Whitewash
On Aug. 12, 1936, the following obituary was published in Waterville’s Morning Sentinel:
“DeForest H. Perkins
“Many friends in Skowhegan have been grieved to learn of the death of DeForest H. Perkins which occurred at the State Street Hospital in Portland Friday night. Mr. Perkins was residing at North Paris where the family moved from Portland seven years ago. Mr. Perkins was formerly for a number of years a resident of Skowhegan and he was superintendent of Skowhegan-Madison schools and for some years principal of the Skowhegan high school. Mr. Perkins excelled in his school work having the confidence and respect of all the students. He was a Mason and had a host of friends in this community. He was born at Brownville Dec. 25, 1875. He leaves his widow, formerly Jennie Powers and two children, Frederick Perkins of Connecticut and Mrs. Perley Dudley of West Paris and two grandchildren.”
It’s difficult to sum up anyone’s life in any amount of words, so it makes sense that this obituary would omit so much. For example, Perkins was also superintendent of Portland schools, secretary of Portland’s Chamber of Commerce and president of his local Rotary Club. In addition, this simple family man, humble pillar of the community, was known inside and outside Maine for yet another career, noted in his one-sentence Chattanooga Daily Times obituary:
“DeForest H. Perkins,
“PORTLAND, Me., Aug 8 – DeForest H. Perkins, 63, head of the Ku-Klux Klan in Maine ten years ago, died in a Portland hospital today.”
So, um, yeah. Despite what Morning Sentinel readers may or may not have been told, DeForest Perkins was the Grand Dragon of Maine’s KKK at the height of its popularity. Yikes! Right? I mean, imagine a world in which the media posthumously whitewashes the life of a fake Christian, world-class bigot who’d made a deep and troubling career of influencing the youth!
Anyway, in case you hadn’t heard, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed last month. I found out because the video was the first thing to load when I opened Instagram. I immediately warned friends: “Charlie Kirk was shot. There’s a video going around that’s pretty gruesome, so be careful.”
Most of them responded, “Who?”
Even if you’d never seen the countless videos of Charlie so generously pouring the bigotry from his then-beating heart, his beliefs are easily inferred by certain context clues. For example, the Orange County Nazis marching in his name while chanting “White men fight back!” should tell you all you need to know. If not that, then maybe the bomb threats called in to at least seven HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) following his death, the racist threats to Black New York University students, or the assault on a Black man in Boise, Idaho, or…
Really, if you don’t get it by now, it’s pretty clear why you’re trying so hard.
Here in Maine, the anonymous terrorizers, violent attackers and Orange County Nazis were joined in their grief by Gov. Janet Mills, who ordered flags flown at half-staff in honor of the dead hatemonger.
Nationally, even the liberal media couldn’t wait to create a Charlie Kirk free of the actual Charlie Kirk. Charlie’s words were too hateful to use and the meaning of regular words would have to be changed, as well. For example, without things like a moderator or fact-checkers, his bullying of college students was now “debate.” Without knowing the killer’s motive, Charlie’s murder was somehow “political.”
In a widely-condemned column for The New York Times, Ezra Klein claimed Charlie was practicing politics “in exactly the right way.” In his defense of that column, Klein doubled down with, “I find myself grieving for him because I recognize some commonality with him.”
I wonder what kind of country we’d now be living in if national media figures were able to “recognize some commonality” with George Floyd or Michael Brown or Sandra Bland or Breonna Taylor or Trayvon Martin or…
At the height of its popularity, the KKK claimed 150,141 members in Maine — more than 20 percent of our state’s population at the time. When the Klan dissolved, its former members didn’t leave the state or renounce their beliefs. Instead, they remained our teachers and bankers and shop owners. The generations that followed ignored and excused bigotry as a relic of the past, ensuring its continued embrace.
Our country continues to generationally pass the racist buck. On Sept. 16, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed “A resolution expressing support for the designation of October 14, 2025, as the ‘National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk.’”
You can tell a lot about a country by the people it chooses to celebrate — especially when celebrating those people demands ignoring who they were.
Samuel James also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
