The Ku Klux Klan in Canada by Allan Bartley

Author:Allan Bartley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Formac Publishing Company Limited
Published: 2020-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

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The Oakville affair became symbolic of the racism, violence and public disorder that accompanied the Klan wherever it showed itself. The Canadian Forum was blunt in its description of the KKK’s historical pattern of activity: “It begins with Mumbo Jumbo and ends in bloody murder. There is no place for it in Canada.”308

The events in Oakville also created unease among others targeted by its hatred. Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath was the recently installed twenty-eight-year-old rabbi of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, the city’s leading synagogue. He joined the general criticism of the Oakville perpetrators and the Klan more generally. Eisendrath was an American, born in Chicago, who had served in synagogues around the mid-southern United States. He was uniquely placed to understand the conditions that made the Klan possible and the risks of having such an organization active in the community.

In a widely noted sermon on March 23, 1930, he tore apart the Klan’s white supremacist philosophy and its focus on repressing Blacks. He also warned that many people publicly opposed Klan lawlessness at the same time that they “silently condone the work which it seeks to achieve. The Klan is saying and doing those very things which myriads of our fellow citizens actually believe.”309 It was an uncomfortable but accurate public denunciation whose truth would become increasingly obvious during the coming decade.

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