vicious racial terror, the violence, the lynchings, the campaigns of terror waged in towns across the country for over a century.

Speaker 17 The The Klan was very real. It was very dangerous.

Speaker 35 People died.

Speaker 17 But, oh my God, do they make it hard to take them seriously with their special clan vocabulary?

Speaker 17 A Kliegel that's spelled like Beagle, but with a K-L up front,

Speaker 17 it's an official clan office that's basically just the local recruiter. So in 1989, Barry was responsible for recruiting new members to his local clan chapter.

Speaker 17 And at this point, he's still a member of the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan. So the Invisible Empire is the overarching national organization with an Imperial Wizard overseeing it.

Speaker 17 The Empire is subdivided into realms by state, and each realm has a Grand Dragon. And within each realm, there are provinces.

Speaker 17 Each one is made up of however many counties the Grand Dragon sees fit to assign the Grand Titan who oversees them.

Speaker 17 The clan had two main eras, so first in the Reconstruction era right after the Civil War, and then it sort of died out, and then it had a second era when it was revived in 1915.

Speaker 17 And the second era of the clan kept a lot of the goofy 19th century made-up words, but it seems like they lost some of the finer subdivisions.

Speaker 17 It used to be that the Grand Titan could appoint a Grand Giant who could in turn appoint henchmen called Goblins.

Speaker 17 I don't think they kept the Goblins the second time around, which just seems like a huge loss, you know?

Speaker 17 But anyway.

Speaker 17 So by 1990, Barry is the Grand Titan of Western Pennsylvania.

Speaker 17 So Pennsylvania has a grand dragon and the grand dragon appoints the grand titans and Barry's the grand titan.

Speaker 17 A 1991 report on clan activity in the United States estimates nationwide membership at about 4,000 to 5,000 Klansmen, with an estimated 300 members in Pennsylvania, and with most of that activity being in the western half of the state, in Barry's province.

Speaker 17 Under Barry's leadership, the Klan was growing again in western Pennsylvania, and he was very active, holding multiple marches in little towns all over the state every year.

Speaker 17 And nobody wanted it. Nobody's excited to see the Klan.

Speaker 17 In January of 1991, they marched in Westchester, Pennsylvania to protest Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Speaker 17 In September of 1991, Barry held a march in his own hometown of Carmichaels, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 17 The town fought tooth and nail to prevent it, but he was determined to put on a show and even tried to rope the ACLU into forcing the town to give him a permit.

Speaker 17 Ultimately, the tiny town resigned themselves to this Klan invasion and they didn't make Barry take them to court.

Speaker 17 The town closed down every shop and restaurant that day out of protest, and residents lined the streets to watch a few dozen men walk about half a mile.

Speaker 17 With Barry leading them in chants of, what do we want? White power. When do we want it?

Speaker 24 Now!

Speaker 24 Scoofy.

Speaker 17 The Center Daily Times ran a story the next day with the headline, 40 clan members stage march in depressed town.

Speaker 17 Even after reading the article, it's not actually clear whether the paper meant the town was depressed, like, economically

Speaker 17 it kind of just sounds like the town was just depressed at having to look at the clan

Speaker 17 every resident quoted in the paper sounded very unimpressed one man told the paper I think they are a joke and added Hitler tried this once and it didn't work did it

Speaker 17 Barry told the paper that his marches weren't a racial thing, but that it was about bringing white people together to fight for their civil rights and against what he called the deterioration of our race.

Speaker 17 He just wanted to raise awareness about important issues like how the banking system is controlled by a Jewish conspiracy and how the government is giving away white men's rights to black people and Asians.

Speaker 17 I don't know what that means, giving them away. Like there's only a set number of them.

Speaker 17 Two months later, in November of 1991, Barry Black was elected to the office of Constable in Johnstown, Pennsylvania's 21st ward.

Speaker 17 The office of constable is kind of a holdover from the olden days. It's kind of a cop, but not really.

Speaker 17 Their function varies from state to state with powers ranging from largely ceremonial to full policing authority. In Rhode Island, constables aren't allowed to carry guns.

