You Know About the KKK, but What About the Black Legion?
The Black Legion was a white supremacist fascist group headquartered in Lima, Ohio. It grew to hundreds of thousands of members in the 1930s and engaged in violent acts of racist terrorism. Its worst deeds are lost to memory, but they shouldn’t be.
Detroit police officers pose with weapons and regalia seized from Black Legion terrorists, May 25, 1936. (Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)
Typically, a friend or relative — sometimes it was just a mere acquaintance — invited a potential “recruit” to a private meeting of an unnamed organization. Its purpose, the friend said, was “protection”; it could help with getting jobs too. At dusk on the appointed night, the friend picked him up at home in a car with maybe three or four other men already inside it, and they drove out to Henry Tapscott’s farm three miles east of Lima, Ohio. Once there, the recruit was suddenly surrounded by thirty, forty, fifty, two hundred armed men — it was hard to see in the pitch-black dark, but some had flashlights — dressed in long black-hooded robes with eye slits, and on top a black pirate hat with a white skull and crossbones. The robes had white trim, a cape with red satin lining, and another white skull and crossbones cut out of felt and safety-pinned to the chest. The recruit was told to kneel. As a revolver was shoved into his back, two robed men stood on either side of him pointing guns. The “captain of the guard” spat out three questions:
1. Are you a native-born, white, gentile, protestant [sic] citizen? 2. Do you understand that this organization you are about to join is strictly secret and military in character? 3. This organization is classed by our enemies as an outlaw organization; are you willing to join such an organization?
Once the recruit replied “yes,” he was commanded to swear that he would never reveal anything about the organization or its activities, that he would “accept an order and go to your death, if necessary, to carry it out,” and that he would “forget your party and vote for the best man if ordered to do so by your superior officer.” A “chaplain” proclaimed: “We class as our enemies all Negros, Jews, Catholics, and anyone owing any allegiance to any foreign potentate. We fight as gorillas [sic] using any weapon that may come to our hand, preferably the ballot, and if necessary, by bearing arms.” He made explicit the group’s goals: “Our purpose is to tear down, lay waste, destroy and kill our enemies without mercy as long as one enemy remains alive or breath remains.” After the recruit swore to the oaths, he was taught the password — “elect only members to office” — and handed a 38-caliber gun cartridge to keep as a reminder of both his oath and what would befall him should he betray it.
By 1935, around five thousand white men in the town of Lima, Ohio, out of a total population of 42,267, had sworn to those oaths. The organization they joined was known as the Black Legion. It was an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, which had boomed and then largely collapsed during the 1920s. By the mid-1930s, the Black Legion grew to between a hundred thousand and a million members all over the United States — no one really knows how many — and was especially strong in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Illinois, as well as West Virginia and Indiana. In Detroit, its members reportedly included the police commissioner, dozens of police, a prosecutor, and the mayor of an adjoining city. It killed at least fifty people: some of them white, some African American, some of them union organizers and leftists. Malcolm X and his family always suspected that the Black Legion had killed his father in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1931 and left him in the street to be run over by a streetcar.
Only when brave police investigators in Detroit got a perpetrator to squeal in May 1936 did national news break about the Black Legion and its activities, and a few prosecutions finally begin. National alarm erupted, driven by daily headlines, as twelve members of the Black Legion were tried in Detroit for killing a white Works Progress Administration worker named Charles Poole. Hollywood even made two films about the Legion.
As the extent, power, and fascist nature of the Black Legion became clearer and clearer (but never entirely clear), as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler continued to rise in Europe, and as Senator Huey Long and “radio priest” Charles Coughlin amassed millions of devoted followers in the United States, the real possibility of an organized fascist uprising in the United States loomed. Echoing Sinclair Lewis’s famous 1935 novel and 1936 play, It Can’t Happen Here, about a fictional dictator who takes over the United States, A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, in a 1938 pamphlet entitled The Peril of Fascism, observed: “The Black Legion, flinging its shadow across the American scene, jolted the unwary and incredulous into a realization it could happen here.”
Reporters soon zeroed in on Lima, a small city an hour south of Toledo in northwestern Ohio, where the headquarters of the Black Legion lay in the home of Virgil “Bert” Effinger, the secret agitator and “major general” atop the organization. We can follow them into Lima — not just to the Legion’s leader, but, more importantly, to its members, its appeal to ordinary white men and women, and the sheer normalcy of white supremacy, nativism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, and militarism during the 1930s in the so-called heartland. “This monstrous organization is not just a grim excrescence on American life,” the Nation wrote at the time, “but something that has been built into the structure of American business and politics.”
