Warren Watson
First Thoughts
May 14, 2008
Remembering a crusader
The board of Ball State's Friends of Bracken Library met recently to remember First Amendment advocate George Dale, a former Muncie mayor who championed for justice and civility as editor of the Muncie Post-Democrat.
Dale, like abolitionist publisher Elijah Parish Lovejoy, who was killed by a pro-slavery mob near St. Louis in 1839, crusaded against hate, bigotry, bootleggers and the white-hooded Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s, when Muncie earned the ignominious (correct spelling) label “Little Chicago.”
Like Lovejoy, Dale risked harm in editorializing against the Klan, which once drew a throng of 200,000 to a Kokomo rally. Once, according to John Straw, director of Bracken’s Special Collections area, a Klansman shot the editor through his hat. Another time, Dale stripped a gun from his Klansman attacker, shooting him in the torso. Gunmen also fired at Dale’s house.
“Those who hope to intimidate us into a servile fear have picked the wrong bird. The rule of the blackjack, the automatic, the black mask and the dark lantern, never works,” Dale editorialized in 1922.
Dale’s campaign against hate and bigotry contributed to the Klan’s demise by 1928. He continued his crusade as Muncie mayor (1930-35).
Dale published the Post-Democrat until his death in 1936. His memory lives on in a new special archive of his newspapers at Bracken.
“One man, with one pen made a difference in a time when the people of Muncie were enslaved by insecurity, walking sideways if not backwards,” great-grandson J. Andrew Dale, told the board. |