The film “Burden” tells the story of an unlikely friendship between the Rev. David Kennedy and Michael Burden, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. Through The Echo Project, Kennedy and others are transforming an old movie theater that used to sell racist paraphernalia in Laurens, South Carolina, into a center for racial healing.
Story by Caroline Eubanks | Photographs by Alexa Rivera
In October 2016, I stood on a chilly Jackson, Georgia, street corner at midnight to be an extra in “Burden,” a film based on a story that unfolded in Laurens, South Carolina, in the 1990s. Forest Whitaker played the Rev. David Kennedy, who helped Michael Burden (played by Garrett Hedlund), a man who had co-owned a business called The Redneck Shop. The film took nearly 20 years to produce and over two more to find distribution before being released on streaming platforms after the pandemic prevented a wide theatrical release.
The film received the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018. It presents a tale of redemption, of crossing racial lines to help fellow humans, of disengaging from hate, ending with a powerful scene of Burden’s baptism in a river. The Hollywood version was tied neatly in a bow as the credits rolled, but it is far from the end of the story for the little town of Laurens.
The Redneck Shop started to fade from local memory until “Burden” was released, retelling the events for a new generation of audiences and pulling Laurens and its residents back under the microscope. From the mid-1990s until 2012, the Laurens town square held a particularly shameful attraction: a museum and gathering space for the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists.
For Kennedy, it was a reminder of that dark time.
“The movie brought a lot of negative memories,” he said. “Horrifying, traumatizing memories. Everybody then was excited [about the film], but when you lived through it, it’s an entirely different ballgame.”
David Kennedy was born in 1953 in Laurens, in the midst of segregation. “I was growing up in this apartment called C-51, my grandparents' apartment on my mother’s side. The C stood for colored, and the white community had W for their apartments,” he recalled.
As a child, he was often harassed by white men as he played outside. His grandfather told him to ignore them rather than fight back.
“You learn early how to survive, because the old people would teach you how you had to act around white people,” he told me.
Kennedy’s great-great-uncle, Richard Puckett, was lynched, strung from a railroad trestle in 1913 before a crowd of 2,000. Photos were taken of the horrific event, sold as postcards, and the remaining piece of rope stayed on the trestle until 1985, when rail construction closed the trestle. Puckett’s murder was one of an estimated 11 lynchings in Laurens County between 1877 and 1950. Kennedy still carries his uncle’s picture with him as a haunting reminder.
Kennedy attended Benedict College, a historically Black college in nearby Columbia, South Carolina. It was there that he was inspired to go into the ministry after meeting Benjamin F. Payton, a South Carolina native and civil rights activist who served as president of Benedict College and, later, Tuskegee University.
After graduating from college, Kennedy moved back to his hometown. In 1984, after an impactful conversation with a Vietnam veteran, he founded New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church.
The Rev. David Kennedy at his pulpit in New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church. Kennedy founded the church in 1984 after an affecting conversation with a veteran of the Vietnam War.
The Laurens economy was based on cotton mills, weaving operations, and glass manufacturing. But in 1986, Laurens Glass Works, the town’s main employer, closed suddenly, leaving much of the community unemployed. The middle class left, making the divide between the haves and have-nots even greater, and crime and illegal drug use escalated.
Kennedy and his church created outreach programs like a soup kitchen for the struggling residents of the town, providing about 250 meals a day.
The people he wanted to help were, as Kennedy called them, “downtrodden, the disconnected with the mainstream of life, who some feel like they’re voiceless because they never get heard.”
Kennedy became a well-known figure in the community, someone you could call on for help, the type of person who didn’t mind getting into trouble for a good cause. He became the chair of the local NAACP chapter and often organized or attended protests.
If there was an injustice in the community, Kennedy was, and still is, there. After the 2019 death of Xavier Parks while in Laurens County police custody, Kennedy spoke out against the handling of the case by the sheriff’s office. He spoke at a rally after the 2020 death of George Floyd and at a heated City Council meeting about the Confederate monument in the town square. Kennedy and his church helped organize rides to the polls during the 2020 election.
Growing up, his friends called him the “revolutionary vamp.” Some people in town used less flattering descriptions, like race-baiter, pot stirrer, and firebrand.
Like most Southern towns, Laurens — named for slave trader Henry Laurens — has a long history of racism.
In its heyday, Laurens centered around its Main Street. It had two Art Deco-style movie houses: the Echo Theater, built in 1910, and the Capitol Theatre, which opened in 1926.
Both theaters were segregated, keeping Black patrons like Kennedy in the balconies and forcing them to use the back door.