The Black Legion fell apart by late 1936 in the face of prosecutions, national outrage, and individuals’ decreasing willingness to be publicly associated with it. For every heroic opponent who eventually stepped forward and helped stop it, though, lurked a fully complicit local government official who had joined the legion or who actively thwarted those who sought to shut it down. They included Robert F. Jones, who in 1934 joined the Black Legion in Lima in exchange for being elected county prosecutor and went on to serve four terms in the US Congress. The story of the Black Legion, from Lima all the way up to the FBI, Department of Justice, and the US Senate, raises all-too-familiar questions about law enforcement and political power, who controlled them, and for what ends.
Today, the Black Legion casts a long shadow in Lima. It’s deep Trump country. As debate rages over the hearts and minds of white working-class men in the Midwest, the history of the Black Legion in Lima, Ohio, is terrifyingly instructive.
Armed and Insidious
Internally, the Legion ran on a strict military structure, with squads, companies, battalions, and regiments and their corresponding privates, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, majors, and colonels, with graded generals above them. Each general in turn commanded a sector constituting one-thirteenth of the United States, chosen to reflect the nation’s original thirteen colonies. Atop them all ruled Virgil Effinger, the major general. The Black Legion also had local subgroups known as “degrees,” responsible for specific activities, called the “Foot Legion,” “Night Riders,” “Black Knights,” “Armed Guard,” and, at the top, the select “Bullet Club.”
Much of this hyper-militarized structure must have emerged out of Effinger’s head, as a veteran of the Spanish-American War. The Legion’s membership would have included many other veterans, too, especially from World War I. One member, Albert Erfer, was a veteran of US wars in the Philippines and Mexico as well as of World War I. These veterans would have been knowledgeable of and comfortable with the military titles and salutes the Legion employed, and they would have aspired to move up within the ranks and achieve the self-importance, deference, and affirmation that came with being an officer. Informants repeatedly identified individual members by their ranks, suggesting that the Legion’s military titles were well known and regularly utilized.
In the military culture of the Black Legion, we can see the legacy, by this point well established, of US imperial forays and ambitions in the Philippines, in Cuba, and World War I — and how they helped lay the groundwork for grassroots, domestic fascism. When we try to put a finger on what the Black Legion actually did, the picture is less precise. Three different Lima informants who spoke to a Cleveland FBI agent in the spring of 1935 said that “they had heard of whipping squads, hanging squads, and killing squads in the order and stated that at the present time there were eight names on the death list, whose death warrants had been signed by General Sloan of Sidney, Ohio, who is an employee of the State Highway Department” — where, we can note, Effinger was reported to be working at the time. But no deaths in the Lima area were ever publicly attributed to the Legion, in contrast to Michigan, where it reportedly killed dozens.
More concrete, if still partial, evidence points to crimes against property. One defector said that Effinger had “ordered him to take twenty men [and] go to the Sigma Theatre in Lima, Ohio, and there destroy a film that was being shown.” He said Effinger objected to the film, White Angel, “on the grounds that it upheld the Catholic faith.” He also said he “heard a discussion in the basement of Effinger’s home on the advisability of taking over the Federal Buildings by the Legion.”
Effinger bragged that the Legion had burned down two roadhouses on the outskirts of town, the Twin Oaks and the Imperial. At 3 a.m. on January 29, 1934, the Twin Oaks roadhouse — a dance hall, clubhouse, and barbecue stand two or three miles south of Lima — was indeed destroyed, in what the Lima News described as a “spectacular fire.” An hour later, another fire torched the home of Mr and Mrs Charles Reese, west of town. “Other fires in the city kept firemen on the run during the week-end,” the News reported. The same defector reported that Effinger had ordered him to burn down the Peacock Roadhouse, but he had refused. Multiple sources reported that the Legion was planning to burn down the post office. In May 1935, a committee of the Ohio state legislature received reports that the Legion was responsible for repeated threats against the governor’s daughter.
Much of the Black Legion’s most well-documented ire, though, was directed at men who refused recruitment, failed to stay active, defected, or squealed. On May 26, 1935, an amiable-looking, fifty-five-year-old white farmer in overalls named William H. Smith told reporters that the previous September 29, after a day spent cutting corn together, a “young relative” had suggested a car ride. They stopped to pick up two other men, then drove fifteen miles out to another farm. “It was raining hard as we tunneled into a long lane” half a mile away from the road, Smith recounted. “Two fellows dressed up like the devil himself walked to the car. Each of them had a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other.” Smith wanted to run away, he told reporters, but it was raining too hard. “The fellow I was with said to one of the fellows, ‘two recruits.’ . . . I said I’d just as soon sit in the car and wait.”