Speaker 17 In Vermont, one of the main roles of the constable is the destruction of dangerous dogs. So I guess there are guys in Vermont running for the office of dog murderer.

Speaker 17 And in Pennsylvania, the office has undergone some reform in the last few decades, but in the 90s, the constable's duties were mainly prisoner transportation and process service.

Speaker 17 But it's an elected office, and the office he won was for constable in a single ward of a borough of a county. And he was able to secure a victory without even really running.

Speaker 17 He won with just a few dozen write-in votes because no one was running.

Speaker 17 I looked up some recent voter turnout stats for Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and Johnstown's 21st ward had 404 registered voters in 2023, and only 107 of them voted in the November 2023 election.

Speaker 17 So it's not hard to imagine someone mounting a successful write-in campaign by buying a few rounds at the bar.

Speaker 17 But it wasn't meant to be. There's nothing I can find in any local news from that time that indicates there was any kind of specific issue.

Speaker 17 The constable of the 21st ward of the borough of a county probably doesn't have enough to do to really do much damage.

Speaker 17 But a few months into Barry's six-year term as constable, Cambria County District Attorney Timothy Creeney noticed that they had a Klansman serving papers for the court.

Speaker 17 Not much he could really do about that though. It's not against the rules to be in the Klan.

Speaker 17 But Barry did have a pretty long rap sheet. He'd been arrested for burglary, he'd escaped from jail twice, and he had a conviction for illegal possession of a firearm.

Speaker 17 So Creeney filed a petition to have Barry removed from office on the grounds that Pennsylvania doesn't allow people convicted of what are called infamous crimes to hold positions of public trust.

Speaker 17 The judge agreed and Barry was ordered by the court to cease and desist his duties of constable in April of 1992, just a few months after taking office.

Speaker 17 When he filed his appeal a month later, he walked the papers into the courthouse himself, dressed in a white robe, a pointy white cap, a green cape, and the kind of sunglasses my grandmother wore when I was a kid.

Speaker 17 A dozen robed Klansmen waited for him outside the courthouse, and he entered the courtroom with his personal bodyguard, a man in fatigues and a black beret.

Speaker 17 He was no longer just a Kliegel or a Grand Titan. Barry was calling himself the Grand Dragon now.

Speaker 17 Over the next few months, Barry staged several protests of what he called this violation of his civil rights, and he appealed it all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Speaker 17 In October of 1994, that court upheld the decision. They agreed that his criminal history made him ineligible for the office of constable.

Speaker 17 That same month, several local papers quoted Barry on his plans to hold a Klan rally in opposition to a Halloween parade.

Speaker 17 He didn't give the quotes to the paper himself, but they were his words and in his voice.

Speaker 17 See, in the pre-internet days, you couldn't have a website, right? So groups like the Klan would distribute flyers with a phone number on them.

Speaker 17 And nobody answers that phone when you call, but you get a pre-recorded message with information about becoming a member, upcoming events, announcements, or just racist propaganda.

Speaker 17 And the Diala Klan hotline that month offered a recorded statement from Barry Black stating that, for security reasons, the time and exact location would be announced with 12 hours' notice, saying,

Speaker 17 We have gone to modern technology, we use fax machines, etc.

Speaker 17 But that there would be an event that month in protest of a York, Pennsylvania-area Halloween celebration. Because, as a Christian organization, the Klan felt that Halloween was satanic.

Speaker 17 Just imagine for a second, it's 1994, and you get a fax from your local clig rap that the Nighthawks are needed at the satanic Halloween parade to enforce white Christian morals.

Speaker 17 I mean, it's baffling. Baffling.

Speaker 17 Kligrap is the title for the Klan's secretary and the Nighthawks are the security guards. So, I guess, you know, the Kligrap is going to fax the Nighthawks.

Speaker 17 A few days later, after the local paper ran a story about a planned counter-demonstration, Barry told the paper that he had no such plans, and he'd never said anything like that.

