By Jenny Labalme
TheStatehouseFile.com
INDIANAPOLIS – There are some faces you never forget.
Not long after Frazier Glenn Cross, according to police, brazenly shot and killed three individuals in Overland Park, Kan., I was reading an online story about him. There was an Associated Press photo of him taken about 30 years ago. I said to my husband, “I know that face and I think I photographed him when I worked as a photographer years ago in North Carolina.â€
Commentary button in JPG – no shadowI trudged down to our basement. In a file box wedged in a corner, I found a folder of old photos. Sure enough, there was the black and white photo of him at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Raleigh, N.C. I can’t find the exact date I took this, but it was in the mid-1980s. I remember the assignment well.
I was a young, just-out-of college photojournalist, working for The Independent, a Durham, N.C.-based weekly newsmagazine. I was following an editor’s directive to photograph the event in North Carolina’s state capitol. Some of my photos of the rally ended up on the front page of The Boston Globe. At that time, Cross went by the name Frazier Glenn Miller. He was the grand dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The rhetoric spewed at the rally was filthy and disgusting.
In my two decades as a photographer and journalist, I don’t think I’ve ever been more uncomfortable and unsettled covering a news event. Most of the Klansmen were dressed in paramilitary outfits as they marched. I still remember the sounds as their combat boots slapped the hard pavement and the Confederate flags flapped in a stiff wind. A few of the Klansmen were dressed in white robes with pointed white hoods, including a man I photographed whose stare down my telephoto lens was so evil. As I look at this photo today, I can still see the hate emanating in the black and white and gray tones of the photo I took close to 30 years ago.
Frazier Glenn Miller, also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, has been charged in connection with the shootings of three people in Kansas. He’s shown here at a white supremacist rally in North Carolina in the 1980s. Photo by Jenny Labalme.
Frazier Glenn Miller, also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, has been charged in connection with the shootings of three people in Kansas. He’s shown here at a white supremacist rally in North Carolina in the 1980s. Photo by Jenny Labalme.
While North Carolina and many states are more diverse now than they were three decades ago, I remember being stunned and puzzled that people could be so misguided and filled with such negative thoughts. After photographing the event, I remember wanting to drive as far away as I could from these people.
It’s not easy, though, to escape hate.
Part of the reason I could recall, 30 years later, that I had photographed Frazier Glenn Miller was that I remembered his face not because of his features, but because of the rage and animosity his face revealed.
That look haunted me then.
It haunts me still.
Jenny Labalme is the executive director of the Indianapolis Press Club Foundation and a freelance journalist.