The Capitol closed in 1964, the same year that the Civil Rights Act legally ended segregation. It was remodeled as a department store before it reopened as a theater and ’50s-inspired restaurant in 2004. The Echo shuttered around this time and was used as retail space, but none of the businesses remained for long.
The rest of the Laurens square was redeveloped in the 1980s while the Echo Theater continued to crumble. In 1989, all of the remaining contents, including the projector and equipment, were sold at auction.
In 1996, John Howard, the owner of a concrete company and openly a member of the Ku Klux Klan, bought the empty Echo. It had been neglected for many years, its walls and ceilings crumbling. With the help of Michael Burden, a troubled man he’d taken under his wing, Howard began the process of renovating the Echo and turning it into The Redneck Shop, a store selling Confederate memorabilia and knickknacks featuring hate speech.
When the Laurens City Council became aware of Howard’s vision for the storefront, they tried to withdraw his business license, afraid it would prevent future business investments. But because there weren't existing bylaws about the types of businesses that could operate on Main Street, Howard sued, claiming it was a violation of his civil rights, and won.
The Redneck Shop immediately made waves throughout the state and nation, bringing negative attention to the community. By September of that year, Howard had upped the ante, opening the World’s Only Klan Museum inside the shop, and again making headlines. Mannequins sported the infamous robes and hoods alongside propaganda posters.
The outrage was swift. In the months that followed, a man purposely drove his van into the building as his own rejection of Howard’s ideology. Over 400 demonstrators protested in front of the store, saying that the KKK was not welcome in town. Among the opposition were Kennedy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the late Ed McDaniel, a local civil rights activist who was one of two Black City Council members at the time.
Then-state Senator James Bryan of Laurens told The New York Times that the locals found the shop to be a blight on the community.
“I have had more complaints about the place from white people than from Black residents. It's an embarrassment and does not reflect what Laurens County is all about.”
Remnants of the Echo Theater’s past occupants are still visible. At left, a faded Nazi symbol can be seen under a coat of white paint on the back wall of the theater. A Confederate flag is still discernible in a corner of the sign.
Confederate memorabilia stores are a problem throughout the South, but it wasn’t just the storefront that concerned Kennedy and the community. It was the potential for The Redneck Shop to be something more insidious: a meeting place for white supremacist ideologues, a recruiting ground to spread their message. As it turns out, Kennedy’s worries were justified.
By the early 2000s, The Redneck Shop was a gathering place for hate groups. Through Howard’s friendship with William “Wild Bill“ Hoff Jr., a leader in the National Socialist Movement (a large neo-Nazi group), the store played host to other white supremacist organizations. Hoff was jailed for a foiled bomb plot and died in 2006 in a car accident near Howard’s home in Enoree, South Carolina. Nazi groups continued to meet and hold events there; even the Aryan Nations gathered at the small-town store over the years.
On Jan. 6, 2021, I drove into Laurens from Interstate Highway 385. I passed a handful of brick smokestacks rising from the pines and a tall fence around the crumbling Watts Mills, and rolled into downtown, past the Echo Theater. I made the trip the day after my home state of Georgia elected Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock — a Jewish journalist and a Black preacher — to the U.S. Senate.
I pulled into the parking lot of my hotel late in the afternoon to a flurry of text messages from friends. “Do you see what’s happening at the Capitol?” As soon as I got my key card, I turned on the TV.
On every channel, Confederate flags waved proudly alongside T-shirts for conspiracy theory groups and alt-right organizations. I’d spent the past few months researching these people for a story on The Redneck Shop and here they were, appearing on my screen, trying to overthrow the democratic process. It felt eerie as if the words from the books I’d read and the troubling images from message boards had come to life.
Walking around the Laurens town square, you wouldn’t have known that it was anything but an ordinary day. I saw a few boutiques and antiques stores, a hair salon, a jewelry store. Historic advertisements for Coca-Cola and Bull Durham cigarettes still adorned the aged brick walls.
But as I spoke with Kennedy on the phone, I knew that this day would become infamous. We spoke about the treatment of these white supremacists and conspiracy theorists and the stark contrast to how people of color would have been treated.
“We have been patient for over 400 years,” he said of watching the events. “We never stormed the Capitol like that. … We don’t have that privilege.”
The Laurens water tower can be seen while driving into town. Mayor Nathan Senn said, “I would not say that we are a racist town, but like any town in the South, there's a legacy that you deal with. … I don't think it is helpful to anybody to put your head in the sand and deny that there are ways that we can improve, but I also think we're pretty damn progressive, as a small town goes.”
