The white supremacist rally that interrupted the mayor's lunch in Howell on Saturday wasn't overly impressive, really — just a dozen or so nitwits, and one ghost.
The nitwits were chased off by a woman from the local library board. The ghost has had more staying power, but the city is trying to get rid of him, too.
Robert Miles, at one point the grand dragon of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan , felt at home in and around Howell for decades before he died in 1992. Even after he claimed to have resigned from the organization, he'd sometimes burn a cross on his farm, just for the practice and the glow.
He and his brethren helped make Howell synonymous with racism and militia-level lunacy, and it's not a great leap to think that's why a dozen anonymous bigots chose the largest city in Livingston County as the place to pass out their little pamphlets and get heckled on a sunny afternoon.
"I know those old ideas take a long time to die," said Mayor Bob Ellis, who was finishing his gyro at Howell Coney Island when the city manager texted him about the men shouting "Heil Hitler" in front of the county courthouse on Grand River Avenue.
The Pride Alliance of Livingston has held a parade in Howell each June since 2021. The inaugural Cultura festival from the Livingston Diversity Council and Livingston Arts Council last fall highlighted music, art and food, and Ellis said the curried goat from a Jamaican vendor stole the show.
Ideally, Miles was rotating rapidly in his grave. And perhaps, Ellis said optimistically, the masked demonstrators chose Howell last week because they recognize how far the city has come since Miles' era.
But probably not.
Khalil el-Hakim, a Ph.D. and part-time college professor from Kalamazoo, operates a touring exhibit of ghastly racist memorabilia called the Black History 101 Mobile Museum . Thirteen years after Miles' death, he attended the former Klan leader's estate auction in Howell, hoping to come away with a couple of his black robes — but a self-identified supremacy supporter bid $6,000 for them, more than eight times el-Hakim's entire budget for the sale.
"Absolutely," said el-Hakim: the lingering rot from Miles is why the latest squadron of scoundrels picked Howell as its destination.
Beyond the limits
Miles did not operate in a vacuum. Technically, he also did not operate in Howell, at least most of the time.
A Free Press report from Howell in March 1971 described the scene in Moe's Barber Shop downtown, where the reading material for waiting customers was military action comic books and grainy pamphlets from the John Birch Society.
Potential clients included not just Miles, but the grand kludd — aka chaplain — of the Michigan KKK, along with a Klan admirer who chaired something called the Michigan Patriotic Party and told the Free Press, "Some of my best friends are racists."
Miles had just relocated from Howell to a 70-acre farm about 12 miles north in Cohoctah Township, where he hosted rallies and operated his Mountain Church of Jesus Christ. He'd become an ordained minister because it gave him access to prison inmates he considered potential recruits.
A national-level Klan kludd, Miles was a polished, smooth-spoken Navy veteran and former insurance executive who served six years in federal prison in the late 1970s. His crimes were helping to plan the bombing of 10 parked Pontiac school buses as a protest against integration, and conspiracy in the tar-and-feathers attack on a Willow Run high school principal .
Family friends said he had a history of heart problems and had suffered a stroke not long before he died at 67 in a Howell hospital.
The only person quoted in his Free Press obituary was well known Detroit attorney N.C. Deday LaRene, who had successfully defended him in Arkansas in 1987 on charges of attempting to overthrow the U.S. government.
Miles was "fascinating, charming, genuinely likeable — wrongheaded absolutely in his beliefs, but an honest and honorable man," LaRene said.
LaRene later pleaded guilty to tax evasion and conspiring with a mobster to hide income, a hiccup in a career that finds him still working in criminal defense at 79.
As for Moe's, it's now Moe's BarBar Shop — a good place to get a burger and a beer.
Changing attitudes, if not numbers
The demonstrators might have driven past Moe's on their way to the Livingston County Historic Courthouse, where they tried to hand out flyers urging passers-by to "Stop White Replacement."
"Bystanders didn't generally give them a kind reception," said Ellis, diplomatically attempting to downplay his pride. So they wandered slightly east to the grounds of the Howell Carnegie District Library, where the board member determined that they hadn't pulled a permit and shooed them away.
On an 80-degree day, Ellis said, they were trudging to their cars in their black clothing by the time he arrived.
At least some of them wound up on an I-96 overpass in nearby Genoa Township, waving flags adorned with swastikas or "KKK."
Judging by license plates and brief conversations with police officers, Ellis said, they were from places in Saginaw and Macomb counties, rather than Howell. Since their faces were covered, it's difficult to track them down to ask exactly why they came to Howell, or whose hearts and minds they expected to win by chanting, "We love Hitler. We love Trump."
Ellis, 63, is a retired Air Force colonel who used to be a pediatric oncologist and is now a part-time psychologist.
He moved to Howell in 2011 to be closer to family, and quickly realized he was also close to the specter of Robert Miles.
“It’s one of those stains on your reputation,” he said, “that you try to erase, or dull, or something.”
One roadblock, he said, is also a lure for the newcomers who have pushed the population of the city past 10,000 — it’s remote enough that everyone in a wide area has a Howell mailing address, whether they're within the city limits or beyond the bounds of reason.
Another is that the Black population of the city remains minimal, only 0.4% in the 2010 census.
By about the time the demonstrators hit the freeway, though, the city had put out a statement saying hey, this isn’t who we are.
El-Hakim did not need convincing.
He'd been concerned for his safety when he attended the estate auction in 2005 and came away with some of Miles' papers and scrapbooks. Fifteen years later, he mounted a Black History 101 exhibit at Cleary University in Howell, and found the attendance and the conversations to be encouraging.
“I see the effort,” he said, and as the years roll by, he expects to see less and less of the grand dragon.
Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Rubin: How a ghost brought white supremacists to Howell — to the city's dismay
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