Speaker 17 He was not planning to protest the Halloween parade. He said that was just a rumor started by fellow Klansman Roy Frankhauser, the leader of a splinter group called the White Unity Party.

Speaker 17 Barry explained to the reporter that if Frankhauser wanted the White Unity Party to be allowed to join Barry's new Klan organization, the Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, then Frankhauser would need to accept that he didn't have Barry's permission to be doing things like holding a press conference about Halloween parades.

Speaker 17 And Roy Frankhauser is, I think, another candidate for his own episode.

Speaker 17 He'd been acquitted earlier that year for stabbing a man with a pocket knife at a Klan conference and at one point claimed to be a government informant, although agents from the FBI and the ATF denied that on various occasions, sometimes under oath, but I'm not sold.

Speaker 17 He was convicted of obstruction of justice while working for Lyndon LaRouche in the 1980s, got convicted of obstruction again in a case involving desecration of synagogues in Massachusetts in the 90s.

Speaker 17 And in 2021, someone made an unsighted edit to his Wikipedia page claiming that his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania, celebrated his death by halting a parade.

Speaker 17 I'll have to dig around on that. I hope it's true, but I have a feeling it's not.

Speaker 17 But in the 90s, Roy Frankhauser was beefing with Barry. And it's hard to say with any kind of certainty, but I wonder if it was Frankhauser who met with the FBI in 1994.

Speaker 17 Barry's FBI file has a few heavily redacted pages about an aspiring Klan informant who reported that he was present at a Klan meeting when Barry Black said the Klan had a plan to deal harshly with traitors.

Speaker 17 The informant told the FBI that Barry Black had automatic weapons and hand grenades. And to their credit, the FBI seems to have taken the tip pretty seriously.

Speaker 17 And in the summer of 1994, they opened a domestic terrorism investigation into Barry Black.

Speaker 17 After only a week, though, the Pittsburgh Field Office downgraded and then ultimately closed the investigation, citing the tipster's, quote, inability to factually corroborate any of his allegations to make them believable.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 17 So Barry is keeping pretty busy through the 90s with his new Klan group. He's got parades to lead and picnics to attend, and he's holding regular cross burnings.

Speaker 17 And by the late 90s, these cross burnings are happening across the street. from the Casa Nova Lounge, which was Somerset County, Pennsylvania's only gay bar.

Speaker 17 In its brief four years in operation, the bar was the site of relentless protests from neighbors, a self-proclaimed Anabaptist bishop, and the Klan,

Speaker 17 as well as a target for shotgun blasts and Molotov cocktails.

Speaker 17 Patricia and Merrick Kramer, a straight couple in their 50s with grown children, bought an old tavern on Route 985 in 1995.

Speaker 17 They ran it as a restaurant for two years before deciding in January of 1997 to start catering to gay clientele. It was the only such establishment for miles and miles.

Speaker 17 Patricia, Pat to her friends, and I'd like to be Pat's friend, said they had customers drive in from as far as Maryland and West Virginia for their tea dances, a kind of gay singles event whose name is a legacy of an era when it was illegal to sell alcohol to known homosexuals.

Speaker 17 In 1997, Pat Krabern told a reporter from the Washington Blade, we do nothing improper here. We have dancing.
We serve dinner from 4 to 6 p.m. I do all the cooking.

Speaker 17 The DC-based LGBT newspaper had reached out to the Kramers after the first time a shotgun was fired through the front door, injuring three patrons.

Speaker 17 And that's when street preacher Ron McRae started showing up.

Speaker 17 If you're old enough to have been politically aware in the early Obama years, this may not be the first time you've heard of Ron McRae.

Speaker 17 In 2008, a now-disbarred attorney named Philip Berg filed a lawsuit alleging that Barack Obama could not legally become the president because he had been born in Kenya.

Speaker 17 A judge threw it out, calling it frivolous and not worthy of discussion, which it was.

Speaker 17 But that's never stopped a conspiracy theorist.

Speaker 17 In December of 2008, Berg filed a motion for an emergency injunction to stop the certification of the election.

Speaker 17 In In his 96-page filing, Ron McRae's name appears over 100 times.