In the late 1980s, a young Michael Burden first showed up at John Howard’s property in nearby Lanford, South Carolina, after leaving high school and living in his car. Howard took him in, giving him a place to sleep and a job at his concrete business. From there, Burden’s father figure taught him the rituals and rites of one of America’s oldest and most popular terrorist organizations.
As Burden was pulled deeper in, he was asked to keep an eye on Kennedy, who in Howard’s view had been stirring up trouble. It wasn’t until many years later that Kennedy learned just how close he was to being killed.
“They never told me that Michael Burden had given a sworn statement to [law enforcement] that he was going to kill me. Our state police never informed me of that,” said Kennedy.
Burden’s life changed when he met single mom Judy Harbeson. The hate that had ruled his life for the previous few years began to dissipate when he fell in love and found the family he’d been looking for. It wasn’t Howard and the Klan. Burden proposed at their favorite dive bar and they were married not long after.
Harbeson didn’t approve of Burden’s life in the Klan and Howard’s influence on him. When the new family fell on hard financial times and faced eviction, they moved into a damp room at The Redneck Shop. When the Burdens told Howard they were leaving the Klan, he locked them out and threw their belongings onto the street.
Burden saw Kennedy outside the jail helping someone. With nowhere else to turn, Burden asked for help from the man he had been asked to kill. Kennedy learned that the family had been sleeping in the car and hadn’t eaten in days.
“I said, ‘Everybody needs help sometimes.’ I said, ‘Don’t feel ashamed, I understand,’ ” Kennedy recalled.
The pastor sprang into action, setting them up with a hotel room, buying them dinner, and hiring Burden as a handyman, just as he would a friend in his own community. Laurens residents told Kennedy he shouldn’t be helping Burden — that he and the Klan made the town look bad.
Kennedy would reply, “Our town’s been looking bad for years, and I’m not going to put all that on these white kids.”
A hand-stitched flag hangs in New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church. Kennedy and his congregants created outreach programs like a soup kitchen for the struggling residents of the town, providing about 250 meals a day. The people he wanted to help were, as Kennedy described them, “disconnected with the mainstream of life, who some feel like they’re voiceless because they never get heard.”
The unlikely friendship between Kennedy and Burden made national news, including a memorable appearance on ABC’s “Primetime Live” in 1998.
Before their falling out, Howard had added Burden to the deed to The Redneck Shop. The arrangement meant that ownership was split between Burden and Howard, but Howard was able to continue operating the business for the rest of his life.
Burden didn’t have much money, but he did have one thing that could be beneficial to Kennedy: his portion of the deed to the shop that the preacher had long tried to shut down. So in 1997 Burden sold Kennedy and his church, New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church, his share for $1,000. An African-American church became the owner of a KKK museum and store.
After Kennedy gained partial ownership, Howard continued to keep him out of the shop, just as he did other Black residents. Kennedy recalled being told that the city attorney assisted in preventing his access to his own building. He was unable to inspect the deteriorating property, which would have allowed him to legally force Howard out for good for failing to maintain it. Ongoing lawsuits kept the two men at odds for years.
By 2011, The Redneck Shop was open only sporadically due to Howard’s declining health. He lost a legal battle in 2012, and Kennedy was finally granted the deed, forcing Howard to vacate the building. He died five years later.
It seemed like the Klan’s reign in Laurens was nearing its end. But the white supremacists that had frequented The Redneck Shop didn’t disappear. Instead, they moved online, first with calls for free speech and hands-off government, then keeping people hooked with far-right conspiracy theories.
Such message-board conversations inspired a young man from neighboring Columbia to drive to Charleston to kill nine Black churchgoers in 2015. Two years later, white supremacists and alt-right hate groups like the ones that met at The Redneck Shop came together at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Nathan Senn, who was born and raised in Laurens, returned around this time after establishing a law practice in Charleston.
“I hadn't originally intended to come back to Laurens specifically, but the more I thought about it, this is home,” Senn told me from across the table at his law office, which overlooks the Echo Theater.
He was swiftly approached about getting involved in the community. After a conversation with the Main Street Laurens board, Senn knew the town needed to be prepared for the media coverage that would follow the release of “Burden.”
In March 2019, he was elected mayor of Laurens. “Part of the reason I decided to run is because of the movie, and of course, we know what was on the horizon,” Senn said.
“In a crazy way, the future of the Echo Theater, and the movie, and all of it surrounding that, and the effect that it could have on our town if we weren’t prepared for it, was the tipping point. … I knew that if we’re going to have to talk about this again, let’s make sure we get it right.”
