The man had pulled the brass item out of a piece of soft white paper and was watching amusedly as the young camerawoman examined it. I didn’t hear him identify the piece but saw that she was very excited about it.
The man was a collector of black memorabilia, he said, something he’d been doing it for more than 30 years. On this day, he was attending a black memorabilia show and sale in Gaithersburg, MD, at the request of another such collector. That collector was interviewing four other long-timers like himself for a book, the man said. The woman was working the camera.
I could not clearly see the item from where I stood, but her curiosity peaked mine. I wondered what this old relic of history was all about.
When the man handed it to me, I saw that it was a belt buckle and then I read the lettering: Ku Klux Klan. He got the piece from a white dealer at another show, the man said in answer to my question. He seemed proud to have it – it was quite a conversation piece – and I’m sure he was relishing the fact that he was able to acquire it and share it. It seemed to be something he did pretty often.
It was his forbidden fruit – a black man owning the accoutrement of a savage group that once induced fear and terror in people who looked like him. I’m sure the Klansman who owned it was turning over in his grave.
In the year 2013, the buckle was no more than a novelty – it and the people it represented mere footnotes in history. I handled it curiously because I had not seen one like it or held a Klan artifact before – Nazi memorabilia comes up pretty often at the auction houses I attend, but very few relics of the Klan. Those types of items stir little interest in me, and I’m sure I would have just bypassed the belt buckle had I come across it elsewhere.
But here in this place, in the hands of a black man, I wanted to see what the relic looked like, to hold it and to dispel it. I couldn’t tell if the thing was real or not, but the owner believed that it was. It was handmade, crudely carved, with the words spelled out on the front, along with the year 1916 and “Realm of Georgia.”
After I examined it, the man removed another item from a leather zippered pouch that held several small relics. It was a silver coin (not sure if it was actually silver) with the letters KKK and the words “God Save the South” (from the Klan itself, I thought to myself) on one side and “Death before Dishonor” on the other side.
I went Googling to see what I could find out about the belt buckle. My first encounter was the mention of a brass Klan belt buckle made by Tiffany & Co., that well-known maker of products with class not crass. The idea sounded ridiculous, but I figured I’d try to find out where that absurdity came from.
A Portland, OR, auction house in 2010 sold a belt buckle with the engraving “Tiffany & Co., London and England” and “Daniel Low, Salem, Mass. Witch,” with a witch on a broom stick. This was on the back of the buckle. The front bore a Klan member. It sold for $80.
Tiffany? I think not.
There is some ambiguity about when and where the buckles were first produced, and who made them. Experts agree that they are fakes, and several websites mentioned that the fakes were even reproduced.
The so-called Tiffany buckles along with ones bearing the Wells Fargo name were produced in the 1970s by Deane and Adams, according to the 2010 book “Blade’s Guide to Knives & Their Values,” edited by Steve Shackleford. Dealers sold them for $3 to $6, according to the book. The fakes also included KKK and Wells Fargo knives, and Tiffany bowie knives.
In answer to a question, the well-known collectors Ralph and Terry Kovel said the buckles were made in England and flooded the market in the 1960s and 1970s. They weren’t even reproductions of originals, they said, but fakes from the start.
Another site called “Bogus Buckles” has a section “Dedicated to Stopping the Tiffany Buckle Scam,” along with information on the origin of the buckles.
On its website, the venerable Tiffany & Co. definitively answered the question, and offered sources to back it up:
“We have no record that any corporate or Western insignia belt buckles were ever produced by or for Tiffany & Co. “
One auction house got it right. In 2007, it offered several collections of 10 of the bogus belt buckles and identified them as relics from the 1970s.
As for the black memorabilia collector, his buckle didn’t resemble any of the fakes. I found one described as “Realm Of Georgia, Hood & Cross, 1916” with no photo on the Kovels’ website appraised at $400 in 2001. His buckle could easily have been tossed by some family member who no longer had a need for it or what it stood for.
Thanks for this history lesson. I came across one of these up for auction today and was horrified that Tiffany’s would produce something like this. I wish I had bought it and melted it down. I shudder to think how many people would be happy to wear one today.. The KKK belongs in the trash bin of history.