100 years ago, Anaheim recalled its KKK city council. Why don’t we remember?

Every time I visit my dad in Anaheim, I drive up Harbor Boulevard past Pearson Park. The crown jewel of the city’s public spaces holds many memories for me, good and bad.

Its large pool? That’s where my dad taught my sister and me how to swim. The tennis courts? My high school friends and I tried to channel our inner Andre Agassi there, to laughable results. Near the Depression-era statue of famed 19th century actress Helena Modjeska is where a former girlfriend broke up with me. In the northwest corner is a dense cactus garden where I scratched and pricked myself too many times playing hide-and-go-seek.

Pearson Park is a great place to picnic, to catch a summer concert at the historic amphitheater or to play pickup basketball at a purple and gold court dedicated to Kobe and Gianna Bryant (Kobe’s wife, Vanessa Bryant, went to Catholic school at nearby St. Boniface).

It’s also where in July 1924, the Ku Klux Klan held a rally that attracted over 20,000 people — one of the largest Klan events ever held west of the Mississippi.

On that night, a 30-foot burning cross surrounded by smaller ones lit what was then called City Park. The Orange County Plain Dealer reported that biplanes flew above the crowd, outfitted with electric lights — one looked like “a large, fiery cross,” while the other flashed “KKK.” New members decked out in white robes and hoods were there to be initiated, but it was also a celebration, complete with a marching band.

In elections earlier that spring, the KKK had won a majority of the city council seats in La Habra and Brea, and four out of five in Anaheim.

Those wins solidified the Klan’s presence in all sectors of Orange County political life, from school boards to the local Republican Party to the sheriff’s office led by Sam Jernigan — and Anaheim was the base.

What was going on in my beloved hometown was part of a nationwide resurgence of the Klan not seen since Reconstruction. But like all evil, the reign of the KKK in Anaheim eventually ended.

One hundred years ago this past Feb. 3 — my birthday — Anaheim voters recalled the four Klan councilmembers. It was the most consequential election in the city’s history, yet there has been no commemoration of the anniversary. Not a peep from the current city council, nor reflections from local publications or posts from local historical societies.

I’m not surprised. The Klan’s rule in Anaheim is a stain on a place that likes to celebrate the positive, in a county where boosterism is religion. Yet the push to drive out the KKK offers lessons for our political moment. As Mark Twain supposedly wrote, history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.

Then and now, elected officials were blaming immigrants for all the supposed maladies afflicting this country. In 1920s Anaheim, the big local issue was bootlegging and Catholics, who were seen as foreigners in what was supposed to be an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country.

Today, the powers that be bray “MAGA” and dare people to oppose their pretend patriotism. Back then, the Klan preached “One Hundred Per Cent Americanism,” a slogan appropriated from the American Legion, much like Ronald Reagan was the first president who promised, with sunshine and not vitriol, to “Make America Great Again.” The KKK cloaked their bigoted message in Christianity and convinced enough voters to put them in power with promises of restoring honor and pride and the good ol’ days. They slimed opponents when they weren’t outright threatening them with cross burnings and death threats.

The Klan went as far as to paint the letters KIGY — “Klansmen, I Greet You” — on major Anaheim streets to show who ran things. They seemed unbeatable — until good people from all strata of society rose up.

Local business owners created an anti-Klan group to organize the resistance. A whistleblower obtained the membership rolls of the Orange County KKK and passed them around town. The rolls revealed that nine out of 10 members of the Anaheim police department belonged to the Klan, along with the four councilmembers.

O.C. Dist. Atty. Alexander P. Nelson openly mocked the group, buying newspaper ads that outed Klan members and stating in a speech, “Barnum once said that there was a sucker born every minute, but when we look at the Klan, we are constrained to think that Barnum’s estimate was extremely conservative.”

The Anaheim Bulletin published the names of Klan members on its front page, while the rival Anaheim Gazette — run by the father of future U.S. Senator Thomas Kuchel — urged residents to vote the racists out. These righteous efforts succeeded: The four Anaheim Klan councilmembers were easily recalled, and the one non-Klan councilmember fended off his own Klan-funded recall. The Hooded Order’s stay at Anaheim City Hall lasted all of nine months.

A story as simple as this should be required learning at all Anaheim schools. Yet I wouldn’t find out about it until Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa in the late 1990s. I was doing a research project on hate crimes and was reading a book about the Klan when I stopped at a black-and-white photo of Klan members in their fearsome robes marching through a town. That same photo had appeared in my high school history textbook, with a caption that didn’t mention a specific locale.

Now, the photo bore a different caption: Anaheim, California, 1920s.

A clash during a “White Lives Matter” protest outside Pearson Park in Anaheim involving KKK members in 2016.

(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

My city never has shaken off its reputation as “Klanaheim,” because politicians and residents continued the racism, even as memories of the Klan faded. The pool where I used to splash around so long ago? Until the 1950s, minorities could only swim the day before it was drained. The cactus garden? It was created by former parks superintendent Rudy Boysen, most famous for inventing the delicious berry that bears his name, but who also confined Mexicans to a fenced-off portion of the park until activists successfully sued him.

Mexican-only schools arose after the Klan left office, and the city council and school board passed anti-immigrant initiatives well into the 1990s. Neo-Nazi rock bands freely passed out CDs of their crappy music at Angel Stadium during the 2000s and were still playing clandestine concerts at local bars last decade. As recently as 2016, a new generation of the Klan held a “White Lives Matter” rally at Pearson Park that devolved into a bloody free-for-all — a fiasco that drew worldwide attention.

Evil doesn’t disappear just like that. What happened in Anaheim a century ago shows how to combat tyranny and white supremacy — and also that the work is never really done. If that’s not a lesson we deem important, good luck to us all.