The Ku Klux Klan in Olympia and what we should remember

Where do you think the largest Klan rally in Olympia was held?

How big was the largest Klan rally in Olympia?

If you think a few hundred people on the Capitol Campus, you’d be wrong.

On September 10, 1927, 2,000 Klan members rallied with burning crosses just behind Lincoln School at the old Stevens Field. For present-day Olympians, this might seem shocking, especially since the higher-profile Capitol Campus is so close by. And given Lincoln’s progressive reputation today, it’s hard to imagine the Klan ever feeling comfortable in its vicinity.

At the time, Stevens Field was a major community facility. It was a large, box-like Pacific Northwest athletic stadium, home to Olympia’s school and community sports teams, including the high school football team and a minor league baseball team. While visitors today might assume that the Capitol Campus is the center of Olympia’s civic life, locations like Stevens Field, and the sites that have since replaced it, were actually where our community gathered.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the 1920s, the rise of the Klan in the Pacific Northwest, and the legislative legacy it left in Washington State and the nation. There are important lessons in the legacy of the Klan and how we stood by and watched. This is a piece of Olympia and Washington’s  racist history that I left out of my longer essay a few weeks ago.

More than 2,000 knights of the Ku Klux Klan marched from the Capitol Campus into the heart of Olympia, Stevens Field. And 10,000 Olympians lined the streets to watch.

They had met at Legion Hall downtown and then marched from the Capitol Grounds to the stadium. For weeks leading up to the event, fiery crosses burned throughout Thurston County in preparation for the convention.

Dr. H.W. Evans, the Imperial Wizard of the nationwide Klan, was the main speaker. Charles I. Singer, Olympia’s city engineer, was the event’s “master of ceremonies.” Throughout his life, Singer worked for the state Department of Transportation, was a city inspector, and later became the city engineer. His wife was a regular in the Olympian’s social columns and was a champion women’s golfer. They lived in Northeast Olympia, just a few blocks from Roosevelt School. Singer was also the director of the Thurston County Radio Club. I can’t find any other references linking him to the Klan, but membership was often secret. Either someone with Singer’s profile was an active Klansman, or the Klan was so accepted in Olympia that the city engineer would step forward to emcee their event on an ad hoc basis. Neither scenario is comforting.

Ten thousand Olympians watched over 60 Klan chapters march. If Olympia had wanted to stop them, they could have.

A contemporary newspaper account described the march:

Led by their regal officers mounted on two white horses and a fiery cross in advance, the klansmen made up a parade more than a half-mile long, one of the largest ever seen in the city. Klans from all over the state were in the line of the march, Grays Harbor, Tacoma, Olympia, Elma, Chehalis, and Centralia being noted among them.

The Olympian devoted twice as much space to covering the Klan’s purpose in 1927 as it did to covering the rally itself. The paper observed: “Today, though, it was asserted, a great many people in Olympia, one typical American community, had just about forgotten that there was a Klan until announcement of the state meet was made.”

By 1927, interest in the Klan in Washington State had begun to wane after peaking in 1924. Even combining the size of the marchers and spectators (about 12,000 people) the event was much smaller than the Klan mega-rallies of just a few years earlier. The Olympia rally may in fact have been the Klan’s last major rally in Washington State.

Many historians link the Klan’s decline to the defeat of Initiative 49, a proposed law that would have required children to attend public schools, effectively targeting Catholic education. Its failure at the polls marked a turning point in the Klan’s influence in Washington politics.

The Klan also declined due to national scandals and corruption within its leadership. Nationwide, its membership plummeted from two million to just a few hundred thousand within a year.

However, this decline came after the Klan had already achieved its biggest legislative victory: a sweeping overhaul of U.S. immigration laws.

Support for Initiative 49 was strongest in two regions: Southwest Washington, from Grays Harbor to Cowlitz County, and Central Washington. It was no coincidence that the chief architect of the Klan-backed 1924 immigration law was a eugenicist congressman from Aberdeen, Rep. Albert Johnson.

