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Today, most people regard the remnant Ku Klux Klan as an artifact of the Jim Crow South. But in the 1920s and 1930s, the so-called Invisible Empire's bigoted tentacles spread throughout Southern California.
Throughout those years, the klan used its hatred of blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, bootleggers and union workers to place its adherents in city council seats, on court benches and in police departments throughout the region.
Inglewood--then the county's agricultural hub--was the nation's fastest-growing city. And to keep it a white Protestant town, klansmen posted signs that read "Caucasian-only."
On a cold spring night--April 22, 1922--more than 100 armed and hooded klansmen broke into the Inglewood home of alleged bootleggers--Fidel and Angela Elduayer, Basque immigrants from Spain. The intruders forced the couple's two teenage daughters to disrobe--contemporary accounts are silent on what may have followed--then ransacked the house and brutally beat Fidel and his brother, Mathias. When the Inglewood police arrived, shots were exchanged, leaving one klansman dead and two wounded.
Two days later, klan-sympathizing Inglewood residents--hostile and armed with pistols--jammed the tiny county coroner's hearing room, where the victim's body lay on a table in the corner. Maintaining the "night riders' " innocence, Grand Goblin William S. Coburn, head of the klan in California and five other states, declared that his men had only tried to "clean up the town's bootleggers."
But an Inglewood traffic cop, Frank Woerner, and a 19-year-old eyewitness, Clyde Vannatta, told another story: Woerner testified that on the night of the raid he had received a call from the Elduayers' terrorized...