In the heat of the civil rights struggle, the Ku Klux Klan tried to intimidate Shirley Ann Grau, a white Southerner who had written about interracial marriage, by burning a cross on her front lawn. Unable to plant the cross upright in the hard ground, they laid it down instead, and the flames soon sputtered out. As it happened, Ms. Grau (rhymes with prow) wasn’t even home. “It scorched a few feet of grass and it scared the neighbors,” she shrugged to The Associated Press in 2003. “It all had kind of a Groucho Marx ending to it.”

Source: New York Times August 08, 2020 22:07 UTC