A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

by Timothy Egan

In Washington, DC, the national Klan burnished its pose as a lobby for morality, meeting with loyal senators and members of Congress on a new agenda of social issues. But elsewhere, terror was still part of the tool kit. In that spring of 1925, a posse of hooded Klansmen on horseback rode up to the house of Earl Little in Omaha, Nebraska. He was a Baptist preacher who led the local chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Nebraska Klan had swelled to an all-time high, 45,000 members, with a women’s brigade and a Ku Klux Kiddies as well. The marauders waved torches and smashed windows at the house. They demanded that the preacher come out and face the mob. His pregnant wife, Louise, with three small children at her side, said her husband was not home. Had he been in the house, he might have faced a lynching. The Klansmen told her that “good Christian white people” would not tolerate a troublemaker stirring things up among “the good negroes.” They smashed every window in the house before galloping off into the night. A few days later, the preacher’s wife gave birth to a son—the boy who would become Malcolm X.