If they did, it was probably mentioned in the same hushed tones that some local whites also used for the word “Black.” I’m not sure how many people even knew then about its Klan association. Not once in my time in Atlanta did I ever hear anyone talk about this house, point it out, flag its hidden history. In her first year, she had already begun to rake it in, pocketing $2.50 of every $10 for each initiation fee for new recruits to the Klan, which were plentiful. Along with her business partner and occasional paramour, Edward Young Clarke, Tyler ran the Propagation Department of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Mary Elizabeth Tyler lived there for only three years in the early 1920s, but in that span she helped to rebuild the most notorious organization in American history. Its legacy has been secured by a listing on the National Register of Historic Places for its architectural merit, which means its actual history should continue to be politely ignored. The house radiates placid ease and mint-julep-scented leisure as if it were custom-built for Southern Living. If, during that pickup Jesus-moment, a wayward jump shot had missed its target, bounded out into the street, and rolled down the hill on Howell Mill Road, it likely would have come to rest along the curb where the road bottoms out in front of a neoclassical home built by the Ku Klux Klan. They interrupted the game to ask a classic Southern question: if we died that night, where we would spend eternity?
MAN ALMIGHTY, my teammate exclaimed during a two-on-two basketball game in the late ’80s at Morris Brandon Elementary School in Atlanta. I think he was trying not to take the Lord’s name in vain, but our opponents took it differently.
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