My father’s grandfather was William Clendenin Robertson, an Episcopalian minister and pastor at Christ Episcopal Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In a eulogy for his cousin, Harold Hinton, delivered in October 1993, my father told the following story:
There is much about our grandfather of which to be proud. The family story that means the most to me, as told by my father, Arthur Clendenin Robertson, was about the time the (then-called) colored church in Chattanooga burned down and our grandfather, after inviting the African American parishioners to worship in his church, discovered a note from the Ku Klux Klan tacked to the door threatening to burn down the church if he continued his abhorrent ways.
My father tells me that grandfather turned the note over, tacked it once again to the door with a message to the Klan on the other side that he planned to sleep in the church and if he caught them trying to burn it down, he would beat them over the head with the cross.
Peter C. Robertson Archive 