Photo by Phil Andraychak at Lilly-Washington Historical Society event
The KKK riot against Irish and Italian Catholics in 1924
[Part 1 of my presentation to the Lilly-Washington Historical Society on Sept. 9, 2024, the 100th anniversary of the riot. Because of time constraints beyond my control, the speech was shortened.]
As a ten-year-old in 1957, I remember asking myself a question that would perplex me for another 34 years: Why would the Ku Klux Klan kill my uncle?
My mother had sat down my sister and me and emphasized something that was very important to her: We should never, ever ask our father why the KKK killed Uncle Phil.
The family was thus engaged in a practice that the entire community would also practice for decades after the KKK had invaded Lilly on April 5, 1924.
It was a culture of silence.
Silence.
The silence went beyond our family and our household. No one in Lilly — Catholic or Protestant — wanted to discuss the KKK riot.
In history and POD classes during this time, that silence reigned supreme. Mr. Leo Krumenacker, our history teacher, alluded to the fact that the KKK invaded Lilly in 1924.
Period. No further discussion.
We students wanted to know about that, but it was not part of the curriculum.
He was not necessarily derelict in his teaching duties. Instead, he was reflecting that culture of silence that many felt was essential to recover a sense of serenity that the community had felt prior to April 6.
The first revelation
However, in a bit of irony, I began to understand the reason for the animus because of something said in a grade school classroom by someone who was not a native of Lilly.
This occurred not long after my mother instilled the culture of silence in us as children, probably when I was in fifth grade. Sister Marion, one of the St. Joseph nuns who taught in St. Brigid’s School in Lilly, mentioned the KKK in our history class. A photo of the Klan in its robes and burning crosses appeared in our history books, and she explained the role of the Klan in the post-Civil War era.
She called the KKK a group bent upon hatred, primarily against Blacks. However, in an aside, she mentioned that “They invaded your town many years ago because they hated Catholics too.”
Ahh, something new had entered my life.
That was the first time that I heard the KKK despised Catholics; suddenly, the killing of Phil Conrad made a little more sense. Phil was obviously not black — we Conrads had those damn freckles that the Irish were blessed with genetically. I knew very well that blacks did not have any of those stupid freckles that we Irish kids do.
Finally, I realized that the silence in the community was intense because of something else: Religious intolerance.
Death of my father
After my father died in October 1989, I initiated my quest to discover the truth of what happened that night. The question was, “How could I ever discover the truth in that culture of silence?”
I discussed this with my good friend Art Martynuska, who was interested in it, but like others in Lilly, knew little other than some of the mythology surrounding it.
I asked Art who might be alive today and willing to talk about it. I found five people who were surprisingly willing to do so despite that culture of silence. The first was an 87-year-old man with fire in his eyes who wanted to right a wrong that had taken place 68 years before that — one that resulted in his spending a year in prison for a crime he did not commit.
He opened my eyes — literally and figuratively.
The second was a 92-year old man who was wounded in the shooting but never told anybody except his family — until the day of our interview.
Both were very willing to talk, and we did so for hours.
The others whom I interviewed were younger that night, but close to the action in a number of ways. One was the sister of a man who was killed in the shooting. She, too, had been silent for most of her 78 years because of the family reticence.
The two remaining men were life-long residents of Lilly who lived close to the action and were tied to many who told the stories of that night.
They, too, were eager to talk, although one insisted that his name not be used — because the KKK may come after him — despite the passage of almost 70 years.
To place this in context, here is the start of those stories.
The Rage of Needles
I wrote a poem about the KKK riot many years ago after I realized that the riot had a very detrimental effect on our family. I called it “The Rage of Needles,” and it was a symbolic look at what the event did to our family.
Emotionally, we deal with the terrible aspects of our lives in a variety of ways. Repression of anger and the resultant hatred is never healthy. Containing rage is a challenge, and I only discovered this after beginning my research about the KKK riot.