Speaker 17 So if you have any familiarity at all with the birtherism conspiracy, you've probably seen some vaguely sourced false claim that Obama's Kenyan grandmother, a woman named Sarah, who was his father's stepmother, was there in the room when he was born in Mombasa.

Speaker 17 It's not true, to be clear. Barack Obama was not born in Mombasa.
But the claim originated from a selectively edited recording of a phone call Ron McRae had with her via a translator in October 2008.

Speaker 17 And McRae was an enthusiastic participant in this conspiracy, providing a sworn affidavit about the phone call for Berg's lawsuit.

Speaker 17 The Supreme Court denied Berg's petition without comment. But McRae's hoax was now part of this official record.

Speaker 17 And conspiracy theorists can easily brush off silly complications like the fact that the lawsuit was dismissed as being utterly without merit. Once a lie is born, it can become unkillable.

Speaker 17 The White House plumber himself, G.

Speaker 17 Gordon Liddy, repeated that same lie a year later on an episode of Hardball with Chris Matthews, conveniently blurring the facts by claiming that the sworn statement was from Sarah Obama herself rather than from McRae, who was merely repeating what he claimed she said to him.

Speaker 42 The preponderance of the evidence

Speaker 42 is as follows. You've got a deposition, which is a sworn statement, from the stepgrandmother who says, I was present and saw him born in Mombasa, Kenya.

Speaker 17 Before he gave birth to one of Bertherism's most stubborn lies, Ronnie Marcus McRae grew up in Texas.

Speaker 17 and claims to have been a police officer before turning to street breaching in his 30s, but I can't find any particular evidence beyond his own claims that he was ever a cop.

Speaker 17 By the late 1980s, he was in western Pennsylvania preaching the word of God to unwilling congregants on street corners.

Speaker 17 He was arrested a handful of times for violating noise ordinances or for disorderly conduct, and when he sued the authorities in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1991 for violating his rights, They paid him $7,500 to settle.

Speaker 17 And that seems to have been the origin of McRae's Street Preachers Fellowship.

Speaker 17 It was a fairly litigious collective of amateur street preachers who would scream Bible verses on street corners until the police would intervene and then they would sue.

Speaker 17 And that seems like what he was trying to do to Patricia Kramer and her customers outside Casanova almost every weekend for four

Speaker 17 years.

Speaker 17 Ron McRae was the loudest and most persistent opponent to the gay bar, but he was far from the only one.

Speaker 17 Don and Lisa Penrod lived less than a mile away on a plot of land they'd inherited from Don's family.

Speaker 17 At a town meeting shortly after the bar opened, the Penrods were among residents complaining about lewd and filthy literature found in the neighborhood.

Speaker 17 Pat Kramer tried to explain that, no, those are flyers advertising a glow stick party, saying, it's nothing provocative. We don't run a dirty bar.

Speaker 17 After someone fired a shotgun through the door of the crowded bar one night in March of 1997, Don Penrod told the local paper that actually he'd forgotten to mention this before, but a few days before that happened, actually something bad happened to him too.

Speaker 17 Someone had spray painted, gay haters, you will all die, love Pat, on his garage.

Speaker 17 The paper doesn't include a photo of this vandalism or even mention any claim that a photo might exist.

Speaker 17 In separate town meetings that spring, Don Penrod claimed that he found hardcore gay pornography on his front lawn, and his wife Lisa Penrod claimed that their child found an abandoned sex toy while playing outside.

Speaker 17 In both instances, the Penrods demand to know how they're supposed to explain this perversion to a child.

Speaker 17 I can find no evidence of anyone aside from the Penrods themselves who ever made any claim to have seen either of these things.

Speaker 17 In April, the Penrods and their neighbors, who were disgusted at the idea of even having to drive drive on a road that shared a name with a den of sin, successfully petitioned to have the town rename Casanova Road to Hemlock Road.

Speaker 17 In May of 1997, the Penrods invited the Klan over.

Speaker 17 Barry Black's Keystone Knights used the Penrods farm as a staging area to park, don their robes, and then march down the street to the bar.

