Synopsis

Illustrated by Quaker graphic designer Susanna Peebles Combs, the “children’s book” Mim and the Klan is set in author Cynthia Russell’s home of Wabash County, Indiana in 1969. Detailed descriptions of rural family farm life invoke memories of a radically different American life style. The teenage main characters Mim and her cousin Karen are children of a Quaker farming family, and so their lives and conversations revolve around the experience of farms, animals, extended family, and their Quaker Meeting.

The skeletal story of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana laced into the main story line creates a sharply conflicting value system to the rural Quakers. As Mim declares one day, “I told Karen what Grampa and Grams had told me. The Klan was here in Indiana – not just the South. And it was here in our county – even among our church members.”