Howell: The Michigan Town That Cannot Outrun Its Past

The county seat of Livingston County, Howell is a pleasant small city of about ten thousand people with a Victorian downtown, a county courthouse, and a summer melon festival. It is also a city that has spent decades trying to disentangle itself from a reputation it did not choose but did not do enough to reject.

The Ku Klux Klan was active across Michigan in the nineteen twenties, part of the organization's national surge into northern states where it recruited on platforms of anti-Catholicism, anti-immigration, and white Protestant nationalism. In nineteen twenty-five, a massive Klan parade marched through downtown Grand Rapids on the Fourth of July, drawing thousands of participants and onlookers. Livingston County had its own Klan presence in this era, as did many rural Michigan communities.

But Howell's association with white supremacy was revived and deepened by a single man: Robert Miles, a Grand Dragon of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan who moved to Cohoctah Township, just north of Howell, in the early nineteen sixties. In nineteen seventy-one, Miles was arrested for conspiring to bomb school buses to obstruct forced busing in the Detroit area. He was convicted and sentenced to nine years in federal prison, serving six before being released in nineteen seventy-seven.

Miles returned to his Cohoctah farm and resumed his activities. Through the nineteen eighties he hosted biannual gatherings at the property that drew leaders of white supremacist organizations from across the country, including neo-Nazis and Klan factions. He developed a theology he called Mountain Church, blending white nationalism with Christian identity. He corresponded with movement figures internationally. Robert Miles died in nineteen ninety-two, but the reputation he built had attached itself to the whole county.

Howell's civic leaders have worked for decades to shed that association, hosting diversity events, hiring public relations firms, supporting civil rights programming. The effort has been sincere and partially successful. There is no active Klan chapter in Livingston County today. But the reputation persists, arriving with the city's name in news stories whenever white supremacists resurface in Michigan. A town of ten thousand is still answering for one man who is thirty years gone.