Speaker 17 They spent an afternoon hollering at the empty establishment. It's a bar, nobody's there in the middle of the afternoon.

Speaker 17 And then they retired to the Penrods property for a cross burning.

Speaker 17 Patrons at the bar would have been able to see the glow from the flames when they pulled into the parking lot that Saturday night.

Speaker 17 Ron McRae kept up his antics outside Casanova, but Barry had bigger things going on towards the end of 1997.

Speaker 17 He got elected constable.

Speaker 17 Again.

Speaker 17 Just as he had in 1991, he managed to secure a victory in Johnstown's 21st 21st ward on write-in votes alone.

Speaker 17 This time, though, he got

Speaker 17 one.

Speaker 17 He got one vote. Nobody was running, and I guess nobody else voted.
And so he won with one.

Speaker 17 And I can't find any reporting on whether or not he was ever asked outright if that one vote was his own.

Speaker 17 But I think it's a safe bet.

Speaker 17 I have to wonder if it was a joke. I mean, was he having a private joke with himself, or was a friend joking about how he had done it last time? Did he really think it would work a second time?

Speaker 17 And if he did do this himself, why didn't he ask anyone else to do it with him? Was he surprised when he found out he was the constable again?

Speaker 17 There's really no way to know.

Speaker 17 So he's back in the saddle as constable, and it seems like nobody noticed.

Speaker 17 It must not be a very demanding job if no one noticed that there were no candidates at all for the office and no one said a word when a guy who'd been ordered by the state Supreme Court to vacate the position just unilaterally voted himself back in.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 there it was.

Speaker 17 And in 1998, Casanova is entering its second year as Somerset County's only gay bar. And things are getting worse.

Speaker 17 There was another crossburning across the street. They got bomb threats.
Ron McRae vowed to be out there every Friday and Saturday night until the bar was forced to shut down.

Speaker 17 The Kramers were getting death threats in the mail. The front windows were smashed out with huge rocks thrown from a passing car.

Speaker 17 But the Kramers weren't going to lie down and take it.

Speaker 17 Speaking later to Professor Todd Heibel for his essay, Blame It on the Casanova, Good Scenery and Sodomy in Rural Southwestern Pennsylvania, Pat said, McRae made a pledge to these neighbors that he would have us closed in a week.

Speaker 17 Well, that never happened. Never happened because McRae didn't know who I was.

Speaker 17 And the Kramers weren't alone. Some neighbors were on their side, even forming a group called Network of Neighbors United Against Hate Crimes.

Speaker 17 And I know you're probably trying to spell that out in your mind to see if that makes some kind of initialism. It doesn't.
It's N-N-U-A-H-C.

Speaker 17 It doesn't spell anything.

Speaker 17 And while the local gay community in Somerset County was pretty small, the gay community in cities like Pittsburgh and D.C. were rooting for them.

Speaker 17 A group of gay men from Pittsburgh rented a bus to come out to Somerset County for a theme night.

Speaker 17 They called it Burnin' Hell Night, poking fun at the screaming preacher in the parking lot who was always telling them that's where they were heading.

Speaker 17 In March of 1998, a DC-based group called the Lesbian Avengers drove three hours to show their support for Casanova. Washington City Paper reporter Amanda Ripley joined them for the trip.

Speaker 17 The Avengers danced, drank, mingled, and performed some comedic skits for patrons at the bar.

Speaker 17 Pat Kramer, that straight married woman in her 50s who ran the bar, said,

Speaker 17 I thought that the girls were just wonderful. We loved them.
And added, even some heterosexuals offered them to stay in their homes in the future.

Speaker 17 And Pat beamed as she told these girls from out of town that a lot of her bar's patrons just call her mother.

Speaker 17 I've always wanted a large family, she explained.

Speaker 17 Pat's own daughter had died a few years earlier after contracting HIV from a blood transfusion.

Speaker 17 And now here she is with this gay bar full of chosen family.

