The first headlines in a case that soon reached into the murky annals of the Ku Klux Klan in Utah told only the first chapter in the story.
Next day, the Deseret News followed with a larger, much more dramatic story: A mob had caught up with Robert Marshall, the Negro suspected of killing Deputy Sheriff James Milton Burns, and had lynched him.Sorted out over several days, the details went this way: For several days, Marshall reportedly had been feuding with Burns, who was a company agent for the Castlegate Mine of the Utah Fuel Co., as well as town marshal.
On June 15, the itinerant miner "drew his time," received his last paycheck and then waited on a bridge for Burns, who made regular rounds in the neighborhood. At about 7:30 that evening, Burns approached Marshall and the latter drew his gun, hitting the marshal with five rounds of gunfire.
Marshall then went into hiding in a shack in the area while a posse scoured the country for him. A fellow worker reportedly told lawmen where Marshall was hiding and they went to bring him in.
When they arrived at the Carbon County Courthouse in Price, a mob had gathered, and a group of men, including representatives of the law, wrestled Marshall away from the law officers. The mob took the black to a nearby ranch and lynched him. In fact, they lynched him twice.
Placing Marshall on top of a car, they first put his head in a noose, then drove the car out from underneath him.
After about 10 minutes, with Marshall hanging about 2 feet off the ground, legal law officers arrived on scene and cut him down. Marshall was, however, still breathing and the mob, estimated at 1,000 in the News story, began to clamor again for his death. The officers were overpowered again and Marshall was rehanged. Disarmed and unable to control the situation, the law-abiding officers returned to Price to report the lynching.
When Sheriff Ray Deming, who had been searching for Marshall elsewhere in the county, learned of the hanging, he rushed to the ranch, but his vehicle was "wrecked in his efforts to get there," a Deseret News story said. Fellow officers came to rescue him and he went to the lynch site and cut Marshall, now irrevocably dead, down from the tree.
Then-Gov. George H. Dern, who was attending meetings in Yellowstone National Park, learned of the lynching and wired home to acting Gov. H.E. Crockett that measures were to be taken immediately to find the lynchers.
"Lynching is a crime and a disgrace to the state. Use all proper measures," Dern ordered.
Over the next week, 11 men were arrested, including several local law officers, mine officials (including the superintendent) and sundry businessmen. All were suspected ringleaders in the posse that flushed Marshall out of his cabin hideout and administered their version of pre-emptory retribution.
For several weeks, a grand jury delved into the case, but more than 100 witnesses known to have been at the lynching refused to provide enough detail to justify charges. None were filed and the event eventually faded into the category of old news.
The hometown newspaper, the Price Sun, made no apologies for the illegal killing. The mob consisted, the local paper said, "of your neighbors, your friends, the tradespeople with whom you are wont to barter day by day, public employees, folks prominent in church and social circles and your real conception of a `mob' might have undergone a radical turnover . . . no attempt at concealment was made by any member of the lynching party . . . there was quite a sprinkling of women - the wives and mothers of the good folks of the town. And, too, there were even some children."
For a while, some enterprising person sold photos of the hanged man door-to-door for 25 cents each.
The words "Ku Klux Klan" never appeared in the Deseret News stories printed immediately after the hanging. But according to Larry R. Gerlach, who later extensively researched Klan activities in Utah, it was common knowledge that Marshall's victim, Burns, and virtually all of the 11 men arrested for lynching Marshall were Klansmen.
Marshall's lynching may not have been the only case of summary judgment carried out in Utah, but his case is the best documented. Gerlach estimated as many as a dozen. Only four states have not recorded lynchings attributable to the Klan, Gerlach said.
In 1921, when the Klan went through a spurt of growth nationally, a unit was created in Utah. Members, many of them businessmen, apparently expected an economic advantage by courting the business of fellow Klansmen. Another national recruitment campaign in 1924-25 fostered another surge in membership.
Opposition by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and many community leaders kept Utah's membership at a minimum, but there were small units in Salt Lake City and Ogden. KKK members burned crosses on Ensign Peak and in front of the home of a Greek man who had married an American woman.
In Helper, Klansmen appropriated the town's dance halls and practiced extortion. The ethnically diverse mining communities of central Utah offered grist for the Klan, which frequently directed its venom against Greek miners.
Several hundred people gathered in a Sandy cemetery in April 1922 to honor Gordon Stuart, a Salt Lake County deputy sheriff killed in the line of duty, were astounded when eight or nine individuals dressed in KKK robes marched up to the gravesite and placed a cross of lilies on the casket.
The intruders then hied themselves to two cars with curtained windows and covered license plates and whisked away, leaving the mourners to wonder if Stuart had been a secret member of the group or if the Klan just took advantage of the funeral gathering to make a statement.
The Price lynching generated a public backlash against the Klan. Ogden, Salt Lake and Logan all passed anti-mask laws to discourage the organization. Although the Klan maintained a small presence in the state into the 1930s, it virtually disappeared for several decades until the late 1970s.
Deseret News headlines in the early 1980s noted a resurgence in Klan influence and high state officials took a swift, firm position decrying the organization and promising action to "curtail and prosecute criminal activities perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan." While supporting the principles of free speech, they stressed that "the right to commit or threaten to commit acts of violence," is not protected by the Constitution.
Pranks imitating Klan violence were not well-tolerated. A Davis County Jail employee who donned KKK-type clothing and paraded past inmates, two of whom were black, was suspended for four days without pay. One of the blacks filed a civil rights lawsuit in U.S. District Court for Utah, claiming "fear, trepidation, emotional distress, sleeplessness and recurring nightmares" as a result of the incident, news clippings said.
Based on his extensive study of the Klan in Utah, Gerlach suggested it is likely the KKK will remain, in the Beehive State, a "clandestine clique of frustrated men and women, largely blue-collar, who seek personal gratification and ideological reinforcement from the exotic order of the hood and robe." But the possibility always persists for future violence whenever hatemongers can gain strength in numbers, he concluded.