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When the KKK was formed after the Civil War, South Carolina was a hotbed of Klan violence. President Ulysses S. Grant suspended habeus corpus in several counties and used the Army to crush the Klan.

Horry County was poor, sparsely populated, isolated and relatively unaffected by those events.

When the Klan was revived in Georgia in 1915, South Carolina did not become a major center of KKK activity in the 20th聽Century. Our state certainly had the Klan, but nothing like other southern states. That was the case in Horry.

The first report of the Klan around here came in a brief article in the county paper in the 1930s. At a small country church, during Sunday morning service, the Klan marched in. They placed a paper bag on the Communion table and walked out.

Inside the bag was a little over ten dollars, surely more than there was in the collection plate back in the Great Depression.

There was also a note which read, 鈥淧reacher, we appreciate the job you are doing.鈥�

There were no follow-up reports and no analysis. The editor passed it off as an amusing incident. We are left to wonder what that meant about the county, the church and the preacher.

Horry stayed calm, and what Klan we had seems to have been small. That changed in 1950 when the state KKK chief ordered a recruitment campaign in Horry.

Outside of Conway, in July, the Klan formed a motorcade. They drove through the Black neighborhood as an act of intimidation. On August 26, 1950, the state grand dragon himself led 25 cars to Myrtle Beach. Destination: Carver Street.

Back then, that area may well be called the birthplace of Beach Music. In its heyday all the great Rhythm and Blues artists performed 鈥� from Billie Holliday to B.B. King. That first visit to Carver St. involved no shooting.

The Klan then proceeded to Atlantic Beach.

Both Carver St. and Atlantic Beach have fallen on hard times, but in Jim Crow days the Black Pearl of the Atlantic was a thriving seaside resort. It was the only place Blacks could go.

The Klan plowed through the crowd of 10,000, and Black leaders pleaded for police help. Then, things got worse. The Klan went back to Carver St. and attacked the Whispering Pines night club. They threw the owner in a trunk and shot up the place.

In the shoot-out, one Klansman was killed and a Black man was hit in the foot. In the hospital, the staff found that beneath the deceased man鈥檚 white sheet was the uniform of a Conway policeman.

No one was blamed in his death, although the Black club owner served time for possessing obscene literature. All charges against other Klansmen were dropped.

The full story of those sad days is in Barbara F. Stokes鈥� history of Myrtle Beach.