For a time in the 1920s, Klan popular in Genesee County

We don't usually think of bed-sheet-robed and pointy-hatted white men burning crosses as a New York kind of thing.

That only happened in the deep, racist South, right?

Several years ago a client delivered a set of pictures to Oakfield attorney Ray Cianfrini that were clearly shot decades before in his hometown, showing men dressed exactly like Ku Klux Klan members.

While Cianfrini knew his parents had faced prejudice because of their Italian heritage -- his mother was denied a job in an insurance agency and his father was barred from the volunteer fire department -- nobody had ever told him that the Klan was once quite popular in Genesee County.

"I was shocked," Cianfrini said. "I had never seen that depicted in a picture before. I never knew that the Klan was here."

The set of pictures -- which were taken to document the funeral of a top Klan official in Oakfield in 1922, including a cross burning -- started Cianfrini on a effort to completely research the history of the Klan locally.

But not because he wanted to show anybody up, embarrass the families of former Klan members, revenge the prejudice shown against his parents or otherwise seek some sort of retribution.

He just thought it was an interesting bit of Genesee County history that should be preserved.

"I don't hold any grudges," said Cianfrini, a former mayor of the Village of Oakfield and currently a county legislator.

From about the turn of the century until the Great Depression, large portions of the American population were gripped by anti-immigrant prejudice (see The Gangs of New York).

In the 1920s, the Klan -- originally founded in 1865 -- was resurgent and recruiting millions of members in all parts of the nation. Genesee County was no exception.

At its height of popularity, there were an estimated 3,500 to 4,500 Klan members in Batavia, Oakfield, Pembroke, Bergen, Byron, Le Roy and Alabama.

Cianfrini said the members were community leaders -- the bankers, shop owners, politicians and farmers. So long as you were native born, descended from Northern European stock and Protestant, you could join the Klan.

The primary thrust of the Northern Klan's hatred was not African-Americans, although its members certainly did hate them. It was the most recent immigrants -- primarily Italians, Poles and Jews -- who concerned them the most.

Cianfrini charted how Genesee County's populations changed in the early part of the 20th Century, when the percentage of foreign-born residents went from primarily Irish, English and German to the Irish and Polish.

The change in population corresponds to the rise of the Klan.

By 1915, for example, 55 percent of all foreign-born residents were Italian.

They were drawn here by factory work, and even though they had been farmers in their native countries, agriculture opportunities were closed to them here, so they took unskilled labor jobs.

Two events helped both kill the Klan locally and allow Italians and Poles to join the mainstream of the community, Cianfrini said.

The first occurred in 1924. 

The Klan announced a march down Main Street in Batavia, and a judge issued an order against the march. A regional daily newspaper had obtained a list of all of the Klan members in Western New York and threatened to publish the list if the march took place.

More than 20,000 Klansman showed up in Batavia on Labor Day, 1924.

The newspaper published the list.

"It drove the Klan underground," Cianfrini said.

Nobody wanted to be associated publicly with the Klan.

The second significant event was World War II.

"They always say there are not atheists in foxholes," Cianfrini said. "I say, there is no prejudice in foxholes."

When veterans returned from the war, they were much more willing to accept each other as neighbors. It wasn't long after the war that Oakfield had its first Italian board member and its first Italian firefighter.

"We can talk about how prevalent it was, but I'm impressed by how in this era, we've gone from a time when a father was subject to prejudice, (to when) his son became mayor of the village where he couldn't become a firefighter."