Smith saw his relative run into a “little shed,” but when Smith entered it, the relative was nowhere to be seen. “I sat down on a box. They had 12 recruits lined up and a man I knew was filling out cards for them.” When Legion members figured out that Smith hadn’t filled out a card, they demanded his name. “You know what my name is,” retorted Smith. “This is a lot of tomfoolishness.” The other recruits were clearly too terrified to resist, he told reporters. “Their teeth was crackin’ together like a hog eatin’ charcoal.” Next, about two hundred Legion members, “all decked out in that paraphernalia,” Smith recalled, marched the recruits into a barn, where “the chief gazabo [sic], a great big fellow with a heavy voice” — who must have been Effinger — “was hollering about the Democrats and the Republicans. ‘We’re going to take over the Government and run it ourselves.’” Effinger told the recruits that if any were Catholic, “you better get out of here real quick.” Smith answered that he “was no Catholic but I was ready to leave.”
When Smith then challenged Effinger directly and protested against initiation, Effinger yelled back, “Why you yellow. . . . . . . . , I’ll mash your brains out with this gun.” At that point, Smith “started shoving to get out,” he recounted, and “ran out into the night. But someone grabbed me and I started to fight, but was struck and cut about the head, I think with the butts of guns.” He was tied up, carried out into a corn crib, and dumped on the floor. An hour and a half later, around 12:30 a.m., “a fellow came up to the crib and asked me if I wanted to reconsider. I said ‘hell, no.’” Finally, around 4:30 a.m. they marched him out, while “poking guns in my sides,” and told him that he’d die if he ever revealed what had just taken place. The next day Smith told his story to the sheriff. Two days after that, he was threatened by men who informed him, “You told and you’re going to die.”
The Legion also routinely threatened men who left after having joined. “Those individuals who have dropped out of the order have been approached on numerous occasions and warned that they should not talk,” a 1935 FBI investigation reported. One informant recounted that he had been “ordered by Effinger to ‘bash in the head’ of a man who refused to attend the society’s meetings.” The Legion’s initiation oath included this ferocious — if perhaps difficult to execute — pledge:
Before divulging a single word or implied pledge of this, my solemn oath, and obligation, I will pray to an avenging God and unmerciful Devil that my limbs be broken with stones and cut off by inches; that they may be food for carrion birds; that my body be ripped open and my bowels torn out and fed to the foulest birds of the air; and that my head be split open and my brains scattered over the earth, my heart be torn out and roasted over flames of sulphur.
During initiations, Legion members staged fake hangings off in the dark, in which a Legion member, who appeared to have violated instructions by repeating a phony password, was promptly hung, in partial view of the initiates. One informant a Mr. Carter, reported that he’d played the role of the victim multiple times. A year after defecting in 1934, a plumber named George Scheid Sr, who’d been active in the Legion for two or three years and risen to the rank of major, informed on it to J. F. Cordrey, a postal inspector in Lima. After he had left the organization, Scheid reported, a note had appeared on his doorstep “advising him to either commit suicide or leave the country.” At one point, “about 50 carloads of men had collected around his house.”
His son, George Jr, later recalled: “I remember when I was a kid one night that there were a couple of carloads of Legionnaires all dressed up that were gonna take on my father, and they stopped outside the house.” Two friends of his father’s, who had also defected, were there to help protect him, including army veteran Albert Erfer. “My dad was sitting at his desk loading ammunition” when Erfer told his dad that “he recognized the two cars and he slipped out the back door.” The cars stopped, “some men got out,” and as Erfer stepped forward, “one of them caught a glimpse of his revolver, and you have never seen people get back in an automobile so fast in your life.” After Scheid Sr defected, he put up security lights around his plumbing shop. “He had weapons at his bed,” his son remembered. In a 2000 interview with the Lima News, Scheid Jr recalled that “my dad wouldn’t eat dinner unless he had a loaded gun beside him. He carried a gun wherever he went. I can remember him stopping on the sidewalk and reaching for his gun when a car slowed or stopped.”
As these accounts illustrate, the Black Legion in Lima was thick with guns and gun culture. Every man at those two-hundred-strong initiation rituals was presumably packing. Initiates were explicitly asked if they owned any firearms. “If they do not own a revolver, shot gun or rifle they are ordered to obtain a revolver and are instructed to carry it at all times,” J. F. Cordrey, the postal inspector, reported in February 1935. One informant showed an FBI agent a .45 Colt automatic pistol that he said the Legion had “taken . . . in a raid on some Catholics in another county. In August 1935, an official in Lima reported to the FBI that “on or about September 1, 1934,” multiple firearms had been stolen from a display case at the Allen County Historical Society in Lima. They included two German Lugers, a German sharpshooter’s pistol, three American-made pistols and revolvers, and sixty-five rounds of ammo for a .45. “It is my understanding that some members of the Black Legion planned to get this equipment,” the official reported. “I believe it will be found that one Chas. Hartzog stole this equipment as this man, who is known to be a member of the Black Legion works at Memorial Hall.”
