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 dark...