Oral History Interviews concerning Robert E. Scoggin

Robert Echols Scoggin was born to John and Pearl McEntyre Scoggin on May 12, 1922, in Green Creek, Polk County, North Carolina. His family moved across the state line, to South Carolina, early in his life. While he was in his late teens, he got a job at the Beaumont Textile Mills in Spartanburg, as a head doffer. Just a few weeks before his twentieth birthday, Scoggin married Rachel Pecolier Hawkins, on May 5, 1942. Scoggin enlisted in the Navy on August 30, 1942, and served as a coxswain. He received a wound as the result of an enemy engagement, and belatedly received a Purple Heart from the Department of the Navy (on December 5, 1960). Scoggin received an honorable discharge on October 17, 1945. In 1950, he enlisted in the US Coast Guard as a seaman.

Scoggin joined the Ku Klux Klan in April 1953 and was the South Carolina grand dragon from January 1, 1962 to January 1, 1969. The House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed him and other Klan officials to turn over Klan membership records. Scoggin refused to comply, and eventually was sentenced to imprisonment (in LaTuna, Texas) for one year for contempt of Congress, beginning in April 1969. He was granted a parole on November 19, 1969, and was released shortly before Christmas that year. Scoggin temporarily resigned from his position as grand dragon of the South Carolina Klan on March 17, 1969 with the stipulation that he would resume his office and duties after his release from prison.

By 1968, Soggin’s relationship with certain members of the national leadership of the United Klans of America, Inc., was already starting to deteriorate, and by early 1969, he began making public statements (many of them published in newspapers), asserting his belief that the KKK was in a state of decline and under the wrong leadership. He was banished by the United Klans of America in 1969. He re-incorporated the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in June of 1970 and assumed the office of grand dragon. He resigned from the Invisible Empire in late 1973 due to his wife’s declining health and his other personal obligations. Rachel died of cancer on September 15, 1980. In spite of his resignations Scoggin remained active in the Klan as long as his health permitted. Robert Scoggin died in South Carolina on March 29, 2003.