Carlisle Slater was a Richmond boy, born on Church Hill in 1918. Like so many young men of his generation that were swept up in World War II, Slater joined the Army and served honorably in North Africa, was wounded in action, and received the Purple Heart. His injury must have been serious and its severity might explain his life membership in the Disabled American Veterans organization. Slater mustered out at the rank of Sergeant in 1945 and returned to Richmond, and when he and Helen Heath were married two years later Slater listed his occupation for the City Directory as “contractor."
In 1955, Slater secured what was a relatively prestigious job with the City of Richmond when he was hired as a Deputy High Sheriff. This grand-sounding office, now long obsolete, was part of the Richmond court system that delivered summonses and warrants, eviction notices, and writs. In the course of his duties, Slater had full police powers and carried a gun.Slater also had a buddy he worked with named Robert Johnson, an older deputy who apparently went drinking with Slater. Slater and Johnson got in trouble in the Augustus Grill at 1000 West Cary Street one afternoon in September 1958, and when the cops arrived at the scene and heard what happened, they immediately arrested the pair. Johnson was charged with making an indecent proposal to a waitress and groping her. For his part, Slater told everyone in the restaurant in a loud voice that he was Richmond Sheriff James Young and that he had everything under control, that is, until the police hauled the two deputies away. Although it was embarrassing to their office, Slater and Johnson were not fired and by the following week the charges were dismissed, “at the request of the complaining witnesses.” No explanation was given as to why the witnesses in the restaurant withdrew their complaint.
The weather was turning colder in Richmond on December 5, 1958, and snow was in the forecast when Slater arrived at the High Sheriff’s office in the basement of what is now known as Old City Hall. He spotted his pal Robert Johnson, standing by a table cleaning his unloaded revolver with a handkerchief. Slater remarked that he, too, should clean his gun (carried loose in his jacket pocket), attempted to pull it out, and the .38 caliber revolver went off. Johnson clutched his chest and grunted, “I’m shot” and collapsed on the floor. The Medical College of Virginia was only four blocks away, but Robert Johnson was dead when he arrived at the emergency room. Three days later his widow and three children followed the hearse that carried Johnson’s body out to Riverview Cemetery.
The front page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch the day after the shooting featured a photo of a stunned Slater making a statement to Patrolman C.L. Timberlake, trying to explain how he killed his friend. Commonwealth’s Attorney T. Gray Haddon instructed police detectives to prepare a report on Johnson’s death which would decide if any charges were to be placed against Slater. In the end, Slater was not charged and the whole mess was just put down to bad luck, stupidity, and carelessness. “All evidence was that the shooting…was nothing more than an unfortunate accident,” announced Haddon.
A stunned Carlisle Slater gives his statement to a Richmond policeman regarding Slater’s accidental shooting of fellow deputy Robert Johnson in December 1958.
How long Slater was employed by the City of Richmond after the Johnson shooting isn’t known, but his occupation is listed as “Machine Operator” three years later in the 1962 Richmond City Directory. At some point, Slater developed radical ideas about race relations and became an avowed racist. Race relations were quickly coming to an ugly boil in the American South in the early 1960s and a pivotal event in racial unrest in this country was the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The explosion killed four little Black girls, galvanized Black rage, and resulted in the police shooting and killing of two more Blacks in the riots that followed. The Richmond Times-Dispatch, while expressing outrage about the killings felt the Red Menace might be behind this and suggested rather disingenuously that “…the possibility must not be overlooked that the crime was committed by Communists who could have seized on this opportunity to end any chance for creating peaceful interracial relations in Alabama.”
The Richmond Times-Dispatch, while acknowledging the Klan was active in the state in the past, in 1964 still maintained, “Virginia has been extremely fortunate in not having been afflicted in late years with any of these crackpot KKK’s operating in the dark of the moon, and idiotically proclaiming themselves ‘100% Americans,’" but that was soon to change, and Carlisle Slater would be in the middle of it. He was probably in the crowd estimated to have been 5,000 people who heard fiery anti-segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace speak at the State Fairgrounds in Richmond in July of 1964.
