The timing matters because Hayes Pond occurred while Lumbee identity was receiving broader national attention.

The Klan’s campaign was therefore not directed at an invisible population.

It was aimed at a Native people asserting itself politically in the same era that civil rights struggles were reshaping the South.

James Cole’s rhetoric focused on racial hierarchy and interracial relationships, but the deeper conflict involved who had the authority to define the Lumbee.

The Klan had an answer.

The Lumbee had another.

Hayes Pond became the night those answers collided in public.

The Klan’s Resurgence After Brown v.

Board

The Ku Klux Klan of the 1950s was not the same organization as the Reconstruction-era Klan or the massive national Klan movement of the 1920s, but it inherited the same language of white supremacy and intimidation.