The film presented Laurens as it had been described when The Redneck Shop was open, a place where white supremacists could spout their beliefs openly. But is that the Laurens of today?
“In dealing with what the message from Laurens should be, my focus is not to do what I think the previous generation has done in saying, ‘We really don't have a problem with racism. There were these guys that did the store, and they were from out of town, and don't paint us with that brush,’” Senn told me about the Redneck Shop era.
“I would not say that we are a racist town, but like any town in the South, there's a legacy that you deal with. … I don't think it is helpful to anybody to put your head in the sand and deny that there are ways that we can improve, but I also think we're pretty damn progressive, as a small town goes.”
In the past few years, the community has elected Chrissie Cofield, the first Black police chief and one of only a handful of female chiefs or sheriffs in South Carolina. A music festival is planned in honor of Pink Anderson and the Rev. Gary Davis, two Black, Laurens-born blues musicians who influenced acts like the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd. Senn spoke at a rally following the death of George Floyd, alongside Kennedy.
“We just dedicated Back Street Park [the historically Black business district of Laurens] as a way of recognizing African American contributions to the city’s history,” Senn told me.
But some say it’s not enough.
Kennedy was born in 1953 in segregated Laurens but is hopeful about the future of The Echo Project and the healing it can bring. “You have to speak truth to powerful and devastating structures in America,” he said. “When you’ve gone through so much, you still have to have enough courage to listen.”
The town still sits in the shadow of a Confederate monument, protected from removal by South Carolina’s Heritage Act of 2000. Since June 2020, more than 300,000 have signed a petition to repeal the act. The final closing of The Redneck Shop didn’t signal the end of racism in town any more than the election of Joe Biden over Donald Trump did for America.
White supremacy and nationalist movements are still as big as ever and don’t appear to be going anywhere. White supremacist hate groups aren’t just a Southern problem. The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks these organizations in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and that doesn’t include individuals who don’t identify with a particular movement.
In many ways, Laurens County was the perfect recruiting ground for white supremacists. Nearly 20% of the county lives in poverty. The opioid epidemic has strained the local hospital, with 16 opioid-related overdoses in Laurens County in 2018 alone. Housing insecurity is another problem that Senn especially wants to tackle.
These factors — systemic poverty, substance abuse, need for family and friends, and a perceived existential threat — led Burden to join the Klan in the 1990s, and they’re the same factors drawing people into white supremacist groups today. Former neo-Nazi Christian Picciolini sums up these needs neatly as “ICP,” or identity, community, and purpose.
So how can a community keep the strong grip of hate groups out?
Soon after graduating from the University of South Carolina in 2018, Regan Freeman saw a “60 Minutes” segment about the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, and lynchings in Laurens. Freeman had grown up in Clinton, the next town over from Laurens and home to Presbyterian College, and had vague memories of The Redneck Shop.
“You grow up near it and you just think it's some sort of, you know, bizarre, local thing,” Freeman told me over the phone.
What shocked him the most in the TV program was how little he knew about the area he called home and the lynchings that had taken place in the county.
“They don't teach any part of this [in school] … so I just started digging. I dug for the next three hours, just finding out who these people were and their stories and kind of what we knew.”
Inspired by the work of the EJI, Freeman got in contact with Kennedy.
Kennedy recalled: “This young white brother was so fired up. He said, ‘I live in Laurens County, Reverend Kennedy. I’ve been wanting to meet you and talk to you. I can’t believe this is happening in the county I live in and I haven’t done anything about it.’”
That encounter has become what Freeman calls the “guiding force” in his life. He serves as executive director of The Echo Project, the organization that he and Kennedy formed to convert the long-abandoned theater into a space that would serve the community.
“We really kind of took off in the summer, especially in the wake of [the death of] George Floyd with people trying to make some change,” Freeman said.
Kennedy holds a newspaper clipping from The Greenville [S.C.] News of two women praying together on the Laurens town square during a 1996 rally protesting The Redneck Shop. “This is our goal at [the] Echo: to provide a space for all people to be able to come together like this,” Kennedy said.
A mention of The Echo Project in the credits of “Burden” helped get the word out, as well as a June 2020 shoutout on Twitter from rapper Killer Mike.
The Echo Project will have two areas of focus. One will be a community center with programming and speakers. The other will be artifacts from The Redneck Shop era and beyond. Among the items in The Echo Project’s collection are the glasses and dog tags of “Wild Bill” Hoff, photos of rallies, Klan “calling cards,” and recruitment literature, which Freeman collected from John Howard’s property.