Speaker 17 I wonder,

Speaker 17 it doesn't say, but I wonder if it was at her daughter's bedside. that she first came to see the importance of queer community.

Speaker 17 Her daughter had been infected by a blood blood transfusion, but I have to imagine Pat Kramer met patients and caregivers and grieving partners there on the AIDS ward, and she got a much more intimate look at who gay people really were than most straight suburban women were getting in 1990.

Speaker 17 Before they left DC on the day of their visit to Somerset County, the Lesbian Avengers all agreed on the rules of engagement.

Speaker 17 They were headed up there to support Casanova, and things are different out in the country.

Speaker 17 They didn't want to make things worse for the gay people who live there, and they really didn't want to end up in the county jail. So the rules were, no cussing, no taking off your top.

Speaker 17 On the drive up, their lawyer Kathy reminded them again to, quote, resist the urge to strip down an arm wrestle. This isn't DC.

Speaker 17 So they were on their best behavior when they got there.

Speaker 17 They ignored Ron McRae and the other protesters when they swarmed the women in the parking lot, calling them trash and wicked and failures as women and telling them they would never find husbands and that they would burn in hell.

Speaker 17 I'm not sure one of those things really bothered them.

Speaker 17 But they just walked into the bar and they had a great time.

Speaker 17 Ripley's article describes McRae's teenage son standing silently in the parking lot next to his father, holding a sign that read, Casanova customers, child molesters, strippers, whores, cross-dressers, prostitutes, sodomites, five drunkards, and a handful of wackos.

Speaker 17 I'm not sure which of McRae's sons that would have been, but I don't think it was the one who would later get arrested for inappropriate sexual contact with a lot of underage girls.

Speaker 17 And when the Avengers walked out into the parking lot a little after 1 a.m., McRae was still there.

Speaker 17 Just as they did every weekend, the protesters were there in the parking lot and they surrounded patrons trying to leave the bar.

Speaker 17 They screamed and threatened and blocked them from getting to their van.

Speaker 17 One protester got right in the face of Beth Armitage, a member of the Lesbian Avengers, and said, you never know, this night might be your last.

Speaker 17 But they were prepared for this. The Lesbian Avengers were no strangers to confrontation.
In fact, they reveled in it. They were only on their best behavior that night for everyone else's sake.

Speaker 17 They kept their heads down and refused to engage on their way into into the bar earlier that evening, but now they couldn't resist.

Speaker 17 They promised they weren't going to make a scene, they weren't going to engage, but it was cold and late, and these men screaming slurs at them were keeping them from the warmth of their van.

Speaker 17 So they formed a semicircle and began to chant.

Speaker 17 Their fire will not consume us! We take it and make it our own! Their fire will not consume us! We take it and make it our own!

Speaker 17 Their fire will not consume us! We take it and make it our own!

Speaker 17 The Lesbian Avengers are fire eaters.

Speaker 17 In September of 1992, Hattie Mae Cohens, a black lesbian, and her roommate, Brian Mock, a white gay man with an intellectual disability, were burned alive in their home in Oregon after neo-Nazi skinheads threw Molotov cocktails through the windows of her apartment.

Speaker 17 A month later, at a vigil for Cohen's and Mock in New York, the lesbian Avengers ate fire for the first time.

Speaker 17 The fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own.

Speaker 17 Their lawyer had pleaded with him on the drive up not to do this tonight, not here.

Speaker 17 They could get charged with public disturbance and this wasn't a friendly place to have to fight a charge.

Speaker 17 But here they were in the snow, being told that they would burn.

Speaker 17 So Ron McRae got to see those lesbians eat the fire he was always threatening people with.

Speaker 17 The Ku Klux Klan with their burning crosses and the skinheads with their Molotov cocktails and the street preachers with their threats of the fires of hell.

Speaker 17 They're always surprised when a bitch burns back.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 17 Barry's Klan group had staged a protest directly outside Casanova in May of 1997.

Speaker 17 But in July of 1998, he assured the Kramers that the Klan's presence in the area had nothing to do with the bar, and nothing to do with the fact that the bar's owner, Pat Kramer, had just returned from a trip to Washington, D.C., where she had testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing on hate crimes legislation.

