The Identity Project: London's early history of hate

LONDON AND THE KU KLUX KLAN

The founder of London, John Graves Simcoe, is known to history for pushing through the first anti-slavery law in the British Empire in 1793.

The Forest City would also serve as a stop on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves seeking freedom in the North.

Yet the city’s early history is also rife with racism and anti-Semitism.

While without doubt, there are multiple accounts lost to history, some of the most prominent examples of racial attacks did not begin until decades after European settlement began in 1796.

In the 1860s, the Civil War in the United States would play a significant role in the formation of one of the first organized hate groups in London.

Defeated confederates, especially those with money and property before the war, were facing financial ruin.

They went looking for options, and for some with ties to Canada, London was to become a refuge.

The Forest City had made money off the U.S. conflict. Procurement officers from both the north and south resided in the city as they looked to secure war supplies from local industry.

After the war, southerners called on their London contacts to help them escape prosecution or destitution in the Union-occupied south.

Once here, they fund a room or a home in the vicinity of Wellington Street and tried to work their way, quietly, into London society.

Yet not all managed to avoid detection. The most prominent example is the story of J.Rufus Bratton.

Bratton, a plantation owner and slaveholder in Yorkville, South Carolina, served as a surgeon with the confederacy throughout the Civil War.

By 1871, his former slaves were free and his finances in disarray. Angry at federal reconstruction policies, he and others joined what would become Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

On March 6, 1871, Bratton, as second in command, led a raid on the home of Jim Williams — a former slave who had fought for the Union Army.

By 1871 Williams had become the leader of a Black militia determined to keep the peace with former slave masters.

Bratton was having none of it.

As multiple publications express, his gang of at least five dozen white men rushed to the home of William’s associate. There, they beat him to the point he confessed where Williams lived.

Arriving at his cabin, the gang thought he might have been tipped off and fled. But upon further check, the men located him under the floorboards.

The group dragged Williams outside, where a noose, already tied to a tree, was placed around his neck.

By force, Williams climbed the tree with a member of the Klan in tow. With Williams clinging from a limb, his attacker cut his fingers and Williams fell as the noose tightened around his neck.

While in the coming decades, the lynching of Black men and women would become sadly common, Williams’s death occurred during southern reconstruction. In other words, it was a very different South Carolina.

Governor Robert Kingston Scott was a former Union Army officer and a prominent abolitionist.

Irate, Scott demanded the troops be dispatched to the Yorkville district. He also welcomed the addition of Bratton's name to the most wanted list.

“It got so bad, that the federal government in Washington declared a state of emergency, suspended habeas corpus, and brought in the army,” said Author Ron W. Shaw of Perth, Ont.

Shaw wrote London Ontario’s unrepentant Confederates, the Ku Klux Klan, and a Rendition on Wellington Street.

Shaw said the search for Bratton commenced immediately but failed. “He slipped through the net. He went on the run,” he told CTV News.

For the next year, Bratton bounced through several states desperately seeking a haven.

He finally found one through connections with confederates living and prospering in London.

Bratton successfully made his way north but had little time to adjust.

A U.S. Marshall arrived and demanded an agent of the Crown Attorney act on an American warrant for a KKK member from South Carolina.

It took a few days, but Bratton was caught.

“They bushwhacked him on Wellington Street, bundled him into a horse cab, and made off to the states,” said Shaw.

London author and former newspaper columnist Brian ‘Chip’ Martin picks up the story from there.

A more detailed version is in his book From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War.

Martin wrote of the outrage following the kidnapping, as it was dubbed in newspapers throughout Canada.

But the new nation had little power to challenge Washington. Prime Minister John A. MacDonald sought help from England.

“Britain raised a royal fuss,” said Martin, with some reports suggesting Queen Victoria herself intervened. But Martin and Shaw are not convinced.

Still, however it came to be, Bratton was freed from jail in South Carolina and returned to Canada.

On June 11, 1872, he arrived back to a warm welcome.

He would never be tried or prosecuted for the murder of Jim Williams.

“Bratton had been indicted for murder and civil rights violations. It is almost never mentioned in newspapers of the day,” Shaw explained.

Bratton practiced medicine in London, Ont. for the next seven years. He left for South Carolina in 1879, as political conditions and Jim Crow laws made it a certainty he would not face prosecution.

It was there Bratton’s story would spur a young man to write a novel that would become the basis for the resurgence of the KKK.

In 1905, Thomas Dixon Jr. wrote The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Clan. Penned with a point of view sympathetic to the lost Confederacy, the book paints the Klan as a saviour of the South.