More powerful weaponry apparently abounded. According to Scheid Jr, “an ammunition magazine” was stored deep in the woods at Tapscott’s farm where initiations took place, containing “explosives, high explosives magazines . . . filled with dynamite and TNT.” He recalled that his father was “quite a handloader and . . . collect[ed] arms and ammunitions.” One informant told the FBI that “he had overheard Effinger and others discussing the son of D. C. W. Leech . . . who was supposed to own a Thompson submachine gun, and they were planning to pose as Federal men and call upon him and confiscate the gun for the Legion.”
It’s safe to assume Effinger’s own weaponry collection must have been formidable. He vigorously asserted the right to bear arms. In August 1935, he was charged with having brought six hand grenades into a Black Legion meeting in Detroit. According to an FBI informant, Effinger owned “a large yellow map at his home he kept in the rafters of the basement,” which showed, Effinger told the informant, “the location of all the secret fortifications in the country.” Effinger asserted that “under the Statue of Liberty were concealed several large coast defense guns of the disappearing type.” In 1936 a man who said he had been a member of the Black Legion in Lima testified to a Detroit prosecutor that, while visiting Effinger in his home, “he showed me a square mechanism with a metal tube affair and that he claimed was invented by [workers] at the United States Government poisonous gas factory at Firewood, Maryland.” Effinger said the device had a timer that could enable it to go off at “a certain time such as a Jewish National celebration.” It would be best to do it in the winter, Effinger pointed out, “when the windows of these Jewish synagogues would be all closed so that the gas could not escape, and you can readily see that we can pretty well exterminate the Jews at one click. It will only take a few hundred members men . . . and a few of these mechanisms to do it.” Effinger then showed him a list of synagogues throughout the United States. Guns and weapons were everywhere, ever more visible ones, including those arrayed next to children at dinner tables, such as the Scheids’.
Twelve miles east of Lima lay the enormous Scioto Marsh, where a thousand workers picked onions under horrific conditions. In late June 1934, led by a thirty-eight-year-old picker named Okey Odell, seven hundred of them went on strike. By July, as the strike escalated, fifty-three sheriff’s deputies, controlled by the growers, deployed machine guns and tear gas at the picket line; the strikers threw rocks, allegedly stabbed someone, and spread roofing nails onto the highway, puncturing the deputies’ tires. One night in early July, “a large group of men, traveling in automobiles,” showed up at 2 a.m. at the home of Elijah O’Dell, Okey’s brother, and announced that they belonged to the Black Legion. They said they had gasoline, nitroglycerin, and dynamite in their cars. “Show us where they live,” the men offered, “and we’ll take care of them” — meaning the big growers. Their “mysterious caravan” then proceeded to the home of W. C. Weis, the union’s vice president, got him out of bed, and pronounced: “We are the firing squad and are going to take over the strike.” At a union meeting the next day, Okey O’Dell, the union leader, declared: “We don’t need these people here. . . . We don’t want any violence. We can’t keep them from coming here, but we have no use for them.”
Guns nonetheless begat more guns. In the nearby town of McGuffey, a fire started by nitroglycerin burned the home of the mayor, who was supporting the growers. When police, without evidence, then arrested Okey O’dell, two hundred vigilantes removed him from the jail, took him out of town, beat him, and dumped him beside a road, while hundreds of other armed vigilantes took over the town. O’dell hitchhiked back and marched with his brother right through the center of town, unarmed, daring the mob to kill him. Later, a huge armed mob swarmed his house, which “was turned into a miniature fortress by friends who appeared ready to back up O’Dell in his threat to ‘kill the first man who tries to get me.’” A photo in the Marion, Ohio, Star showed four white women of varying ages wearing filmy summer dresses, described as part of O’Dell’s “defense” team, lined up in a row on a couch, each holding a gun pointed grimly at the camera.
In Lima and its hinterland alike, the Black Legion both thrived on gun culture and fed it further. For every gun that actually went off, every roadhouse that was actually burned down, the threat of further violence magnified the Legion’s power and ability to terrorize. By 1935, the Black Legion was armed and dangerous and armed with dangerous ideas, with an unstable fanatic at its helm and thousands of men at his command, in paramilitary formation.