Speaker 24 No,

Speaker 24 it had nothing to do with that.

Speaker 17 The Klan was just in the neighborhood for an entirely unrelated crossburning.

Speaker 17 Don and Lisa Penrod, that couple who'd been active in the protest against the bar's presence in the town, owned a little bit of land across the street and they invited the Klan to have a picnic on their property.

Speaker 17 Their farm had been the site of previous Klan rallies and crossburnings and on this July afternoon, they'd be hosting the Klan's White Pride Day picnic.

Speaker 17 The picnic did not go well.

Speaker 17 I'll go ahead and spoil it. One local paper ran the headline, KKK picnic host arrested.

Speaker 17 The two-day affair was announced two weeks ahead of the event.

Speaker 17 Local residents who opposed the Klan held their own competing picnic, calling it the Unity Picnic, at the Laurel Trinity Lutheran Church a few miles away.

Speaker 17 The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Ron McRae himself stopped by the Unity Picnic.

Speaker 17 He'd sent the church a letter denouncing their pastor the week before and accusing members of the congregation of a variety of sexual sins, but even Ron McRae hated the Klan.

Speaker 17 I'm not totally sure why he hated the Klan, to be honest.

Speaker 17 I mean, his own religious beliefs included the idea that sex outside your own race is within the biblical definition of the sin of fornication, so it's not like he's not racist.

Speaker 17 But nevertheless, he apparently enjoyed the picnic.

Speaker 17 About 150 people attended, and the local paper reported that dinner was served potluck style, and speeches were given by various state and local civil rights organizations.

Speaker 17 Over at the Klan picnic, the police were keeping an eye on the Penrod farm, specifically on Barry Black.

Speaker 17 Barry would later explain to a reporter that the reason his family-friendly picnic was crawling with burly tattooed Klansmen with pump action riot shotguns is that they were worried that the people from the gay bar would come bother them.

Speaker 17 And just a little more Klan vocabulary, those security guards are the night hawks.

Speaker 17 And while these armed guards were under strict orders to prevent media or cameras of any kind, really, from entering the property, Barry invited Dennis Roddy, a reporter from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, into the picnic for a little tour.

Speaker 17 And Barry was just so happy to show off his event to this reporter from the big city, and he made sure to put it on the record that there was absolutely no reason to worry about any lawlessness going on at the picnic.

Speaker 17 Not only did the Klan count many cops from a variety of counties among their membership, Barry himself was in law enforcement.

Speaker 17 Nobody seemed to have noticed up until this point that Barry was the constable again, but here he is bragging about it to a reporter. And that's going to bite him in the ass later.

Speaker 17 Sometime that afternoon, just as it was about time to start setting up the cross that they were going to burn when the sun went down, The Nighthawks saw something.

Speaker 17 State police had made no secret of the fact that they were increasing their presence in the area that day just as a precaution.

Speaker 17 They didn't want any chance of these competing picnics encountering one another.

Speaker 17 But in addition to their visible presence in the area, the state police had gotten permission from the Penrod's next door neighbor to be on their property.

Speaker 17 And from that neighboring property, an undercover state trooper was perched in a tree with a telephoto lens.

Speaker 17 They were acting on a tip that Barry was, once again, illegally in possession of a firearm and they wanted to see if they could catch a glimpse of him handling a gun.

Speaker 17 It doesn't sound like they ever did catch Barry holding a gun, but almost everyone else was armed to the absolute teeth.

Speaker 17 So when the Nighthawks caught a glimpse of a guy hiding in the tree line at the edge of the property, they bolted for him.

Speaker 17 State Trooper George Emmig would later testify that he was sitting up in that tree on the neighbor's property when about 10 picnic attendees rushed over to the fence line.

Speaker 17 He identified himself to the armed men as a state trooper, and he explained that he had the neighbor's permission to be on their property.

Speaker 17 He said it was at that point that Don Penrod pointed the rifle at him and said, you're dead.