“We're basically using it [for] justice, reconciliation, and healing and to really kind of change the narrative of what the Echo Theater was,” said Freeman.
“We are hoping that this building will be a place where diversity is not only talked about but celebrated. A place with the intention of bringing opposing forces together. Just to talk, first. And we’ll be able to work our way from the talk,” said Kennedy.
Film has always had the ability to divide or bring together, for tales of hope and redemption. Like “Burden,” or as propaganda, like the 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation,” which inspired the burning crosses and other rites of the KKK. So it seems fitting that a formerly segregated movie theater would be the place to establish a more inclusive Laurens.
On my visit to Laurens, the Echo Theater was boarded up with plywood, just as it had been since 2012. There were still traces of the Confederate flags on the marquee, but where the words once read “Redneck Shop” and “The World’s Famous Klan Museum,” it now says “The Echo Project” and lists the organization’s website. The marquee’s neon was a faded forest green, but the letters spelling out “ECHO” are currently being restored to the original color. In April, Freeman texted me a photo showing the newly illuminated letter E on the sign out front.
The back wall inside the theater had a number of murals over the years, including a Klansman on horseback, and Adolf Hitler alongside George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. Taking down the Klan imagery with a few cans of paint was easy, but removing the stain of the building’s reputation will be much harder.
“It feels like a mausoleum. When you walk in here, you feel sick,” Freeman said of the space.
“When we went in, we saw the condition that, in our minds, we had sort of been thinking about,” Kennedy said of the first time he went into the building after winning the court battle. The church had limited resources, and leaders weren’t sure what to do with the old theater.
The Laurens community had a meeting in 2019 to discuss plans for the building that had long been a source of pain for residents. Since then, The Echo Project has been working with a Greenville-based architecture firm to bring it back to code.
But the process hasn’t been cheap. The organization’s publicity efforts, including a recent appearance on “CBS This Morning,” have helped inch toward the fundraising goal, along with volunteer workdays. There’s a lot left to be done, but the lights of the Echo will soon shine again.
The Echo Theater’s newly illuminated letter E glows on the sign out front. The marquee neon was a faded forest green when The Echo Project began but is being restored to its original color. Photo by Regan Freeman.
The story of the Echo Theater is forever tied with Michael Burden, even if he is no longer involved with its future. After leaving the Klan, Burden struggled to support his family and was arrested for larceny. When he got out of jail, he moved out west to work as a truck driver, away from the spotlight. Even though he no longer lives in Laurens, he still supports Kennedy and his vision.
“[He’s] a great guy,” said Freeman. “He actually was one of our first donations when we were launching this.”
In the book Burden: A Preacher, a Klansman, and a True Story of Redemption in the Modern South, John Howard said he opened The Redneck Shop to “tell the truth of what took place. The good, the bad, and the ugly of it.” He, of course, was speaking of the Civil War and the Klan’s century-long reign of terror.
It’s not dissimilar to the mission of The Echo Project, which seeks to tell the truth about white supremacy.
“I think that The Echo Project must be willing to try and include everybody’s experiences,” Kennedy told me. “Because if they talk about their experiences and have the freedom to talk about it without being crucified, I think that could be a beginning for it.”
The word “echo” means to repeat back. It’s the parroting of conspiracy theories spread by politicians. It’s the hateful ideology that makes its way from one family member to another, into blog posts and message boards. But it can also be hearing something for a second time that didn’t seep in on the first. It can be echoing something empowering, something transformative, something that feels like justice. Maybe this echo can reach the many disillusioned people in America.
Kennedy is hopeful about the future of the organization and the Echo Theater, which he fought so hard to obtain.
“You have to speak truth to powerful and devastating structures in America,” he proclaimed. And then he added: “When you’ve gone through so much, you still have to have enough courage to listen.”
To learn more about The Echo Project, visit rehabhate.com.
Caroline Eubanks is a writer from Atlanta and author of This Is My South: The Essential Travel Guide to the Southern States. She studied politics and journalism at the College of Charleston and spent four years traveling the backroads of the South before settling back in Georgia. Her work has appeared in Mental Floss, Travel + Leisure, and Southern Living. She is a fellow at the Hambidge Center.
Alexa Rivera is a photographer currently based in Athens, Georgia, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography from the University of Georgia in 2020. Born and raised in the Southeast, Rivera’s work is influenced by her Southern upbringing and the communities that surround her. She photographs with the intention to capture the essence of her subject matter with a personal and intimate tone.
