In Detroit one evening last fortnight some 50 members of the Black Legion, wearing cheap black & white robes and hoods, held a solemn conclave. Present were two relatives of the wife of a 32-year-old WPA worker named Charles Poole. They reported that Charles Poole was a wife-beater. "Let's beat him up!" "Let's stripe him!" cried the Black Legionaries. Some, more bloodthirsty, screamed: "Let's hang him!"
The Legion's "Colonel" Harvey Davis decided on hanging. Poole was lured to the meeting on the pretext that he was needed for a sandlot baseball team. The men piled into a string of automobiles with their victim, started out of town. At a spot near Dearborn, after a round of drinks, one Denton Dean discovered that there was no rope handy, abruptly shot five slugs into Charles Poole.
Such was the lurid story disclosed by Detroit police to the Press last week. Their arrest of 16 Black Legionaries as suspects in the murder of Charles Poole, whose widow denied that he ever beat her, unearthed a sinister and hitherto little known U. S. nightshirt organization. Of late years Southern hillbillies, steeped in
Ku Klux Klan tradition, have emigrated to Detroit in search of unskilled factory employment. To uphold "Protestantism, Americanism and Womanhood" and, as a sideline, to establish a mutual assistance group to find members jobs, a number of them founded the Black Legion in 1933. The organization burgeoned. No man could apply for membership, but if sponsored by friends, was enticed to a meeting. There, with a revolver at his heart, he was permitted to declare his willingness to "be torn limb from limb and scattered to the carrion" if he betrayed a word of society secrets. After swearing to support God and the Constitution, to give his all in any "war" against Catholics, Jews, Negroes, aliens and Communists, he paid $7 for a robe, 10¢ monthly dues, bought himself a gun, became a member in good standing. State police variously estimated the Legion's membership in Michigan at from 3,000 to 135,000. Last week in a Detroit court, the 16 sullen, empty-faced prisoners insisted they belonged to the Wolverine Republican Club. "A political organization?" inquired the court. Sixteen heads bobbed affirmatively. Unconvinced, the court arraigned twelve "Wolverine Republican clubmates" for the murder of WPA Worker Charles Poole.