Speaker 17 State Police Sergeant George Bivens arrived on the scene almost immediately. He'd seen the group moving towards Emmig's position.

Speaker 17 And he testified that he'd heard Emmig trying to explain to the men that he was a police officer.

Speaker 17 And then Bivens heard Ronald Beddix, one of the Nighthawks, reply that he didn't care and they were going to kill him anyway.

Speaker 17 It was at this point that Bivens drew his own weapon and the Klansmen scattered.

Speaker 17 And now,

Speaker 17 now the state police had a reason to enter the Penrod property. Before, they were keeping it at the fence line, but now they're giving chase.

Speaker 17 Michael Abraham was arrested inside the picnic tent. Ronald Beddex was found hiding under a blanket.

Speaker 17 And Adam Moyer was also taken into custody, but it doesn't say where he was hiding.

Speaker 17 Don Penrod was nowhere to be found that afternoon, but he was arrested a week later when the police searched his home.

Speaker 17 The police confiscated several shotguns, a pistol, a ceremonial clan sword, a Tommy gun, and a bullet brew vest.

Speaker 17 But the picnic wasn't canceled. Three members had been carted off to jail, but the show must go on.
And that cross wasn't going to burn itself.

Speaker 17 A few months later, Barry's lawyer was in court arguing for the return of those seized items. I'm not quite sure what the legal strategy is here.

Speaker 17 Like, I don't know if you have legal standing as the guest at a picnic to challenge the search and seizure of someone else's property.

Speaker 17 And the sword was definitely Barry's, but he absolutely was not claiming ownership of the submachine gun.

Speaker 17 But the judge did order the police to return Barry's ceremonial clan sword.

Speaker 17 But they kept the guns.

Speaker 17 It took a year to sort out, but in the end, Don Penrod got six months for terroristic threats, followed by two years of supervision for the assault.

Speaker 17 Stephen Beddex got 14 months for the assault and terroristic threats. Michael Abraham got nine months for simple assault, and Adam Moyer was acquitted on all counts.

Speaker 17 One article notes that Bedex got more time than the others because, at the time of the incident, he was out on parole for a conviction in a case related to his role in a cocaine trafficking ring that would bring drugs down from New York City and distribute them in the Lehigh Valley area.

Speaker 17 In 2012, he was the president of his local chapter of the Pagans Motorcycle Club when he was federally indicted for cocaine trafficking. Again,

Speaker 17 he spent five years in prison and died shortly after his release.

Speaker 17 But back to Barry.

Speaker 17 After those three Nighthawks were arrested, Don Penrod used his own property as collateral to bail out Abraham and Moyer. Beddocks was held without bond due to the parole violation.

Speaker 17 And when Penrod himself was arrested a few days after the picnic, Barry walked into the jail with a $10,000 cashier's check in hand. to bail him out.

Speaker 17 That same week, Barry filed a criminal and civil complaint against state police Sergeant Bivens, the trooper who drew his gun on the Klansmen who were pointing their guns at another state trooper.

Speaker 17 And the county prosecutor filed a petition to have Barry removed from the office of constable.

Speaker 17 It's a new prosecutor now, that district attorney from the first time around is a judge at this point, but the game is the same.

Speaker 17 Barry can't be the constable because he's been convicted of too many crimes.

Speaker 17 Complaining about the police intrusion on his picnic, Barry told the local newspaper, The state police are like the Gestapo. We're nice white people having a family picnic.

Speaker 17 Where's our First Amendment rights to our beliefs?

Speaker 17 And Barry's relationship to the First Amendment is something we'll explore in greater detail next week, because that's where I'm going to leave it today.

Speaker 17 We'll pick up next time with Barry's second court battle to keep his job as Cambria County Constable and then follow him to Virginia, where he'll light the cross that takes him all the way to the Supreme Court.

Speaker 17 Until then,

Speaker 17 I don't know. Try to love your neighbors like Pat Kramer did.

Speaker 17 And don't bring a Tommy gun to a family picnic.

Speaker 17 Weird Little Guides to the production of CoolZone Media. For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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