As a gauge of the growing popularity of the Klan in the counties around Richmond, a Klan rally the following year in Amelia County drew 1,000 people who watched a large cross burn in the middle of a field while listening to Marshall Kornegay, the Grand Dragon of Virginia. The burning of a burlap-wrapped and kerosene-soaked cross was a tradition and a signature for the Klan and a powerful tool of intimidation against Blacks, Catholics, Jews, or any people who were neither white nor Protestant, and this perversion of a religious symbol became the hallmark and sign of the Klan’s power. Prominently displayed in the middle of a field or on a hillside, the flaming cross signaled to everyone who saw it the same message: the Klan is active and powerful and is here, among your neighbors. The burning crosses and hooded costumes only accentuated the Klan’s mysteriousness, its malignancy, and the implication of potential violence.
In March of 1966, Richmond police were called to the 1300
block of Bainbridge Street where Carlisle Slater lived in South Richmond and
found three men standing under a tree beside the street holding a sign that
said, “THE KKK IS HERE.” The three (one of who was wearing tree climbing
spikes) were Thea Otis Elliot, a man with the odd name of Dean Marine, and
Carlisle Slater. They were all arrested and charged with an ordinance
forbidding placing signs on City right of ways and streets. A
photograph of the incident in the Richmond Times-Dispatch showed a
broadly grinning Slater and a cigar-chomping Dean Marine proudly holding up
their sign while standing in front of a Richmond police car. The arrested men identified
themselves to the police as Klan members and claimed the sign was simply promoting
an upcoming Klan rally in Greensville County. Marine
was wearing a fireman’s uniform and badge when arrested and as a result of his
appearance in uniform in the newspaper was forced to resign from his post as a
member of the Midlothian Volunteer Fire Department the following day. This incident was the first, but certainly not the last time Carlisle Slater
would publicly and proudly identify himself as a Klansman in the Richmond
press.
On the left, Carlisle Slater, and on the right, his fellow Klansman Dean Marine pose for a photo before being taken away under arrest by the Richmond Police in March 1966.
In an attack chillingly and deliberately staged to echo the Birmingham church bombing, someone broke into the small Bethel Second Baptist Church on Charles City Road in eastern Henrico and blew up the front of the building with dynamite on the night of October 5, 1966. The isolated little frame church with its tiny congregation was an easy target as the building was unoccupied, meaning there was no danger of the disastrous public backlash generated by blowing up children in Birmingham. It was also the nearest Black church to the Darbytown rally fields. No one was injured in the explosion, but the bombing was obviously race-related, and the FBI was called in to help local authorities. To underscore the widening of racial hatred that converged nearby at Darbytown and Miller, on the preceding weekend another Klan rally was held there with signs advertising the event posted all over eastern Henrico.
The same open field at Darbytown and Miller was the scene of another Klan demonstration three days later where a forty-foot cross was burned as the crowd roared its approval and listened to a speaker who further inflamed race hatred. To add insult to injury, this was only an hour after a meeting at the damaged church called by the Virginia NAACP and the Virginia Council on Human Relations. The meeting was advertised as “A Protest Against KKK-Type Bombing in Virginia” and drew 100 people – ten of which stood on the edge of the crowd and loudly identified themselves as Klan members. When one of the Klansmen heckled the speaker at the event, Henrico police moved forward and quickly escorted the man away from the shattered church. The Grand Dragon of the KKK, Marshall Kornegay, offered to have the Klan rebuild Second Bethel Baptist Church “with our workmanship and our materials.” The church understandably rejected this cynical and disgusting gesture entirely, and the church’s pastor, Rev. Fogle, issued a terse statement saying only, “We who bear the cross of Christ should not entrust our priceless burden to those who burn the cross."
Second Bethel Baptist Church on Charles City Road as it stands today. The front wall and vestibule were rebuilt by the congregation after the church was bombed in 1966.
A direct line between the church bombing in Birmingham, the
massive presence of the Klan in eastern Henrico, and the cross burning so close
to Second Bethel Baptist Church explosion seems to have eluded the editorial
writer of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. An opinion piece that ran on
October 8 termed the church bombing in Henrico an “isolated event” and
suggested “…the bombing may have been the work of only one person, or only two
or three.” This is especially
ironic since the parishioners who came to see what happened to their church
could probably see the glare in the sky from the giant cross burning in the
distance on Darbytown Road. It was doubtful that anyone, Black or White, in central
Virginia or even in the Southern United States would have any illusions as to
who had committed this crime.
