Guardian Angel Foiled the Ku Klux Klan

 More than 60 years after the fact, longtime Allegany County resident Anton “Toni” Urbas (1909-1995) recounted that he would have been killed in the 1920s by anti-immigrant vigilantes, if not for divine intervention.

This was during the George’s Creek coal miners’ strike of 1921-1924, while Toni was a young teenager, aged 12 to 15. It was a violent, lawless time, an opportunity for ugliness to emerge from the shadows, and Vale Summit racists had formed a new cell of a vicious group that was then at the peak of its nationwide influence: the Ku Klux Klan.

While Toni often declined to name his long-ago tormentors – “What was to be gained,” he asked in 1988, “by creating another cycle of anger?” – he was quite specific about other things. A Klan ringleader, for example, lived in “one particular home on the Top Row.” And the Klan’s late-night Vale Summit headquarters was the kerosene-lighted sanctuary of the Methodist Church.

“They would come to the meeting place under total darkness, one by one, avoiding contact with all outsiders,” Toni wrote. “They all wore white dress uniforms complete with total head coverage hoods to obscure their identity.”

Toni and his siblings weren’t fooled. “As youngsters, endowed with a keen perception, we viewed these crude attempts of maintaining secrecy of identities as a throw-back of the Middle Ages – nothing escaped us.”

They also knew the Klansmens’ “prime intent … to destroy or render immobile the presence of the black race and the Catholic religion. … To this day I still hold to the belief that our family, especially myself, was the prime target to be eliminated. We were a Catholic family and our parents were of foreign extraction – Slovenes.”

One night, an explosion rocked the Urbas house, rousing everyone in terror. Toni rushed through the kitchen and outside to see a hellish sight. Just up the hill, “above the Consolidation Coal Company tramroad in Recky Hansel’s pasture,” was a flaming cross 10 feet high.

In his bare feet, acting on instinct, heedless of his own safety, Toni ran to the stable to fetch a 6-foot pole and carried it to the cross, where he used his impromptu lever to break up the pile of stones at the cross’s base and send the blasphemous thing crashing to the ground.

As he beat out the flames and stripped away the kerosene-soaked bedsheets, he heard voices from the darkness:

“That son of a bitch will pay for this.”

“That goddamn hunky kid has to stick his damn nose into our business.”

“He will pay.”

As a final act of immigrant thrift – and immigrant defiance – Toni toted the cross’s remains back to the house. Why waste perfectly good 10-foot yellow pine boards from Sleeman’s Lumber Yard in Frostburg?

Later, Toni and his family discovered that the explosion had been a stick of dynamite, detonated in sync with the torching of the cross.

Ten nights later, the Klansmen set off another explosion, and torched another cross, on the same site. This time, Toni ran up the hill with a long-handled machete, a much more efficient tool for stripping off the burning bedsheets. Once again, he walked down the hill with an armload of free Klan lumber, and received a tongue-lashing from his parents for being foolhardy.

But he figured, I can keep this up as long as the Klan can.

Some nights later, just as Toni finished the day’s final chores in the stable, he emerged to hear the sound of a branch snapping, up the hill where no one should have been. He whirled to see yet a third cross whoosh into flame, ignited by a torch held by a white-hooded Klansman.

This time, there had been no warning explosion, and after waiting 30 seconds, Toni decided there wouldn’t be one. He grabbed his tools and ran up the hill. What happens next is best told in his words.

I just barely made it up to the lower side of the abandoned C&P Railroad bed, when an unseen hand or force pressed firmly against my chest area and an almost inaudible voice uttered the word, “Drop.” Subconsciously, I dropped flat on my stomach and at the very moment of contact with the ground surface, an intense shock wave of an explosive charge swept over my body along with a mass of stone fragments whizzing by with a number raking across my butt-side, leaving red welts.

After the shock wave accompanied by the pelting of stone fragments against our out-buildings and home subsided, my mother came running out of our home, crossed the bridge walkway and came up to the stable area and in a deeply frightening voice, cried out in Slovenian, “Toni! Toni! Where are you?” To be honest, I could not move for a minute or so. I was so frightened that breathing became a task. My body trembled from the nearness to total annihilation. I could not understand what unseen power pressed against my body and uttered the word, “Drop!” so vividly. Before arising, I uttered a prayer of thanks to the Lord and my guiding angel for saving me.

When his mom reached him, just as he was staggering to his feet, her first words were: “Why don’t you listen?”

Whatever language she used, those words, being universal, would have been understood by all mothers everywhere.

Toni does not mention, in the account he wrote as an old man, whether he told his mom or anyone else in the family about the supernatural voice, then or at any other time.

He does claim, however, that his brush with death ended the Klan demonstrations in Vale Summit. He supposed that the Klansmen felt they, too, had gotten off lucky, that they realized things had gone too far.

Still, why would they wait to set off the dynamite, unless they had murder in mind?

Maybe they had heard Toni’s “guiding angel,” too.

Source:

Urbas, Anton. “Cross-Burning by the Ku Klux Klan in Vale Summit.” Journal of the Alleghenies 26 (1990): 57-60.