In an interview with The Olympian after our 1927 rally,  the national Klan leader openly took credit: “Dr. Evans stated that the Klan was largely instrumental in securing legislation to curb immigration…”

Rep. Johnson and the Klan had a mutually supportive, though not necessarily formal, relationship. Johnson, a staunch eugenicist and anti-immigration politician, independently championed restrictive immigration laws, culminating in the 1924 Immigration Act. While his xenophobic views predated the Klan’s rise in the 1920s, the organization strongly endorsed him, seeing his policies as aligned with their nativist agenda. Nationally, the Klan prioritized his reelection, and contemporary reports acknowledged its backing of his legislative efforts. Though it remains unclear whether Johnson was a Klan member or direct ally, he undoubtedly benefited from and welcomed its political support.

The 1924 Immigration Act was rooted in racism, eugenics, and nativism. It built on earlier immigration restrictions, such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1917 Immigration Act, by further limiting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and outright banning Asian immigration. The law’s architects, Johnson and Senator David Reed, sought to preserve America’s racial and ethnic “purity” by restricting non-Nordic immigration—a stance championed by eugenicists and nativist groups like the Klan. The act disproportionately targeted Catholics, Jews, and Asians, reflecting widespread fears of economic competition, cultural differences, and radical political ideologies. Though it faced some opposition, particularly from the Japanese government and a few U.S. lawmakers, it passed with overwhelming support, reinforcing white supremacy in U.S. immigration policy for decades.

Our focus today should be on the laws the Klan wanted, the public standing by and watching them work, not just their hoods and fiery crosses. By fixating on the spectacle of the Klan in the Pacific Northwest, we risk ignoring the real, long-term impact they had on communities here.

I really appreciate this passage from Trevor Griffey:

Historians have ignored these 50,000-person events and downplayed the significance of the Washington state Klan because the organization lost probably 90 percent of its members in the year after its 1924 super-rallies. This fact is supposed to attest to the overall liberal nature of the Pacific Northwest, as if the Klan rallies had been mere passing fads. What little has been written about these rallies has been for small regional historical societies or provided material for a chapter in a book called Eccentric Seattle.

By emphasizing the bizarre and the marginal, and by measuring the Klan’s success in political rather than cultural terms, these histories have overlooked what is perhaps the more disturbing aspect of this part of Washington state history. While Klan robes and jargon about Kligrapps and Konventions may have been exotic or even preposterous, and the Klan itself ultimately proved to be unpopular, the massive attendance at Klan rallies also demonstrated the everyday quality of white supremacy and Christian nationalism in the Pacific Northwest. They showed that the politics of intolerance could be made remarkably palatable by simply dressing it up as a form of entertainment.

At Klan rallies, common expressions of American patriotism were saturated with KKK references in an attempt to make the two synonymous, and mass spectacles served as a vehicle through which an otherwise arcane set of secret society initiation rituals and bizarre Klan jargon could be made tolerable. It was a way of hiding the Klan’s distinctive form of intolerance in plain view, making it unremarkable or even normal. The speaker at the Seattle/Renton July 14 rally could call forth ‘an army of Christ’ to ‘demand the continued supremacy of the White Race as the only safeguard of the institutions and civilization of our country,’ yet this language of racist Christian patriotism went unchallenged and unreported in local media and individuals’ memoirs, which focused more on attendance figures and traffic jams.

The Ku Klux Klan did not invent white supremacy or Christian patriotism, or even pioneer their fusion. It failed in its political ambitions, but it also demonstrated how people’s everyday racism, fear of foreigners, and intolerant Christianity could be channeled through mass marketing and popular entertainment into a toxic politics of hate masked as the highest form of patriotism.

By ignoring our historical connection to the Klan and the 1924 Immigration Act, we are acting much like the 10,000 Olympians who watched peacefully as 2,000 Klan members marched by, secure in the knowledge that the organization was on its way out.

The Klan was indeed fading in 1927, but their legacy had already been cemented. The counties that had voted “yes” on a bill specifically targeting Catholic immigrants had also delivered nationwide, race-based immigration reform. By that point, the Klan wasn’t needed as a vanguard anymore—the war had already been won.

If we ignore this history today while debating policies to combat institutional racism, we risk underestimating just how easily these systems can persist. We allowed Klan members to melt back into our communities, separating the rallies from their massive impact on our policies. We’ve forgotten who they were because they stopped burning crosses, but we shouldn’t ignore the laws they passed.