The next day, cross-burning moved from the fields of Darbytown Road and into the heart of Richmond itself. On October 10, a cross was burned in the front yard of Frank C. Akers at 1018 West Main Street. No explanation was given as to what Akers had done to be singled out for this terroristic act. A few weeks later, Carlisle Slater was back in the news, this time arrested at a Klan rally in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. Violence had broken out at the meeting, with a Black man firing into the crowd, wounding three Klansmen. Ten Black men who were picketing against the Klan meeting were arrested and charged with “walking on the wrong side of the highway,” apparently a serious crime for pedestrians of color in North Carolina. Slater was observed strolling through the crowd carrying a shotgun, and when leaving the rally was stopped by the North Carolina State Patrol. In his car were found two shotguns, one ax handle, 26 rounds of buckshot, 175 bullets, and three Klan placards. Slater was taken into custody and charged with being “dangerously armed and terrorizing."
Klan activity and cross burnings continued through the fall and into the winter of 1966, but in December, a cross was set up and burned literally in the center of State government. Richmond police found the smoldering remains of a cross on Governor Street in Richmond, directly behind the Governor’s Mansion, which may have been a response to Governor Godwin’s offer of a $1,000 reward for anyone caught committing this crime. Cross burnings, said Godwin, have been “long associated with the record of bigotry compiled by the Ku Klux Klan” and enacted laws to make burning a cross without permission of the property owner a felony. While Mills Godwin looked out the window and fumed at the charred cross set up on the Governor Street sidewalk directly below his home, Police Chief Frank Duling noted this was the tenth cross burning in Virginia’s capitol in recent weeks.
December 1966: scorched stone marks the place where a cross was burned on Governor Street, just below the Governor’s Mansion in Capitol Square.
The new year began with another ugly note as five people in Richmond with known Klan ties were arrested for burning crosses in the city. On January 2, police picked up two men and a woman and charged them with burning a cross in front of 1212 North Boulevard. The trio was seen leaving another flaming cross at a location two blocks away. In the car, the cops found a third cross, Klan literature, a pistol, and a rifle. All three were charged with cross burning as well as contributing to the delinquency of a minor as the woman’s three small children were in the back seat. Moving to the West End, the same night two other men, one of them a State Penitentiary guard, were arrested for burning a cross in front of the Fox Rest Apartments on Glenside Drive.
The increasing number of Klan rallies all over Virginia in 1967 were emblematic of a society torn from within and unable to navigate or cope. Indicative of how blatant Klan demonstrations became, Governor Godwin arrived in Bedford on January 11 to inaugurate the opening of a new dress factory and was met by seventy-five Klansmen waving Confederate flags who lit a cross in a field across the street from where the Governor spoke. The same day assault charges against five men in Chesterfield County were dropped because the victim and principal witness, James Gregory, had understandably left the state. Gregory had accompanied police investigators to a Klan rally in Louisa County but later was run off the road in Chesterfield by trucks with Klan stickers and pulled out of his car and beaten. One of the accused assailants, James Sneed, listed as his home an address on Darbytown Road, less than a mile from the site of multiple Klan rallies. January 11, 1967 saw the election of one of the most famous White supremacists of his day, Lester Maddox, as Governor of Georgia. The election was described in a Richmond newspaper as a “…sweet victory for the little man who started his campaign more than a year ago with little funds, no organization – but a big reputation as a Negro baiter.”
The crowd of Klansmen greeted Virginia Governor Mills Godwin in Roanoke where he spoke there at the opening of a factory in 1967.
On April 10, several people were arrested during a cross-burning spree and as a consequence of a raid on Carlisle Slater’s garage behind his house on Bainbridge Street in South Richmond. John W. Kennedy of the 1000 block of Jeff Davis Highway was charged with burning a cross on Christmas Day 1966 at the intersection of Erin and Orleans streets in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Fulton. He was also charged with vandalizing the offices of the Richmond newspaper, The Afro-American, at 301 East Clay Street. Charles Schuyler and his neighbor on Bainbridge, Carlisle Slater, were charged with burning a cross in Chimborazo Park the preceding Christmas. Police said a search of Slater’s home turned up “shotguns, rifles, pistols, black powder, and dynamite fuse wire …along with four medium-sized crosses, rough lumber, inner tubes, and burlap, together with a large amount of Minutemen and Klan literature.”
