From The Daily News: In the shadow of the Klan

If the truth were known, hundreds of local residents had relatives who were members of the Ku Klux Klan in Western New York during the early 1920s. The Klan, which originated in the South soon after the Civil War, was a white supremacist secret society known for intimidating and sometimes killing blacks, Jews, Catholics and others.

The Klan and local immigrants are the subject of a talk titled “Clash of Cultures” which Oakfield lawyer and Genesee County legislator Ray Cianfrini will present March 22 at the Gaines Congregational Church of Christ.

Cianfrini stumbled upon evidence of the KKK activities in Genesee and Orleans counties while researching local immigration, he said.

“My father came from Italy in 1911 to work at the U.S. Gypsum,” Cianfrini said. “I’ve always been interested in the immigration movement in our area — why they came and why they stayed here.”

In the mid 1980s, Cianfrini started tracking the number of immigrants in Oakfield particularly.

“Statistics gave me an indication of the influx of what they called ‘new’ immigrants to this area,” he said. “All were primarily males and predominantly Italian.”

“Old” immigrants were the English, Irish, German and Scottish, while the Italians and Polish were called “new” immigrants. From 1892 to 1925, the Italian population of Oakfield went from 16 percent of the total population of foreign-born to 58 percent. They all worked either in the gypsum mines or canning factory.

The “old” immigrants represented all the power in the area — they bought all the land, ran all the businesses and controlled all the boards, Cianfrini said.

“Then comes the ‘new’ immigrants, creating what I call the ‘Clash of Cultures,'” he said. “They weren’t welcome or liked.”

In the late 1980s, a client came into Cianfrini’s office with a bunch of pictures he had found in the house of a relative. They included pictures of a large number of Ku Klux Klan members at a funeral of an Oakfield man, the man’s burial in Reed Cemetery, a ceremonial burning of a cross after and a group of Klansmen who walked into a church service at the Oakfield-Alabama Baptist Church.

Cianfrini was immediately intrigued.

“What was the Ku Klux Klan doing in Oakfield, I wanted to know,” Cianfrini said.

He found the group had a revitalization in the North which started in the 1920s and lasted through the early 1930s. By the time the state Legislature banned the group, it wasn’t so much anti-Blacks as it was anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant, Cianfrini said.

In 1924, Klansmen announced they would march in Batavia’s Labor Day parade, and in response, the Rochester Journal and Post Express reported if the KKK marched, the newspaper would print the names of all its members in the paper — which it did.

In his research, Cianfrini was able to obtain a list compiled by the Buffalo Police Department naming all the members of the KKK in Erie, Genesee and Orleans counties. Hundreds of names in Genesee and half a dozen in Orleans County are well-known names, even now…