Download To Stand Alone: Inside the Kkk for the FBI ePub

Rev. Delmar Dennis was a courageous man but his memoir is not a totally accurate account of his life or his experience as an FBI informant within the KKK.

I have acquired the entire FBI headquarters and Jackson MS field office files on Rev. Dennis. What Rev. Dennis does not truthfully acknowledge in his memoir, is that he was a product of the prevailing values and beliefs of the small Mississippi community in which he lived. He was drawn to the Ku Klux Klan because he believed in their premises and conclusions with respect to African Americans. Even after his FBI association, he continued to be a segregationist.

FBI documents make it clear that Rev. Dennis was very much in sync with the prevailing values of white Mississippians during the 1950's and 1960's. These are the folks that elected and re-elected U.S. Senator James Eastland, a life-long racist who (quietly) sought and received KKK support for his political campaigns. These are the same folks who repeatedly elected racist Governors such as Ross Barnett.

Rev. Dennis created a church and then affiliated it with other southern churches whose fundamental precept was that African-Americans were inferior beings who should not be allowed to worship or associate with whites.

So, yes, Rev. Dennis was a courageous individual because his religious convictions would not condone murder or church bombings or beatings and castrations of African American men -- but, by no means, should we invent a false persona and attribute it to him.

The John Birch Society uses Rev. Dennis as evidence to claim it is not a racist or bigoted organization---since Rev Dennis was a JBS member and later a JBS employee. This is rather ironic considering that in To Stand Alone, Rev. Dennis acknowledges the horrific environment that existed in Mississippi during the 1960's (and previously) where the Klan and White Citizens Councils dominated many local communities and where the entire law enforcement community was suffused with Klan members or sympathizers. For example, in November 1964, Dennis told the FBI that:

"The Klan in MS has completely infiltrated every phase of the legal, political, social and economic system in MS. The membership in the Klan ranges from common laborers and criminals, to judges, lawyers, doctors and political leaders. While they may not be active members, they are secret members who use their influence to further Klan efforts and aid Klan activities, for example, it is generally known in Klan circles that supervisors who pick juries use their influence to get Klan members on the jury panel."

Despite this admission, however, the Birch Society characterizes our civil rights movement as entirely the creation of, and dominated by, "Communists" and "Communist sympathizers" -- as if opposition to the prevailing values and norms within Mississippi described by Dennis could only come from disloyal, suspect, or radical Americans who have no genuine interest in social justice.

Significantly, the Birch Society suppresses not only Rev. Dennis's frank admissions re: Mississippi but also the comments made by another one of its "experts", namely the prominent African-American columnist George Schuyler. Schuyler was not a JBS member in 1961 but he endorsed the JBS. Nevertheless, he too acknowledged what the JBS never did. In an 4/22/61 column in the Pittsburgh PA Courier, he wrote:

"The White Citizens Council which has branches or cells everywhere, controls by terror such states as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and to a lesser extent, Virginia...It has defied and disrupted the operation of the laws of the land. It has used threats and vicious economic reprisals...It has become a legal arm of Mississippi's Government." ...

What readers must understand about Rev. Dennis is that his objection was to violence and murder. However, he did not object to the underlying values which produced the type of society that Schuyler described in the quote above.

Books and movies have said alot about Daniel Dennis. This book is his story, as he lived it. It is not what anyone with an agenda, for or against, wants to read.
It is the honest tale of a Klansmen, who believes in the Klan, but can not condone murder.
This is an important book for anyone who wants to learn the heart of "the other side" of the civil rights movement.
Mr. Dennis did not set out to write books, and it shows. But this is one of the most honest, and heartfelt, books on the civil rights movement I have ever read.
I stronly recommend "Freedom Is A Constant Struggle" to be read alongside this book.