This garage behind Carlisle Slater’s house on Bainbridge Street became a meeting place, arsenal, and workshop for building Klan crosses.
The farm field at Darbytown Road and Miller Road in Henrico was the venue for what an ad in the Richmond Times-Dispatch promised would be a two-day celebration of the hundredth anniversary of “the real Ku Klux Klan” on May 6th and 7th 1966, featuring country music, exhibits about the history of the Klan, and a ribbon cutting ceremony. Thirty-eight Grand Dragons from across the country were scheduled to attend and the ad assured uncertain racists who wanted to participate, “we have a hundred acres of land for this event." Efforts to obtain a temporary permit to erect a tent for the event were denied by the Henrico County Board of Zoning Appeals. As a result of the denial, Board member David Buker (who lived on Darbytown Road) received a series of harassing phone calls to the point he called Henrico Police to watch his house. The callers didn’t identify themselves, but chillingly told Buker they “knew who he was” and “were going to keep an eye on him.”
A field near this otherwise innocuous eastern Henrico intersection became infamous as a site of Klan rallies in the 1960s.
Even without a tent, about 2,000 people still drove out to Darbytown Road to attend a meeting that was marked by internal dissension, with one Klan “imperial Kludd” or chaplain, Rev. George Dorsett, charging Klan leaders with making too much money on Klan literature and souvenirs. Dorsett was escorted from the field and a shot was fired at his car. Grand Dragon Kornegay diverted the group by reverting to sure crowd pleasers, called President Johnson “sorry” and Virginia Governor Godwin “a nigger.” As a fundraiser, Kornegay also promoted the sale of the Klan’s favorite melee weapon after Lester Mattox famously started handing out autographed ax handles. “The guy down in Georgia used them and now he’s governor,” explained Kornegay. Between country music and sales of Klan records, ax handles, fried chicken, and flounder, Kornegay continued to rile the crowd, calling the Negro race “a tool of an international Zionist conspiracy,” and complaining “there are just as many white niggers as there are black ones.” Governor Godwin, with his insistence on making cross burning a crime, was held up for Kornegay’s special ridicule, saying the state troopers monitoring the rally were at Godwin’s direction, “showing up the kind of nigger that he is.”
Grand Dragon Kornegay returned to the Darbytown Road pasture again the next month, holding a rally and raffle for a car to benefit the Virginia Klan. Gun control and race war were the main topics of his talk and that of Kornegay and other speakers, which included the Grand Dragon of South Carolina. “If you register your gun with anybody, you’re a nut! When the conspiracy comes for your firearm, give it to ‘em like this grand dragon is – right between the eyes!” A speaker predicted “an insurrection of the Negro race and a revolution within the next four or five years. Be prepared for it.” When the winning ticket for the car was announced, State Police swept in and arrested Kornegay and another man for setting up a private lottery, bringing another Darbytown Road Klan event to an end. The next day a Richmond Grand Jury indicted six people on cross-burning charges, including Carlisle Slater. He was also charged with maliciously damaging a favorite target of the local Klan, the offices of the Richmond Afro-American, on Clay Street, but all those charges were dismissed in July.
An incident in that hot summer of 1967 was symbolic of the growing disruptive power of the Klan in Eastern Henrico. On the 10th, Henrico police called for assistance from the State Police in handling a crowd of Klansmen in 200 cars that descended on Henrico’s eastern governmental center at Dabbs House on Nine Mile Road. It coincided with another Klan rally that day at their usual gathering place not far away on Darbytown Road. At 6:00 the cars all started blowing their horns and Henrico police assumed a state of siege, locking the doors and posting police to block access to what is essentially the eastern Henrico courthouse. By 8:00, the cars formed a caravan and drove back out to Darbytown Road.
The following week a rally was again held at what the Richmond Times-Dispatch termed “the Klan’s customary meeting place on Darbytown Road” on July 16th. What was usually empty farm fields once again rang with bile and racial hatred as Grand Dragon Kornegay, in one rant, called reporters, “all lying s.o.b.’s,” and forbid the press from attending future rallies. Referring to one of the Klan’s favorite tropes of an upcoming race war, Kornegay predicted, “Some of us may get killed, but there are worse things than dying, and one of them is living under that white nigger Godwin.”
