He took on Fort Worth’s KKK in the 1920s, leading to an assault by the police chief.
Stansell T. Brogdon was a modern Renaissance man in many ways: newspaper editor, high school teacher, music composer, student of Greek and Hebrew, political activist, preacher.
Born in Bosque County in 1877, he was a graduate of both Texas A&M and Moody Bible Institute (Dallas) and did post-graduate work at Yale. By the early 1920s, he was a resident of Fort Worth and publisher-editor of a little sheet called the Texas School News out of Polytechnic.
Brogdon, who was white, was a man of strong passions, whose principal cause was shutting down the Ku Klux Klan, which was riding high in Texas in those years. He was a member of the Citizens’ League of Liberty, which was dedicated to exposing the Klan when he decided to do something dramatic to put the spotlight on Fort Worth’s Klan.
On Friday morning, July 14, 1922, Brogdon arranged an interview with Fort Worth Police Chief Harry Hamilton for his newspaper. The chief had probably never heard of the Texas School News, but he was enough of a politician to welcome any publicity no matter the source. Hamilton was a proud member of the KKK.
Imagine the chief’s surprise when Brogdon began firing questions at him about the Klan, specifically city-issued special-officer commissions that allowed the holder to openly carry a gun and function in a law enforcement capacity. Things really got tense when Brogdon demanded a list of all the men holding such commissions, suggesting that those names were a virtual roster of local Klansmen.
That was the end of the interview as far as Hamilton was concerned. He considered any such list to be protected police records. (Membership lists of the Klan were secret). He angrily accused Brogdon of publishing anti-Klan screeds then came around his desk and hit the pesky editor three or four times with his service revolver.
Brodgen walked out under his own steam but promptly went down the hall to file a complaint with the District Attorney’s Office, pointing to his swollen face as the evidence. In the meantime, Chief Hamilton placed himself under arrest, put up the $20 bond, and called the Star-Telegram to give his side of the story. He said that he and Brogdon had “clinched” and he had been forced to hit the other man once with his fist – and only after removing his pistol “for fear that Brogdon might try to seize it.” He, not Brogdon, was the aggrieved party, he insisted.
The dust-up was resolved peaceably enough. The chief and the editor appeared in municipal court a few days later. The judge fined Hamilton $10 for assault but remitted the fine upon Brogdon’s request. The two antagonists then shook hands and walked out of the court. Since the story was a news item, Mayor E.R. Cockrell delivered a public reprimand to the chief. However, there was no official censure. Thus ended the Fort Worth Police Department’s brush with the “fake press” of the day.
As for Brogdon, he continued to lambaste the Klan while maintaining a high public profile. He took over the presidency of Meridian College — “the only college in Texas where girls are treated as the equal of boys and given the benefit of military training.” One of his first moves was to ban athletics.
A little later, as an ordained minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, he reinvented himself as a fundamentalist debater on Biblical matters. He moved back to Fort Worth and set up the Protestant Bible Society, using it to organize trips to the Holy Land for those wishing to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.
But his crowning glory came in 1938 when he threw his hat into the ring to become governor of Texas. He was 61 years old and described himself as an “architect,” a career switch that transformed him from the next Billy Sunday into the next Wyatt Hedrick – or maybe the next James E. “Pa” Ferguson. (Texas likes its politicians colorful.)
The most interesting plank in his campaign was a call for Texas to annex the four northern states of Mexico. Most of his campaign appearances were before small crowds at Methodist churches. In the 1939 state elections, he was swamped by W. Lee “Pass the biscuits, Pappy” O’Daniel, a radio celebrity and former flour salesman who also called Fort Worth home. Fort Worth and colorful characters just seemed to go together.
The failed run for governor rang the curtain down on the public career of Stansell T. Brogdon. He moved to Bryan, where he died on May 2, 1960. He was buried in the Alexander Methodist Church Cemetery there.
Author-historian Richard Selcer is a Fort Worth native and proud graduate of Paschal High and TCU.