Klan controversy surrounds Fullerton historic home designation

Overlooking Fullerton Stadium, a pistachio-hued Craftsman bungalow first built in 1917 now finds itself at the center of a Klan controversy more than a century later.

A narrow Fullerton City Council majority voted on Tuesday to designate the former Hillcrest Drive home of Louis E. Plummer a historical landmark, but not without overriding a dispute over how to do so.

An education pioneer, Plummer served as a longtime superintendent of Fullerton High School and Fullerton College.

According to a membership list gone missing from the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., he also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan in Orange County during the 1920s.

Plummer’s name has been the subject of controversy in Fullerton before.

In 2020, the Fullerton Joint Union High School District board of trustees voted to remove his name from a Fullerton High School auditorium after an online petition gathered more than 25,000 signatures in support.

The year before, President’s Advisory Council of Fullerton College decided to take Plummer’s portrait down from the campus library.

Jose Trinidad Castañeda, a former Buena Park City Councilmember, raised questions about the designation at Tuesday’s council meeting in light of the Klan connection.

“Plummer was a notable figure in Fullerton, but also an active member of the KKK,” he said. “I’m not sure if we’re designating the Plummer house with that name … into the historic preservation code. I would want to caution [against] memorializing the name, though I do want to credit the architectural features.”

The application for the historical designation lists the property as the “Louis E. Plummer House” while lauding its Craftsman architecture with Victorian and Revival elements. Plummer lived in the house, built by William Campbell, for a few years before moving to a bigger Fullerton home to accommodate his growing family.

Fullerton Councilwoman Shana Charles sought to designate the Hillcrest house without naming it after its controversial first resident.

“I’m glad that we’re designating historic landmarks, and it’s based on the architecture, but I would like to have a motion where we would approve this petition, but maybe not call that the ‘Louis Plummer home,’ because that would be what was on the plaque,” she said.

Councilmember Nick Dunlap, who had earlier called for a vote to approve the historical designation of the home alongside two others, called Charles’ proposal “unnecessary.”

Ernie Kelsey, president of Fullerton Heritage, was invited to speak as council members disagreed on how to designate the house.

Kelsey noted that the nonprofit has tried to “clear Mr. Plummer’s name,” especially amid the auditorium debate years prior, though he acknowledged that Plummer associated with Rev. Leon Myers, the Exalted Cyclops of the Orange County Klan at the time, on prohibition raids.

“There’s nothing that shows that he was in [the Klan],” Kelsey claimed. “Nobody can really see this supposed list of his name. We feel that his name has been sullied over the years.”

The Fullerton Joint Union High School District disagreed five years ago. It cited a 1979 doctoral dissertation on the Orange County Klan by UCLA history student Christopher Cocoltchos in an agenda item regarding renaming the auditorium.

As noted in his research, Cocoltchos used a Klan membership list housed at the Library of Congress, which he called a “valid and complete catalog” of Klansmen through August 1924.

Cocoltchos, who taught history at Western Oregon University, not only identified Plummer as a Klansman using the list, but called him “a leader in the Myers-led Klan” who joined in 1923.

But the list, which fueled the recall of four Klansmen from Anaheim City Council a century ago, went missing in 1982 and hasn’t been found since.

A list donated to the Anaheim Heritage Center by former Anaheim City Atty. Leo Friis is believed to be a derivative by Library of Congress historians, but is missing a page where Plummer’s name would appear alphabetically.

In the application to historically designate the Hillcrest house, Fullerton Heritage claimed that “the accuracy of the list is difficult to ascertain” and later cited an oral history interview where Albert Launer, a former Fullerton city attorney, lauded Plummer as “one of the finest citizens Fullerton ever had.”

TimesOC reviewed the 1968 Launer interview transcript that Cocoltchos also cited in placing Plummer in the Hooded Order.

Although there were names, like Plummer’s, that Launer did not “directly associate” with the Klan, he said Plummer “fit in” as someone preoccupied with protecting youth from vice.

Despite Kelsey’s comments, some Fullerton council members remained uncomfortable with a plaque that could be construed as a Plummer memorial.

“[Plummer] didn’t build the house,” Councilmember Ahmad Zahra said. “He was the first resident, right? “Could the plaque just state that? It will be more historically accurate.”

Zahra asked if council members could vote on the historical designation for each of three houses separately.

The first two historical homes — the William N. Rollo House on Whiting Avenue and the Suters House on North Richmond Avenue — passed unanimously.

The council split 3-2, as is often the case on contentious issues, on the Hillcrest house.

Charles and Zahra voted to designate the house without the Plummer name. Mayor Fred Jung, Councilmember Jaime Valencia and Dunlap voted to keep the name on the forthcoming plaque.