A burning cross high on the hillside of Chimborazo Park overlooking the predominantly Black Richmond neighborhood of Fulton would have been a chilling and intimidating sight to the people looking up at it on Christmas Day, 1966. Identified in the newspaper as a “South Richmond Ku Klux Klansman,” Carlisle Slater went on trial for his part in that incident, swearing he was driving home from Newport News with his wife and daughter when the cross was burned in Chimborazo Park. He also called on his wife, his son, his mother, and a boarder in his house to testify and confirm his story. The prosecution, however, had a witness that put Slater at home, in his garage, and who said Slater gave him and two other men a burlap-wrapped cross and instructions on how to burn it, specifically in the highly visible park. A Richmond police detective testified he spoke to Slater at his Bainbridge garage the night of the incident.
The first two hours of the trial were taken up with jury selection “and extensive questioning of jury members, specifically six Negro men.” Defense attorneys asked the six if they were prejudiced against the Ku Klux Klan, or if they were members of the NAACP. “Two Negros were removed by the commonwealth and four were struck by the defense. The result was an all-white jury of 12 men.” Slater had a defense team of two lawyers, one of which was Orange County Commonwealth’s Attorney S. Page Higginbotham. “Slater’s lawyers likened their client to Jesus, Socrates, and Patrick Henry in espousing an unpopular cause – in Slater’s case, the Ku Klux Klan.” Despite testimony from one of Slater’s cross-burning team, he sent out from Bainbridge Street, the Richmond police detective who spoke to Slater that night, and an FBI analyst who matched a piece of rubber innertube found on the cross with a sample from Slater’s garage, the trial ended in a deadlocked jury. A two-day trial the following October ended in Slater being acquitted of all charges.
Encouraged by the outcome of his trial, Slater joined Klan Grand Dragon Kornegay’s successor, Robert Hudgins, in filing suits in U.S. District Court in 1977 against FBI Director Clarence M. Kelly. Hudgens was suing for $2.5 million as he claimed he was the victim of a disinformation campaign directed by the FBI and distributed to Klan members under the guise of legitimate communication. As a result, the suit claimed, the FBI claimed credit for sabotaging the formation of a Klan chapter in Warsaw, Virginia, for breaking up a group in Danville, and for causing loss of revenue for the organization and Hudgens himself. The suit sought $500,000 in punitive damages, $500,000 for “mental pain and suffering, loss of sleep, and nervousness…” as well as $250,000 for Mrs. Hudgens who suffered “the loss of services of Robert Hudgens, his companionship, and an interference with the sexual relationship inherent in their marriage.”
For his part, Slater claimed the FBI and the CIA created and mailed false letters about him, had surveilled his home, publicized his garage as a Klan cross workshop, and confiscated papers and firearms that were not returned after his acquittal of the cross-burning charges. Slater sought the same amounts as Hudgens, including $250,000 for Helen Slater, but did not specify the same personal information that the Grand Dragon felt was necessary. “Hudgens and Slater,” noted the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “…are acting as their own lawyers.” Hudgens persisted with his case against the government into 1978, but Slater dropped his efforts in December of 1977 and Judge Robert R. Merhige, Jr. dismissed the case.
An article about Slater’s suit against the FBI noted “Slater
was a member of the KKK and the Minutemen organization, another rightist
political group, from 1965 to 1972.” The Minutemen was a short-lived
organization that rose and fell during the 1960s. It was founded in the early
60s by a Missouri chemist named Robert DePugh and would probably today be
characterized as a militant survivalist group. DePugh’s Minutemen were
stockpiling guns and supplies for that undefined war with Communism that would
supposedly soon rage across America. The
Minutemen fell apart with DePugh’s eventual conviction and imprisonment for
bank robbery and firearms violations. The odds are pretty good that Slater was
in the work party that erected a sign that once stood for years on Laburnum
Avenue in eastern Henrico with the stark message, “The Minutemen Are Watching
You.” For
Blacks in Richmond, eastern Henrico must have seemed a dangerous and forbidding
place, filled with cross-burning, hooded racists. The sheer number of them who
gathered out on Darbytown Road would have been terrifying enough to avoid the
area by miles.
