When manager Bob Lee arrived at the New Era Bookshop on the morning of Feb. 12, 1967, he found his front window smashed and several signs posted on the storefront with this chilling message: “You are being watched by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”
A few weeks later, “a can filled with oil and gasoline soaked rags” was ignited at the store’s entrance. Lee’s car was vandalized. Xavier Edwards, self-appointed Imperial Wizard of the Interstate Ku Klux Klan, an ultra-violent offshoot of the national Klan organization, claimed responsibility for the attacks. And in mid-March, he promised more violence if that’s what it would take to close the New Era down.
Why did this bookstore become the target of domestic terrorism? Edwards told the Sun that he and other Klan members sought to shut down the New Era because it espoused Communism. It was true that the New Era, established in 1962 at the height of the Cold War, stocked Marxist and socialist philosophy, and also distributed publications issued by the U.S. Communist Party. It was also true that the store boasted one of the largest selections of Black literature and periodicals in town during a time of escalating racial tension, which exploded in citywide violence and destruction a year later. But as the Publishers’ Weekly reporter noted, Lee also stocked conservative, right-wing publications including the National Review and the works of Ayn Rand. Clearly, it was the fact that the bookstore gave any shelf space at all to views and ideas that many Baltimoreans at the time found threatening, that set the stage for the Klan’s actions.
Initially, police looked the other way, and the landlord of the building gave Lee notice that he was terminating the lease. Tenants in the upstairs floors called for the store to be evicted. Lee stood firm, however, refusing to be intimidated into closing the store. “I want to see the Klan put down. . . . But I want to see it done by due process of law and by public opinion,” he stated calmly. Finally, the Baltimore Sun published an editorial defending the New Era and chastising the public for its implicit support of the Klan’s actions.
“Surely it is not a matter of public indifference in Baltimore that a bookstore may be hounded out of existence,” they wrote. “A city can claim for itself a world’s championship in baseball and have a shiny new set of downtown towers . . . but if it is a place where a bookstore can be driven out by terror tactics, it is not a big league city . . . or a progressive center of culture and enlightenment. A city in which a bookstore is forced to yield to know-nothing book burners is a mean place, a frightened and frightening place, and it easily could happen to Baltimore while good citizens are busily looking the other way.” (Qtd. in Publishers' Weekly)
Eventually, the mayor and others in the city government came to Lee’s defense, and while it is not clear if Edwards and his followers were punished in any way, the New Era remained, selling left-wing and Black publications into the 1980s, a testament to free speech and free thought.
Sources:
“Baltimore bookman fights against KKK Terrorism.” Publishers’ Weekly 191 (March 27, 1967): 35-36.
Clipping from the Baltimore Evening Sun, May 17, 1967, Enoch Pratt Free Library vertical file (“Books and Booksellers”).
