In the 1920s, Dallas was a Ku Klux Klan hub. During what historians call the second wave of the Klan, many local officials and politicians belonged to or supported the hooded order, the city saw its share of Klan violence, and by some accounts, the North Texas city was home to the largest per capita membership in the country. But infighting, pushback from civil rights groups, media scrutiny, and reputation-damaging political scandals, among other setbacks, had chipped away at the Klan’s local support, and the organization had become largely resigned to the city’s political fringes.
More than five decades later, in the fall of 1979, Addie Barlow Frazier, a 73-year-old Dallas woman, grabbed national headlines when she announced the first organized Klan rally in the city since the 1920s. That the city had granted Frazier a permit at all prompted anger among local civil rights leaders and anti-racist groups, and the controversy soon became a fixture in the press during the leadup to the rally. But when newspapers took note, some made a spectacle of the rally and the woman at the center of it, printing profiles of the “Klan granny” who insisted she would lead the white supremacist group’s North Texas comeback.
One article dubbed her the “grandmother Kleagle,” referring to her rank in the group, and another by Associated Press opened with a description of Frazier as a “self-respecting grandmother” who kept a rocking chair near her fireplace, wore spectacles, and offered ice cream to anyone who visited her home. “But this little old lady also wears a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood, has a KKK altar and sacred sword in her bedroom, and keeps a loaded pistol by her bed,” the piece continued. The reporter went on to repeat Frazier’s anti-communist conspiracy theories, including her assertion that every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt had been a communist. “You can’t get elected dogcatcher in this country without the support of international communists,” she quipped.
Frazier had been a Klan member since the 1950s, and her vocal white supremacy and open racism had often landed her name in the papers. At times going by the moniker Dixie Leber (rebel spelled backward), she regularly wrote in to local dailies and appeared on radio talk shows to promote Klan politics and rail against desegregation.
In 1956, she filed a lawsuit demanding that a Dallas transportation company enforce segregation on city buses. In 1960, along with the head of the Texas White Citizens Council, Frazier joined a push against desegregation in Dallas schools. Five years later, she joined pushback to the city’s plans to add fluoride to public water — a communist plot, she insisted, telling a local television station that it amounted to “tyranny.” In 1972, during Dallas’s first pride parade, she walked behind attendees holding a placard that called for the “execution of homosexuals.”
On Nov. 2, 1979, a day before Frazier’s Klan rally was scheduled to take place, US District Judge Robert Porter heard local civil rights lawyer Gerald Weatherly’s request to have the event canceled. Weatherly argued that due to the Klan’s commitment to segregation, the march would have a “chilling effect” on others. The judge said he found the group “repugnant” and did not “in any way condone” the Klan’s beliefs, but he ultimately rejected Weatherly’s argument.
Frazier, who was now a magnet for media attention like never before, took a victory lap. Despite the “innumerable death threats” she claimed she had received, the rally would move forward. She told reporters that Klansmen from around the country would attend. It would be, she insisted, “the biggest thing to ever hit Dallas.”
Klan Not Welcome
Civil rights organizers and anti-racists spent the weeks before the rally gearing up. The ad hoc group leading the pushback called itself the Coalition for Human Dignity, and the broader pushback would ultimately include Black civil rights leaders, Catholic students, feminists, gay rights advocates, the local Black Panthers chapter, the militant Chicano group the Brown Berets, and the East Dallas-based Bois D’Arc Patriots activist group, among others.
John Fullinwider, a longtime Dallas resident who was in his mid-twenties at the time, was an original member of the Bois D’Arc Patriots. Although he and others did not expect a large Klan turnout, he told me, they wanted to show that the Klan’s message wasn’t welcome in town “even if there were only five of them.”
On the day of the rally, Frazier’s plan to put on “the biggest thing to ever hit Dallas” was a flop. A few dozen Klansmen paraded through downtown Dallas. Frazier, draped in her Klan robe, marched front and center. Next to her was Grand Dragon Earl Hawkins, who held a sign that read, “Join the March of the Christian Soldiers.” The Klansmen chanted “white power,” while many waved Confederate flags and raised placards against “race-mixing.”
“You reporters always ask in numbers, and that’s the one thing we never answer.” – Addie Barlow Frazier
Worse for the Klansmen than the meager turnout, a much larger number of angry hecklers lined the streets and taunted them. Some held anti-Klan signs, while others walked along the procession and shouted at the Klansmen. Tensions spiked, and fearing violence, the police forced the Klansmen to hide in a nearby basement until the crowds cleared out.
