Today -100: September 8, 1923: Dropping the iron that has grown too hot for him

Japan is rounding up Koreans, putting c.15,000 from Tokyo in internment camps. It’s claiming that Koreans are looting and burning earthquake-downed buildings and that there is a conspiracy, just now uncovered, for Koreans to assassinate Prince Regent Hirohito and other royals on his wedding day and kill lots of Japanese etc.

Commerce Sec Herbert Hoover says Japan will recover rapidly. Hoover is always so optimistic about economic recovery.

The Oklahoma KKK’s Grand Dragon N. Clay Jewett says Gov. J.C. Walton is using his anti-Klan fight to make himself a national figure (i.e. to set himself up for the VP nomination in 1924) but now he “would like to drop the iron that has grown too hot for him”. Walton responds by threatening to extend martial law to the entire state. He’s giving state police commissions to people threatened by mobs so they can defend themselves with lethal force. Jewett says Walton’s real problem with the Klan is that they rejected his membership application.

1,500 Hackensack, New Jersey parents, evidently spurred on by the Klan, petition against a young (21) black teacher, Nellie Morrow, being allowed to teach white students. The district has no choice but to employ her since she passed her exams. So they’re going to create a class of “backward negro pupils” for her to teach. The district superintendent will be forced out for hiring her, but she will continue to teach in the district for 42 years, despite years of harassment by the Klan, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Knights of Columbus. There’s now a Nellie K. Parker (her married name) School in Hackensack. Her father had fought for her and her brothers to attend local rather than Jim Crow schools (his father, a slave, learned Latin and Greek alongside his master’s son). One of those brothers, E. Frederic Morrow, will be the first black person to hold an executive position in the White House, administrative officer for special projects under Eisenhower. He will then become a vp at the Bank of America and write a book about how fucking racist Hackensack was. Another brother, John, will be appointed, also by Eisenhower, as the first US ambassador to Guinea after it became independent and the US rep to UNESCO. Nellie died at age 95.

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