For the Irish, one obviously is through the use of alcohol. However, for many other Irish, they turn to spirituality, to their religious beliefs.
That was the reaction in my family.
The culture of silence in our family was broken by my Aunt Helen, who was 77 when I visited with her over Thanksgiving 1992 in Norristown, Pa. She surprised me by saying that she would be happy to talk about what she remembered about that night and the details of the aftermath.
We sat in her living room and she talked about it in details that I had never heard. Some of this comes from that conversation.
Katie Brady Conrad
My grandmother, Katie Brady Conrad, whom I never knew because she passed away before I was born, immigrated to the US from Ireland in 1880 at the tender age of 8. She was brought to Lilly by her uncle, Father Philip Brady, who had also immigrated from the Isle after being ordained a priest. He was then the assistant pastor at St. Brigid’s, named in honor of one of the great Irish saints, and later became the pastor there.
He brought Katie to America so that she could obtain an education, and he enrolled her in Mount Aloysius, then a grade and high school in Loretto. Perhaps he also paid for her to immigrate to America beause of the tremendous intolerance against Catholics.
Katie eventually finished her studies and eventually became certified to teach, but she met Charlie Conrad and became the parents of six children.
Never could she have envisioned that the terrible animus toward the Catholics in her homeland at the hands of the British Protestants would be repeated in America is such a tragic way for her.
All my dad would say about the trauma experienced by his family in the early eyars was this, “We had some tough times in those days.”
Beyond that, silence about Phil and the KKK.
His father, Charlie, had died in 1915 when my dad was just nine years old, leaving Katie with six children and no means of support. They owned a store in the homestead, but really did not have great access to money.
Then, nine years later, she lost her eldest son, Phil, just 24 at the time of the Klan riot who had been employed as a conductor with the Pennsylvania Railroad, though he had been bumped off the job in February and had been employed at the coal mine in Moshannon in Lower Dutchtown for just a few months, according to Aunt Helen.
He had become the financial supporter of the family after being hired by the PRR shortly after graduating from high school.
Then, my dad, who was yearning for an appointment to the Naval Academy, or simply a chance to attend college and maybe participate in some sports, had to put aside those dreams and become a mailman and the sole supporter of his mother and his younger siblings.
He did that for 40 years, though he served two of them in the US Navy during World War II.
In the years that I lived with my father, from childhood to his death at the age of 83, he arose at 6:30 a.m. and drove to St. Brigid’s for daily mass. According to Helen, after Phil’s death, Katie also walked to mass every day until the latter days of her life.
That strong religious belief was what the KKK was seeking to denigrate on that fateful April night. The beliefs of the Klansmen and women originally focused on anti-black resentment after the Civil War. However, when it was reconstituted in 1915 and then became powerful in the 1920s, it changed its philosophy to hatred of Catholics, Jews, immigrants — along with blacks.
The root of Catholic hatred
Why the hatred of Catholics? The animus may be traced back to the same rationale as to why the hatred occurred in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The British had denigrated the Irish for centuries, and finally, in 1923, just before this occurred, Ireland finally earned its independence.
I read an interesting book about this when I was doing grad work at Penn State in the 1970s. It was entitled “Trinity” by Leon Uris, and he detailed this in a fabulous historical novel. This was my first introduction to the hatred of Catholics by Protestants, but I did not put that together with what happened in Lilly.
I mentioned this novel to my Shakespearian professor in a discussion before class in 1977, and he purchased it and read it. We later talked about the Celtic people and the roots of their conflict in Ireland.
I also remembered the actions of evangelical Protestant leaders in 1960. Led by Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, they had met in Switzerland and plotted a way of keeping John F. Kennedy out of the White House.
Why?
Because he was a Catholic, and the pope was a despicable person.
They failed.
I will discuss the events of that night throughout this. First, these were the interviews besides Aunt Helen.
To be continued ... Part 2, Jerry Carney
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