The Klan’s great comeback might have been a failure, but the counter-protest proved a success. News reports later put the turnout at 2,500, but Fullinwider believed twice as many people came out. That same day, around 1,100 miles away in Greensboro, North Carolina, Klansmen and American Nazi Party members opened fire on anti-Klan demonstrators — and killed five leftists. In Dallas, though, no such violence took place. “Our thing turned out peaceful,” Fullinwider remembered, “although we were ready for anything that day.”
After all was said and done, Frazier tried to save face in the press. “You reporters always ask in numbers, and that’s the one thing we never answer,” she shot back at a reporter who questioned her about the low turnout. “Because in a war, if you give your enemy a good account of how many are in and what we intend to do, they have the advantage.” She insisted that the rally was “the tip of the iceberg,” adding: “You see a little handful of people out here, but there are literally, literally millions of people all about you that are just fed up to the ears with this tyranny.”
Funeral Home Takes a Stand
Frazier was, after all, fighting a losing battle. Between 1957 and 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO — a series of illegal and covert operations — mostly targeted civil rights leaders, Black power outfits, anti-war activists, and the broader left, but it also included spying on and infiltrating Klan groups. Long before Frazier was planning her rally in Dallas, the FBI crackdown had “broken the traditional Klan,” and the organization had “ceased to be a force in the way it was early on,” according to Michael Phillips, a historian and author of White Metropolis.
At the same time, Dallas had changed since the Klan’s heyday in the city, becoming “Blacker and Browner,” Phillips told me. The city had long been home to Black and Latino communities, but as the population swelled, both had grown. Although racism remained a potent and oppressive force in Dallas, the city had also strived to become an important business hub. “In the 1920s, you could be a Klan city and get away with that,” he explained, but in the late 1970s, the “Klansmen-in-sheets type of racism had really become an embarrassment.”
As it turned out, Frazier wouldn’t live to make good on her threat to “bring a million Klansmen” to Dallas at the next march. A month after the rally, she checked into a hospital with viral pneumonia, doctors diagnosed her with lung cancer, and she died before the year ended. Yet, it was after her death that Frazier would mount her last stand.
Frazier had spent years paying monthly installments on a burial plot, and her final wish was that her funeral would include a Klan ceremony. After she passed away, Laurel Land, the funeral home and cemetery she had purchased the plot from, denied that request. “They flatly refused to give her a Klan ceremony because of the robes,” Beverly Pittman, Frazier’s granddaughter, complained to the Associated Press at the time. “They wanted no robed Klansmen there. They said they wanted no trouble.”
Klansmen picketed outside the funeral home, and Pittman threatened legal action. Still, Laurel Land’s general manager stood his ground, telling the Associated Press that a Klan ceremony “would have created a disturbance.”
In the end, another cemetery allowed the Klan ceremony Frazier’s family and supporters wanted. On Jan. 5, 1980, police officers gathered to prevent any potential unrest as around 100 people showed up to attend the funeral, including Klan security forces dressed in military fatigues.
Among the mourners were prominent white nationalists like Louis Beam, then the grand dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. In the years that followed, Beam would go on to join the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, stand accused of sedition, and author an influential essay that serves as a blueprint for white nationalist violence, but that day he kept his focus on the eulogy he delivered. Frazier, he said, had more courage than “99% of the white men” in the county and was “in heaven now, dressed in white, looking down at us, glad to see us in our robes.”
“Refought Every Generation”
Frazier’s funeral would not be the last time Dallas heard from the Klan, but the organization would never return to the heights she had hoped for. Throughout the early 1980s, the Klan enjoyed a brief nationwide resurgence, but major newspaper editorial boards took aim at the group, legal battles from groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) took down chapters in states across the South, and more times than not, the Klan could not hold a rally without prompting local anger or drawing out a much larger show of counter-protesters. But the politics Frazier and her fellow Klansmen advocated haven’t died out, and other far-right groups stepped into the space the Klan once dominated.
Decades after Frazier’s death, militias, anti-immigrant vigilantes, separatist groups, and conspiracy theorists have again found an audience in the highest halls of power. In 2023, the SPLC only tallied a handful of Klan chapters around the country, but the watchdog estimated that there were more than 1,400 hate groups “upholding white supremacy” in total. (Even Frazier’s crusade against fluoride has reached new heights: incoming Republican President Donald Trump’s pick to head the department of health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has vowed to remove fluoride from public water.)
The end of Frazier’s life underscored a shift happening across the country: Even in a city like Dallas, where one in three eligible men were once KKK members, a Klan rally could not be held — nor could a Klansman be buried according to their wishes — without pushback from everyday people. Still, the way Fullinwider saw it, that did not mean the fight ever truly ended. “These battles,” he told me, “really have to be refought every generation.”
Top photo: Addie Barlow Frazier marches next to other Klan members on Nov. 3, 1979, in downtown Dallas (Rodger Mallison/University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection)
