Why you can't wear masks at a protest in Tennessee

Masks won't be allowed when white separatist Matthew Heimbach and members of the Traditionalist Worker Party show up at the University of Tennessee on Saturday to kick off their "National Socialism or Death" lecture series.

The same goes for protesters expected to converge on the event, from religious groups to anti-fascist organizations.

It's part of a 150-year-old legal tradition that dates back to Tennessee's chaotic years after the Civil War, with twists and turns along the way through a turf battle between masked mountain vigilantes, the revival of America's oldest terror organization and banana-toting college students trolling campus demonstrations.

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Courts have generally upheld such laws, with judges typically concluding masks to be more about avoiding consequences than about expressing ideas.

Night riders and masked men

Tennessee's anti-mask law first hit the statute books in 1868 in the midst of Gov. William Gannaway "Parson" Brownlow's war with the Ku Klux Klan.

The "Ku Klux Law," as it became known, banned all kinds of behavior, including associating with "any secret organization of persons who shall prowl through this country or the towns of this state by day or by night, disguised or otherwise, for the purpose of disturbing the peace."

The wearing of masks and mere possession of anything judged to be Klan "uniform or regalia" carried the risk of fines and imprisonment.

The masks and uniforms of that original Klan, formed to terrorize newly freed slaves and resist Tennessee's readmission to the Union, looked less like the standardized robes and hoods of its successor groups and more like crude costumes stitched out of pillowcases, flour sacks, bedsheets and rags.

State legislators later repealed the law in favor of a more narrowly tailored act that prescribed fines and jail time for anyone "masked or in disguise, (who) shall prowl or travel or ride or walk through the country or towns ... to the disturbance of the peace."

By then Brownlow had left office, and Klan leaders like former Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest claimed to have dissolved the secret society.

Murder in the mountains

The law drew fresh interest in the 1890s when a feud between rival vigilante gangs in Sevier County erupted in gunshots and bloodshed.

Farmers in the rural Emert's Cove community initially banded together for masked nighttime raids to drive out local prostitutes.

But the Whitecaps, as the group became known, soon began inflicting whippings so severe victims died and branched into other outlawry. Members swore oaths to keep each other's secrets and to kill anyone who informed on them. They kept their vows.

A counter-vigilante group, the Bluebills, formed, and the rivalry spiraled into a series of fatal shootouts and ambushes.

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The Tennessee legislature passed a law in 1897 expanding the state's "Ku Klux" penalties in an effort to stamp out the feud. Around the same time, local governments began passing ordinances against wearing masks in public.

Rufus Mynatt, who helped send two Whitecaps to the gallows for murder as a young prosecutor, stepped in nearly 30 years later as Knox County district attorney general to ensure members of a revived Klan marched unmasked at a rally in Knoxville in September 1923.

The law today

Knoxville's anti-mask ordinance remains on the books, although the City Council tweaked the language slightly in 2013. That change came after street performers, including one who portrayed Spiderman, complained about being cited simply for performing in costume.

The current ordinance bans wearing a mask to intimidate or threaten anyone, to interfere with police duties, or to escape "discovery, recognition, identification or capture."

"We felt like the previous law was probably overly broad," city Law Director Charles Swanson said.

Police have relied on the ordinance to forbid masks at recent events, including last month when Heimbach and his supporters protested the Knoxville Women's March downtown. A group of masked demonstrators showed up briefly to protest Heimbach's group at that event, but stuck around just long enough for a few chants before leaving.

"They weren't actually harassing anyone," Swanson said. "But they were just there about five or 10 minutes. If they had become threatening, they would have been told to leave."

UT has had its own run-ins with mask-wearers, including controversial former state Rep. Stacey Campfield. A UT police officer kicked the West Knoxville Republican out of the Vols' Halloween 2009 game at Neyland Stadium when he showed up in a luchador mask (the kind worn by Mexican wrestlers) and wandered into the wrong section, where a mother and her two daughters complained. UT had advertised that masks wouldn't be allowed, and officers ushered him to the gate.

Tennessee's Ku Klux law survived various revisions of the state criminal code as well. The current law forbids wearing a mask "with the intent to violate" anyone's civil rights.

The most recent arrest under that law came in September 2016, when student Tristan Rettke showed up in a gorilla mask and waving a banana dangling from a noose at a Black Lives Matter demonstration on the East Tennessee State University campus in Johnson City.

Rettke's attorney, whose client insists he just showed up as a prank, challenged the law as unconstitutional, but Washington County Criminal Court Judge Lisa Rice didn't laugh. She denied that move last month. The case has yet to go to trial.