As the United States was roiled by the Vietnam War, desegregation, civil rights, and student unrest on college campuses, the Ku Klux Klan thrived amid fear and uncertainty. In 1969, the Virginia Ku Klux Klan had a rally in Victoria, Virginia, and claimed their chapter as the third largest in the country, behind only North Carolina and Alabama. Grand Dragon Robert Hudgins instituted reforms, aiming to create a more publicly palatable Klan to increase membership and promised to concentrate on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. This included outreach to chiefs of police all over the country, and while Richmond Police Chief Frank S. Duling did not commit to meeting with Klan members, Hudgens said Duling was “enthused over the Klan’s promoting the upholding of law and order.”
When Carlisle Slater drove from his home on Bainbridge
Street in South Richmond to the favored Klan meeting grounds on Darbytown Road,
his route must have taken him through Fulton. By 1970 and under the direction
of the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority, this once-thriving
neighborhood in the eastern part of Richmond was utterly destroyed through
“Urban Renewal,” leaving only a haunting grid of empty streets. Even though the majority of the residents who
were forced to flee Fulton were Black, Slater still seems to have been shocked
at the erasure of so many homes and worried about the vulnerability of his own
surroundings in his similar blue-collar neighborhood in South Richmond. Instead
of vindictive about other races and ranting about the creeping Communist
menace, Slater’s letter to the Editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in
July, 1993, sounds like that of an old man whose world, and perhaps even his
memories, are being threatened. This time it wasn’t colored hordes, Jews, FBI
agents, or Catholics bent on subverting his racial purity, culture, and
religion, but something perhaps even more tangible and more frightening: the
same indifferent bureaucracy that obliterated Fulton with the weapon of an unjust
law.
The former home of Carlisle Slater at 1302 Bainbridge Street in South Richmond.
Slater wrote to the Times-Dispatch: “I have lived in the Bainbridge area for 50 years. I bought my home and kept it up to city code all of the years that I have owned it… Some of the houses in this area have been called ‘shacks’ by the Richmond Redevelopment Authority, but to many of the people who live in them, they are home. I ask the City Council not to pass into the hands of the Richmond Redevelopment Authority the power of eminent domain.” Slater closed his appeal with an oddly egalitarian phrase: “Much of the so-called trashy look in the Manchester area has been created by the City of Richmond’s indifference to the needs of the people.”
At the distance of thirty years, it is impossible to say if
the old Klansman’s rage had finally subsided before his attention was drawn to
the much more believable and potential threat to his home and the dispersal of his
community. Although entire blocks in the South Richmond neighborhood where
Slater lived on Bainbridge have been leveled, the neighborhood did not suffer
the same fate in the hands of the Richmond Redevelopment Authority as the
now-vanished Fulton. His house is still there on the corner of 13th
Street. It has been many years since the garage behind the house rang with low,
hate-filled speech amid the stockpile of guns and gunpowder and where, in the
dark of night, crosses were quietly passed out of the same garage doors and
into the trunks of cars idling in the alley. Carlisle Slater died in 2003 at
age 84 at McGuire Veteran’s Hospital. His grave in Richmond’s Maury Cemetery is a Government-issue bronze marker that
notes his military rank and award of the Purple Heart.
The field near the corner of Darbytown Road and Miller Road
is silent now, and the grassy expanse where Carlisle Slater looked out with
satisfaction over the enraged, red-faced, and sunburnt crowd under the orange ball
of a Virginia summer sun is now an industrial site. The county fair atmosphere
of vendors selling fried fish, the blare of amplified Klan records playing rage-filled
rants, and the horrible concentration of hatred are all gone. Where enormous
crosses blazed out in the summer night sky, fierce oaths were sworn and the Governor
of Virginia was denounced as a “nigger,” there are only the sterile blank walls of
massive distribution warehouses on the site. Today, the hum of air conditioners
and the faint sound of a truck in the distance are the only sounds to disturb
the quiet of this once-tumultuous part of Henrico at Miller and Darbytown.
Commonwealth of Virginia,
Bureau of Vital Statistics, State Board of Health, Certificate of Birth: Carlisle
Massie Slater, July 17, 1918, File Number 37142.
This information is taken
from Slater’s tombstone in Maury Cemetery and his obituary. Richmond Times-Dispatch,
March 15, 2003, B-9.
83 More Vets From 3
Boards Get Discharge,” Richmond News Leader, September 13, 1945, 34.
Commonwealth of Virginia,
Certificate of Marriage, Slater and Heath, File No. 6764, April 5, 1947.
