The lights of an apartment complex named after a former Ku Klux Klan member shone just beyond the clouds of tear gas used to disperse protesters outside police headquarters in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, after an unarmed 20-year-old Black man was fatally shot during a traffic stop on Sunday.
The KKK member was Earle Brown, on whose farm the city of Brooklyn Center was founded back in 1911. Along with the Earle Brown Farm Apartments, there is the Earle Brown Heritage Center and Earle Brown Tower, and Earle Brown Drive.
Until June 2020, there was also Earle Brown Elementary School. And the city’s annual summer festival was called The Earle Brown Days until two months ago. The names were changed in a long-delayed response to a 2013 book by a Minneapolis high school history teacher. Elizabeth Dorsey Hatle’s The Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota cited reports of Brown’s KKK membership back in 1923, when he was Hennepin County sheriff.
Hatle writes that Brown had been called before a grand jury investigating the KKK in 1923 after a fellow Klansman identified him as a member. Brown testified that he had been formally initiated as “member 4” in a room at the Dyckman Hotel in Minneapolis. He had been recruited by somebody who worked security at Bell Telephone. The Dyckman was said to be the meeting place for the Twin Cities Klan.
A local newspaper got wind of it and reported, “Sheriff Earle Brown was a witness before the grand Jury Friday. Although it was reported that another witness had named the sheriff as a member of the Klan, Mr. Brown declined to make a public statement, taking the position that his testimony was given under the usual oath of secrecy taken before the grand Jury.”
His membership with the KKK became an issue as he made a failed bid for governor in 1932. He set aside his supposed worry about grand jury secrecy.
“Back in 1923, when I was sheriff, was called to the grand jury and was told I had a connection with the Ku Klux Klan. They asked me to waive immunity, and tell them about it. I said I’m a member of the Klan,” he said. “They wanted me to explain if there was any excuse for my being a member. I replied that I thought so or I wouldn’t have joined.”
He then added some spin:
“I had read news accounts of lawlessness attributed to the Klan in the east. As the highest police officer of Hennepin County, I felt I ought to know what was going on in this organization. I was asked to join, and I explained I would so long as the oath of the organization would not interfere with my oath as sheriff. I wanted to know what was going on. One of the grand jurors asked me then if I hadn’t thought it would have been better for one of my deputies to join the organization, I replied that I wouldn’t ask them to join and I didn’t know if they would be asked to join. Furthermore, I wouldn’t ask any deputy to do something I wouldn’t do myself. My usefulness to the Klan, of course, was gone, and I was kicked out the next day.”
All that would have been easier to believe if Brown had taken any action against the Klan during his time as sheriff and subsequent role as founding chief of the Minnesota Highway Patrol.
“Brown did nothing... to stop the Minneapolis Klan chapters from meeting or burning their crosses in Hennepin County,” Hatle writes. “Brown would have been aware of these activities.”
Hatle further notes that the Klan had a shortage of Blacks to target in Minnesota and also focused its hate on Catholics, Jews, and the foreign born. Brown further fostered bigotry as vice president of the Minnesota Eugenics Society, which advocated sterilizing “feeble minded” females.
The Eugenics Society and the KKK membership seem to have been all but forgotten in the decades after Brown’s death in 1962. Hatle then followed up her book by presenting Brooklyn Center mayor and city council primary documentation that Earle Brown was a registered Klan member. The city leaders responded last year by changing the name of the Earle Brown School to Brooklyn Center Elementary and dropping Earl Brown from the summer festival.
“A wonderful and caring group of people,” Hatle said of the people now running the city.
But a reminder of just how much the question of race remains a critical issue in present day Brooklyn Center came on Sunday afternoon, when two of its officers pulled over Daunte Wright.
Brooklyn Center Police Chief Tim Gannon would later say his officers did so after seeing that the registration tab on Wright’s license plate was expired. Gannon would also acknowledge that renewals had been delayed by the pandemic.
Wright called his mother while the officers ran a check on him. He told her that the cops said they were stopping him for having an air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror. Minnesota statute 169.71, subdivision 1 does indeed state: “A person shall not drive or operate any motor vehicle with... any objects suspended between the driver and the windshield.” But the violation is so petty it makes you think some other factor had to be involved.
As Gannon would later tell it, the officers determined that Wright had an open warrant for a misdemeanor that the chief did not name.
Wright was still on the phone with his mother.
“Then I heard the police officer come to the window and say to put the phone down and get out of the car,” she later told reporters. “And Daunte said why, and he said, ‘We’ll explain to you when you get out of the car.’”
Body camera and dashcam footage would show that one of the officers moved to handcuff Wright as he stood by the open driver’s side door. His mother had recently given the car to him, and he had been out on a Sunday afternoon drive with his girlfriend in the seat beside him, and now he was about to be hauled off to jail.
Wright dove into the car where his girlfriend still sat. Gannon would say that one of the cops, Officer Kim Potter, mistook her handgun for her Taser and fired a fatal shot.
But there remains the question of why Potter decided there was a need to use a Taser in the first place. There is also the issue of why Wright was pulled over.
With all that comes the issue of race, which pervades so much of our society that it is hard to imagine it was not a factor.
A look at the city’s more recent history shows the Brooklyn Center Police Department can show commendable restraint when it comes to a traffic violation. A top supervisor ordered cops not to join state troopers in a 2018 pursuit that ended with the fleeing suspect moving down three youngsters, ages 2, 3, and 4. Brooklyn Center Commander of Investigations Rick Gabler afterward noted that the chase had begun with a traffic offense, going 75 mph in a 55 mph zone. “Had it been for something a little more severe, we might have,” Gabler was quoted saying. “The biggest thing we look at when initiating a pursuit is what is the alleged offense.”
But now, after the most petty of traffic stops, a young man who never got enough chance to make his mark in the world has been killed in a city where the name of a member of the KKK is all over the place, including an apartment just beyond police headquarters.
