“I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say,” said Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone.
And so, apparently, did his contemporary Stan Lee, who had superheroes tackle masked menaces we might know by another name.
In The Avengers 32-33, during 1966, Lee and artist Don Heck introduced the Sons of the Serpent, thinly veiled stand-ins for the KKK. Earlier that year, the real KKK had firebombed the Hattiesburg, Mississippi, farmhouse of the civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer, then blasted the buildings with shotguns to make sure no one came out alive.
“Marvel attacked bigotry and intolerance without making explicit reference to segregation or the struggles of African Americans,” observed Bradford W. Wright in Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Your Culture in America. “The X-Men sometimes found themselves persecuted by bigots who were opposed to mutants. A story appearing in… The Avengers concerns an organization called the Sons of the Serpent which bore a close resemblance to the Ku Klux Klan and pledged to rid America of ‘foreigners’ and those of different ‘creeds’ and ‘heritage.’ The Avengers expose the organization as a Communist front working to instill hatred and disunity among Americans as a precursor to foreign invasion. The argument for civil rights thus comes safely couched in the incontrovertible language of anticommunism.”
“Regardless, Lee was serious about diversification within the regular Marvel titles,” noted John Wells in American Comic Book Chronicles. “Native American Wyatt Wingfoot quickly rose to prominence in Fantastic Four, holding his own alongside the team as early as the Black Panther two-parter. The same month as FF #53, black model Jill Jerold joined the cast of Modeling with Millie in issue #48 (by Denny O’Neil and Stan Goldberg). Two months after that, Lee and Don Heck introduced African American scientist Bill Foster as Hank (Goliath) Pym’s new assistant in Avengers #32 (Sept. 1966), the first of two issues involving a group of white supremacists called the Sons of the Serpent.”
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