Maine Legion of White Decency

The Maine Legion of White Decency was a Northern analogue of the Ku Klux Klan, active in Derry, Maine, during the late 1920s and early 1930s. While the Klan was more prominent in historical memory, the Legion of White Decency operated in Northern industrial cities and manufacturing areas, including New York, New Jersey, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, and Portsmouth. In Maine, Derry was the only place where the organization achieved any real success, finding fertile ground for its ideology of racial hatred in the town's peculiar soil. The Legion's members marched in white sheets, burned crosses, and wrote hate-notes to Black citizens they felt were getting above their station or taking jobs meant for white men. In churches where preachers talked about Black equality, they sometimes planted charges of dynamite. The Legion's most notorious act in Derry was the burning of the Black Spot, a segregated enlisted men's club for the Black soldiers of Company E, on a November night in 1930. The fire killed over sixty people, including eighteen soldiers from Company E, fourteen or fifteen Black townspeople, four members of a jazz band, and a number of white patrons who had come to hear the music. The attack was carried out by men wearing white sheets and carrying torches, some of whom arrived in a brand-new Packard automobile. The Legion of White Decency was essentially finished in Derry after the fire at the Black Spot, as the violence had gotten out of hand. The members simply laid away their sheets, lied to each other, and the event was papered over. The town's collective memory of the atrocity was suppressed, a pattern of forgetting that mirrored the larger cycle of violence and denial that defined Derry's history. The Legion's actions were not an isolated incident but part of a broader pattern of violence in Derry, a town where bad things, hurtful things, seemed to do right well in the soil. The organization's existence and its culminating act of arson serve as a crucial historical precedent for the supernatural evil that the Losers' Club would later confront, demonstrating how systemic human cruelty and supernatural horror are intertwined in the town's identity.