“Deputy Fatally Shot in City
Hall Accident,” Richmond News Leader, December 5, 1958, 1.
“Two Constables Arrested
in Grill Incident,” Richmond News Leader, September 3, 1958, 17.
“Constables Are Freed of
Charges,” Richmond News Leader, September 10, 1958, 34.
“Deputy Fatally Shot in
City Hall Accident,” Richmond News Leader, December 5, 1958, 1.
“Deputy Constable Slain in
Accident,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, December 6, 1958, 1.
Ibid.
Obituary, Robert M.
Johnson, Richmond News Leader, December 6, 1958, 11.
“Deputy Constable Slain
in Accident,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, December 6, 1958, 1.
“No Charge Expected in
Shooting of Deputy,” Richmond News Leader, December 16, 1958, 9.
Hills Richmond City
Directory – 1962, (Richmond: Hill Directory Company, Publishers, 1962,
1145.
“Four Negros Die in Blast
at Birmingham Church,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 16, 1963, 1.
“Birmingham Outrages,” Richmond
Times-Dispatch, September 17, 1963, 12.
“Condolences to Tar
Heelia,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 14, 1964, 18.
“’At Least 5,000’
Heard Wallace Speak,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 6, 1964, 18.
“Klan Rally at Amelia
Draws 1,000,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 9, 1965, 14.
“Posting of Sign Nets
Three Arrests,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 22, 1966, 4.
“Three Arrested in
Posting Klan Signs,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 23, 1966, 2.
“Klansman Quits Fire
Department at Midlothian,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 24, 1966, 2.
“Negro Church Damaged
in Bombing,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 6, 1966, 1.
“Blast ‘Protest’ Rally
Crowd Includes 10 Klan Members,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 8,
1966, 2.
“Church Rejects Klan
Offer for Rebuilding,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 11, 1966, 5.
“The Church Bombing,” Richmond
Times-Dispatch, October 8, 1966, 10.
“Cross Burned at Home
Here,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 10, 1966, 24.
“Carolina Negro
Charged in Wounding of Two,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 8, 1966,
2.
“City, State Officials
Score Cross Burning at Mansion,” December 12, 1966, 1.
“Cross Burnings Charged
to Five,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 2, 1967, 1.
“Cross Burned Before Godwin’s Address,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 11, 1967, 15.
“Beating Case Left Open:
Plaintiff Not Located,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 11, 1967, 17.
“Mattox is Declared Governor
of Georgia,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 11, 1967, 1.
“Two Local Men Are Charged In
Cross-Burnings Here,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 10, 1967, 1.
“Anniversary Festival,” Richmond
Times-Dispatch, May 3, 1967, 3.
“Zoning Appeals Man Harassed
by Phone,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 30, 1967, 38.
“Dissention Marks Henrico Klan
Rally, “Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 7, 1967, 1.
“Two Arrested at Klan Rally in
Lottery Case,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 5, 1967, 13.
“Grand Jury Orders Cases
Tried,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 6, 1967, 23.
“Charge of Damaging Property
Dismissed,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 1, 1967, 16.
“Harassed Police Ask
Assistance,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 10, 1967, 9.
“Newsmen Scored, Barred from
Future Klan Rallies,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 16, 1967, 22.
“Klansman Denies He Helped in
Church Hill Cross-Burning,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 21, 1967, 13.
Ibid.
“Cross-Burning Trial Here Ends
in Deadlocked Jury,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 22, 1967, 11.
“Slater Acquitted in
Cross-Burning,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 28, 1967, 11.
“Two Klansmen Are Suing FBI,” Richmond
Times-Dispatch, August 4, 1977, 27.
Ibid.
“Klan Suit Dropped Against FBI
Director,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, December 17, 1977, 25.
Beckemeier, Eric, Traitors
Beware: A History of Robert DePugh’s Minutemen, (Hardin, MO: published by
Eric Beckmeier, 2007.
The author of this essay remembers as a child seeing this
sign beside the road which to him was both memorable and disturbing.
“Victoria Klavern to be Host
to Ku Klux Klan Rally,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 31, 1969, 28.
“Redevelopment Authority
Creates a Shake Attack,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 20, 1993, 6.
“Carlisle M. Slater,” Richmond
Times-Dispatch, March 15, 2003, B-3.
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