David Curtis Stephenson was grand dragon of the KKK in Indiana. He became immensely wealthy and influential in Indiana politics and was responsible for reviving the KKK and massive recruiting for the KKK. By 1922, he was considered the most powerful man in Indiana. He had been married four times. I can’t imagine what life must have been like for those women. He was a brutal criminal and rapist.
He kidnapped a young white woman, Madge Oberholzer, a state education worker who worked to reduce illiteracy, kept her prisoner in his private train car where he repeatedly raped her and bit her all over her body. He had also forced alcohol into her and she tried to commit suicide while kidnapped. Madge Oberholzer. Eventually he dumped her, still alive, on her parents lawn. She was taken to the hospital where she died of sepsis from the bite wounds all over her body.
His arrest, trial and imprisonment, along with the publicizing of the heinous crime he had committed destroyed the Klan in Indiana. It became a shameful connection, as it was, in fact, from the beginning. In his attempt to get his sentence reduced, he cooperated with law enforcement and gave a list of the political leaders who were in the pay of the KKK which resulted in many arrests and convictions including the Governor, the Chairman of the Republican Party, and many party members and officials resigned rather than be exposed.
The Indianapolis Times won a Pulitzer prize for investigated reporting on this crime and the publicity helped to defeat the power of the Klan because people were repulsed by the heinous crime and all the details of the debauchery of the private lives of the klan leaders and politicians involved with the Klan.
Stephenson was paroled in 1950, violated parole and was arrested again in 1956 and sentenced to ten years. He married twice more, without even divorcing a previous wife, but was again arrested for attention to kidnap and rape a teenaged girl. His most recent wife left him as had the previous ones. He was fined and forced to leave Indiana. He died in Tennessee in 1966 and was given a veterans burial. Later, Congress added restrictions against burying veterans who had been convicted of sex offenses and capital crimes in veterans cemeteries
So much for the KKK claim, so prominently portrayed in the film of Birth of a Nation. of protecting innocent white womanhood. Needless to say, men like these were never interested in protecting innocent African American womanhood - they were more interested in kidnapping and raping them.They are and always have been, a group of criminals who kidnap, torture and murder American citizens. Shame on anyone who is proud of white supremacy leanings and the history of this stance in America. Shame on anyone using that poisonous population to push into a political power position, like Donald Trump, another immoral, criminal, self-serving despotic madman.
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