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

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

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

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.

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 Nerneyville.

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

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

The local prosecutor had simply shrugged.

It's not illegal to burn a cross.

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.

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.

The tactics of intimidation and terrorism are.

That same year, 1948,

twin boys Barry and Bruce Black were born in Pennsylvania.

Barry didn't burn that cross in the peanut field.

He was just a baby then.

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

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

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.

I'm Molly Conger,

and this is Weird Little Guys.

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.

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.

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.

It's the aisle seat in the second row on the defendant's side of the bench.

I don't know why that one's one's my favorite, but if I can't sit there, it's just not right.

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.

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

I am.

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

But not today.

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.

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 cross-burning law was unconstitutional.

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.

So, Commonwealth v.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

That's the only place I found that information.

Decades of newspaper articles about his clan hijinks never mention it.

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.

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

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

In the summer of 1968, Barry and his brother were caught stripping parts off a car in a a salvage yard.

Two years later, Barry was back in jail again.

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

One report at the time says it was a morals charge.

Another says it was a paternity case.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

But he was not.

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

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.

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

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

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.

In 1971, he went back to jail for a burglary of an auto parts store.

And between stints and jail, he married his wife Judy in 1974, and they had their first of six children in 1975.

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

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

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.

This time he just got probation.

And he was given probation again when he was convicted in 1986 for illegally possessing a revolver.

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

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.

But by 1989, he's a Kliegel in his local Klan.

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.

I don't know.

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.

The Klan was very real.

It was very dangerous.

People died.

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

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

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.

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.

The empire is subdivided into realms by state, and each realm has a grand dragon.

And within each realm, there are provinces.

Each one is made up of however many counties the grand dragon sees fit to assign the grand titan who oversees them.

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.

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.

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

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

But anyway.

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

So Pennsylvania has a Grand Dragon and the Grand Dragon appoints the Grand Titans and Barry's the Grand Titan.

A 1991 report on Klan 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.

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.

And nobody wanted it.

Nobody's excited to see the Klan.

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

Day.

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

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.

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

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.

With Barry leading them in chants of, what do we want?

White power when do we want it now

schoofy

the center daily times ran a story the next day with the headline 40 clan members stage march in depressed town

even after reading the article it's not actually clear whether the paper meant the town was depressed like economically

It kind of just sounds like the town was just depressed at having to look at the clan.

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?

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.

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.

I don't know what that means, giving them away.

Like there's only a set number of them.

Two months later, in November of 1991, Barry Black was elected to the office of Constable.

in Johnstown, Pennsylvania's 21st Ward.

The Office of Constable is kind of a holdover from the olden days.

It's kind of a cop, but not really.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Not much he could really do about that, though.

It's not against the rules to be in the Klan.

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.

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.

A 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.

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.

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.

He was no longer just a Kliegel or a Grand Titan.

Barry was calling himself the Grand Dragon now.

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.

In October of 1994, that court upheld the decision.

They agreed that his criminal history made him ineligible for the office of constable.

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

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

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.

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.

And the Diala Clan 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,

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

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.

Just imagine for a second, it's 1994.

and you get a fax from your local cligrap that the Nighthawks are needed at the Satanic Halloween parade to enforce white christian morals i mean it's baffling baffling

cligrap is the title for the clan's secretary and the night hawks are the security guards so i guess you know the clig rap is gonna fax the night hawks

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.

He was not planning to protest the 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I'll have to dig around on that.

I hope it's true, but I have a feeling it's not.

But in the 90s, Reif 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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So Barry is keeping pretty busy through the 90s with his new clan group.

He's got parades to lead and picnics to attend, and he's holding regular cross burnings.

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.

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, as well as a target for shotgun blasts and Molotov cocktails.

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

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.

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.

In 1997, Pat Kramer 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

But that's never stopped a conspiracy theorist.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The Supreme Court denied Berg's petition without comment.

But McRae's hoax was now part of this official record.

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.

The White House plumber himself, G.

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.

The preponderance of the evidence

is as follows.

You've got a deposition, which is a sworn statement, from the step-grandmother who says, I was present and saw him born in Mombasa, Kenya.

Before he gave birth to one of Bertherism's most stubborn lies, Ronnie Marcus McRae grew up in Texas and claims to have been a police officer before turning to street preaching in his 30s, but I can't find any particular evidence beyond his own claims that he was ever a cop.

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

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.

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

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.

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

years.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

In April, the Penrods and their neighbors, who were disgusted at the idea of even having to 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.

In May of 1997, the Penrods invited the clan over.

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.

They spent an afternoon hollering at the empty establishment, it's a bar, nobody's there in the middle of the afternoon,

and then they retired to the Penrods property for a cross burning.

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.

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

He got elected constable

again.

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

This time though, he got

one.

He got one vote.

Nobody was running and I guess nobody else voted.

And so he won with one.

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

But I think it's a safe bet.

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?

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?

There's really no way to know.

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

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.

But

there it was.

And in 1998, Casanova is entering its second year as Somerset County's only gay bar.

And things are getting worse.

There was another crossbury 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.

The Kramers were getting death threats in the mail.

The front windows were smashed out with huge rocks thrown from a passing car.

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

Speaking later to Professor Todd Heibel for his essay, Blamin 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.

Well, that never happened.

Never happened because McRae didn't know who I was.

And the Kramers weren't alone.

Some neighbors were on their side, even forming a group called Network of Neighbors United Against Hate Crimes.

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.

It doesn't spell anything.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

They've always wanted a large family, she explained.

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

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

I wonder,

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.

Her daughter had been infected by a 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

so they formed a semicircle and began to chant

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 their fire will not consume us we take it and make it our own

the lesbian avengers are fire eaters

In September of 1992, Hattie Mae Cohens, a black lesbian, 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.

A month later, at a vigil for Cohens and Mock in New York, the lesbian Avengers ate fire for the first time.

The fire will not consume us.

We take it and make it our own.

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

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

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

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

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.

They're always surprised when a bitch burns back.

Not all group chats are the same, just like not all atoms are the same.

Adam Brody, for instance, uses WhatsApp to pin messages, send events, and settle debates using polls with his friends, all in one group chat.

Makes our guys' night easier.

But Adam Scott grouped messages with an app that isn't WhatsApp, which means he still can't find find that text from his friends about where to meet.

Hang on, still scrolling.

No, the address is here somewhere.

It's time for WhatsApp.

Message privately with everyone.

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

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.

No,

it had nothing to do with that.

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

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.

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

The picnic did not go well.

I'll go ahead and spoil it.

One local paper ran the headline, KKK picnic host arrested.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

But nevertheless, he apparently enjoyed the picnic.

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.

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

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.

And just a little more Klan vocabulary, those security guards are the nighthawks.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

He said it was at that point that Don Penrod pointed the rifle at him and said,

you're dead.

State Police Sergeant George Bivens arrived on the scene almost immediately.

He'd seen the group moving towards Emmig's position, and he testified that he'd heard Emmig trying to explain to the men that he was a police officer.

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

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

And now,

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.

Michael Abraham was arrested inside the picnic tent.

Ronald Beddix was found hiding under a blanket.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

But they kept the guns.

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.

Stephen Beddix 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.

One article notes that Beddix 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.

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

Again,

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

But back to Barry.

After those three Nighthawks were arrested, Don Penrod used his own property as collateral to bail out Abraham and Moyer.

Beddix was held without bond due to the parole violation.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Where's our First Amendment rights to our beliefs?

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.

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.

Until then,

I don't know.

Try to love your neighbors like Pat Kramer did.

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

Weird Little Guides to 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.

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