While the novel did little to elevate the racist organization, the movie it is based upon did.

The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the first blockbuster and remains one of the largest-grossing films of all time when adjusted to today’s dollars.

At the time, critics heralded the film for its story and noted for its cinematic advancements. The latter still stands today, but the movie's distorted view is widely regarded with disdain.

A 2015 publication in The Washington Post dubbed The Birth of the Nation “The most racist movie ever made.”

Which brings us back to its ties with London.

In his book, The Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan in York County, South Carolina, author Jerry L. West argues J. Rufus Bratton’s story, and his flight to London, was the inspiration for Dixon Jr. to write The Clansman.

Dixon Jr.’s maternal family were prominent plantation owners and slaveholders in York County.

THE HARRISON ATTACK

Shortly after Bratton’s return to the United States, London’s KKK members were suspected of a crime.

In 1882, the Harrison’s, a prominent Black family who had escaped slavery in the U.S. in the 1850s, faced increasing harassment and discrimination.

Tensions become so frightening for the Harrisons they fled to Windsor.

It turned out they got away just in time. Two days later, their family home on Wellington Street was burned to the ground.

“You’ve got to be suspicious,” shared Shaw.

As a side note, one of Harrison’s sons returned to the Forest City 50 years after the fire.

By that point, Richard B. Harrison was a prominent stage actor known throughout North America. Soon after his London, Ont. visit, he was featured on the cover of Time Magazine.

THE KLAN GROWS IN LONDON

As the KKK waned in the later part of the 18th century in the United States, London's dwindling members remained underground.

But with the end of the First World War and the popularity of Birth of the Nation, Klan membership grew.

Small rallies took place in the 1920s. Then, in 1925, the Southern Ontario convention of the KKK was held just outside of London.

Martin's research found it was no small affair.

“I mean a 1,000 white-sheeted men at the Dorchester fairgrounds and a 40-foot burning cross. It was a rally for the Ku Klux Clan.”

But the rally was to be the height of the Klan in London. The organization sputtered in the 1930s as membership dropped.

The rise of fascism in Europe has turned the public away from far-right organizations.

NAZIS IN SOUTHWESTERN ONTARIO

Still, Hitler's rise in Germany and Mussolini's in Italy was not unwelcome by all in southwestern Ontario.

But only a few went public with their admiration.

In the 1970s, the academic paper Nazi Party Membership in Canada: A Profile by Jonathan Wagner of Minot State University in North Dakota revealed RCMP and German government records.

His research confirmed 88 registered members of the German National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in Canada in 1937. To be a member of the Nazi party, a person had to prove their German heritage.

Wagner’s paper further broke down where registered members lived. He found many in Toronto and at least five members in southwestern Ontario. They were joined by hundreds of others who professed allegiance to Hitler’s Reich

His research found some of those identified were active in promoting Nazi causes prior to the outbreak of war. Their efforts focussed on pamphlet distribution to both German and non-German-speaking households.

Several spent the war in a Canadian prison for their actions.

LONDON’S OWN SELF-PROFESSED NAZI MAKES HEADLINES

After the Second World War, London welcomed European migrants. By 1950, some of the new arrivals included former foes in the form of Wehrmacht soldiers.

Martin Weiche arrived in London in 1951 at the age of 30. During the war, he served as a pilot in the German Luftwaffe.

While Weiche had never been a member of the Nazi Party, he would soon begin professing his belief in fascism and National Socialist ideologies in Canada.

He joined or was associated with, multiple upstart far-right parties in the 1960s and 70s, including the Canadian National Socialist Party. Under that banner, he ran for the 1968 federal election in the riding of London-East. Eighty-nine people voted for him.

Wieche’s public stance coincided with personal success. He built a construction firm that erected highrise apartments.

He used some of his funds from these projects to construct a new home just outside of city limits near Hyde Park.

It would become known as the “Berghof,” the same name as Adolf Hitler's Bavarian residence.

Loosely modeled on Hitler’s chalet, Berghof featured swastikas in its interior design and Nazi paraphernalia.

Over 25 years, the acreage around the property was the site of cross-burnings with both far right and KKK members present.

In a 1980 CFPL-TV (CTV News London) story, Weiche is seen with white men during a cross burning.

Some are filmed in Nazi uniforms while others wear KKK robes. The men also ignite a large swastika in the night sky.

In 1993, following another cross burning, Weiche told a reporter he and his supporters were exercising their religious freedoms on private property.

Martin Weiche would hold his beliefs until the end of his life. He died at the age of 90 in 2011.

His Berghof home then fell into disrepair before and was demolished in 2020.