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Today is George’s funeral service, so I thought it fitting to re-post an interview I had with him back in July of 2009.

I am honored to present to you my interview with well-known author, educator, and my new friend, Dr. George E. Stanley. George’s latest and daring novel, Night Fires (ALADDIN, Simon & Schuster, 2009), quite frankly, disgusted me. However, I couldn’t put it down. All week I kept telling my son, you have to read this! Why? Because it’s a part of history I chose to bury deep inside  myself, with the hopes of never having to deal with it, or hear about it – until now. You know, sometimes in life the truth rears its ugly head for a reason. Sometimes we have to learn, whether we like it or not. We all can afford to learn. And this year, I challenge teachers to incorporate truthful, historical accounts, through their fictional selections. In other words, diversify your curriculum a bit. Students need to learn the good, the bad, and the ugly about America’s history, so not to hurt, but to heal.  I highly recommend starting that healing with Night Fires (grades 7-12).

AB - What made you decide to write a book about the Ku Klux Klan operating in Lawton, Oklahoma?

A few years ago, I was writing an eight-volume set of books for World Almanac/Gareth Stevens called A PRIMARY SOURCE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Wow!  What a project.  It took an enormous amount of research but it is doing very well – and I think it’s a fascinating look at the United States from around 1492 until 2004 – through all kinds of documents.  Well, the Ku Klux Klan kept coming up, from the Civil War period, to the 1920s, and to the 1960s and civil rights.  I’ve always been perversely fascinated by the KKK.  (It just amazes me that grown men would dress up in these white costumes for the purpose of terrorizing people – namely African-American, Jews, and Catholics.  I spent the 1969-1970 academic year during doctoral work at the University of Kansas in Lawrence (I ended up doing all of my doctoral work at the University of Port Elizabeth in South Africa – more later) and once, when driving back from Kansas to Texas (where my parents lived) I pulled off the highway onto a rest stop (just an asphalt extension with a couple of trash cans) and on the other side of a barbed-wire fence I saw a sign tacked to a big tree.  It was advertising a meeting of the local KKK.  This was actually in the spring of 1970.  Well, I took it down, and I’ve kept it all these years, to remind myself and other people that the KKK is still operational.)

I was talking to a colleague about my research and mentioned the KKK and I was told that in the 1920s, Lawton has a lot of KKK parades through downtown and meetings on farms around the city and that the KKK’s stated purpose was to clean up crime in Lawton.  I was also told that during that time almost half of the members of the state legislature be