Proclamation against the Ku Klux Klan, 1922

Oregon Governor Benjamin W. Olcott issued this 1922 executive proclamation in response to three assaults in southern Oregon perpetrated by members of the Medford klavern (a local organizational unit of the Ku Klux Klan). The first victim, a white piano salesman from Medford, was kidnapped and threatened with hanging, while the other two, a black man and a half-Mexican man (according to one account), were taken out into the country and terrorized with “necktie hangings,” that is, non-fatal lynchings.