Editor’s Note: The rhetoric flying around these days contains a lot of archaic terms- “White Supremacist” seems to be a favorite, which makes me remember when such despicable creatures actually existed, attacking children of color during integration times, and “KKK,” of whom there may be a few hundred sprinkled in a population of 320 million. And the favorite default insult of “Nazi.”

I would be tempted to say they died with the end of the Third Reich, but of course they didn’t. I was driving down Wilson Boulevard the day after three purported Nazis showed up at the Dominion Hills Strip Mall where American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell was assassinated by a disgruntled follower after doing his laundry at the coin-op at the end of the building. I vaguely recalled writing something about it, and found it in the archives from 2009, the result of a history of our neighborhood book I had done a couple years earlier (“Stories from Big Pink). In view of the timeliness of the topic, I will inflict it on you again.

– Vic

The Interstate Wizard

(Original Klan Robe)

After the marching season was done, emotion continued to run high outside the rental office at the target for integration in Arlington County, the Buckingham neighborhood. The landmark legislation was just two years old, and there was a lot of controversy about it. Persons of color were being permitted to swim in the formerly segregated community pool, and people who did not live in the neighborhood were angry.

1966. One hundred and one years since the War Between the States had concluded. The centennial was only a year past, and the demonstrators who were marching on either side all overlapped the lives of the last men who had actually heard the sound of the guns.

Albert Henry Woolson died on August 2, 1956. He was the last surviving member of the Union Army, and possibly the last of both armies. He was a drummer boy in Company C, of the 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery Regiment. He never saw action, but when he passed away, President Eisenhower was moved to say:

“The American people have lost the last personal link with the Union Army … His passing brings sorrow to the hearts of all of us who cherished the memory of the brave men on both sides of the War Between the States.”

I have a vague recollection of Woolson’s passing; maybe it is a false one, since I would only have been in Kindergarten at the time. But ten years after the last vet was in his grave was also the last year that anything made much sense in the context of how America used to be. Absolutely no average citizen had an idea of what it was going to become.

Certainly the Nazis at their headquarters on North Randolph Street did, as did the people who were demonstrating at the intersection of Glebe and Pershing Drive.

The Buckingham neighborhood was still a comfortable enclave of white government workers. Washington was still a bus trip away, since the streetcars had all been torn up. The integration of the races was still a felony under state law, essentially unchanged since Reconstruction.

All that was going to change so rapidly that it resembled the massive slide of a massive continental tectonic plate like the San Andreas Fault. Pressure had been building for years and years, though you could pretend not to feel it. One morning the fault was just going to rip wide open.

But that summer, Francis Freed, the Grand Dame of Buckingham who owned it all, could look out her office window and see her overseer’s cottage just a block north on Glebe Road, and once a week the Civil Rights demonstrators picketing down below. The massive garden apartment complex of more than 1800 units was nearly paid for, and she had a new vision for what this land should look like. She was thinking about tall towers of dwellings for the new elite of Washington, something to replace the modest two-story brick buildings. Maybe that was the way to get around the protestors. Tear it down and start all over again.

Xavier Edwards wanted to prop the old ways up. Edwards styled himself as the Imperial Wizard of the Interstate Ku Klux Klan, which sounds more like a tire and battery wholesaler than an invisible empire. He preferred visibility, and showed up at the Buckingham rental office with another Klan member shortly before the civil rights group ACCESS was due to start their weekly demonstration on Sunday.

He probably came up Route 50 to get there, and was arrested in Arlington and charged with using abusive language and carrying a concealed weapon.

Xavier traveled frequently to stir up trouble from his home in Jessup, Maryland, near Fort Meade. Considering the mutterings of those in the Deep South about the presence of Outside Agitators stirring things up, the ACCESS demonstrators were mostly home-grown, and it was the costumed extremists who were from out of town.

Interstate Wizard Edwards knew that, too, but did not care. He specialized in appearances at civil rights demonstrations, mostly in the state next to his own.

He must have been quite a sight when he was arrested. He was wearing his purple robe of office, even if the weapons charge was not as exciting as it sounds.

Arlington Police Officer Gerard Cox found what he was actually packing- not heat, but a tear gas pen in the breast pocket of his shirt under the robes.

I think they advertised those things in the dense page of matchbook-sized ads in the back of comic books at the time, with the X-Ray glasses

The Cops were executing a warrant that came out of an alternation at the Rental Office in Buckingham earlier in the month (the 6th) not long after the march that circled the neighborhood. ACCESS had been picketing and marching all that long summer and fall, and the Klan was right there with them.

While most of the encounters between the groups were not violent, emotion seethed and epithets flew. ACCESS member Dave Smith swore out a complaint to the authorities that Xavier had verbally abused him. You can imagine what was said.

Dave lived at 3000 S. 16th Road, which is about ten or twelve blocks southeast of Big Pink, on the highlands. The modest residence is not far from the entrance to the Army-navy Country Club, built on the remains of Fort Richardson near the historically African American Nauck neighborhood.

Construction of the massive line of forts that encircled the capital had destroyed the old great houses that stood on the heights, and stripped their lands of fences and outbuildings. Although the fixtures were sold off in short order as surplus of the late unpleasantness, the massive earthworks were too intrusive for farming without significant effort, and former slaves moved in.

The Interstate Wizard was released on $250 bail the same afternoon he was arrested, after assuring the police he would appear at a Monday hearing in Arlington County Criminal Court. There is no existing record of whether he showed up in a meek white shirt or his colorful robes that Monday morning.

According to the newspapers, Dave had the good sense to move before the warrant was served. I mean, who needs the Klan or a burning cross on your front yard?

(George Lincoln Rockwell)

Our Nazis were also from out of town, but they came to stay. Their Fuhrer was a nasty fellow named George Lincoln Rockwell. He was born in Bloomington, Illinois, and went to college in Lewiston, Maine. He washed up in suburban Washington for the same intoxicating reason most of the rest of us did. This is where things were going on. It was a place you could make a difference.

George Lincoln Rockwell’s bully-boys cut a swath through town, flying their flag and festooning their vehicles with hate. They lived right here in town. The headquarters of the American Nazi Party was a modest house that is now home to the Java Shack, which conducted an exorcism on the place before they opened. The big house they called “Stormtrooper Barracks” on Hatemonger Hill that featured in Alex Haley’s startling interview for Playboy is now a County park and home to Upton Hills swimming pool.

The die-hards used to paint a red swastika on the parking place where Rockwell died, but the cops were on the look out, and the tradition died out years ago. That is why it was so startling to those three silent demonstrators there the other day in their white shirts and dark trousers. I thought they had died out a long time ago.

Oh, they solved the problem of the community pool. They put a Mercedes dealership on top of it.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com