On a lazy Memorial Day, actor and comedian Ellie Kemper found herself somewhere no one wants to be: smack dab in the center of Twitter discourse. The Office and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star began trending on Twitter after a user unearthed a newspaper story reporting that Kemper had been named Queen of Love and Beauty at St. Louis’s secretive Veiled Prophet Ball in 1999; in the process, the user insinuated that the Veiled Prophet Ball was affiliated with “our local KKK.”
Immediately, questions, rumors, and more tweets began to swirl. Was the Veiled Prophet Organization, whose members have been depicted in costumes that look eerily similar to the white robes worn by Klan members, an arm of the KKK? How much was Kemper’s family worth? Was Kemper legitimately a “KKK Princess?” Jokes clashed with misinformation and thoughtful, necessary critique of hegemonic white power structures. The upshot: Kemper had won the unenviable role of “Main Character of Twitter,” trending on the site for over a day and racking up over 28k tweets in the process.
Confused? You’re not alone. Here’s a breakdown of the truth, fiction, and uncomfortable grey area involved in Kemper’s internet saga.
The internet became aware of Kemper’s connection to the Veiled Prophet Ball after Twitter user Thee Hannah responded to @WB_Baskerville’s tweet about the existence of the Veiled Prophet Ball, equating the event to the first season of True Detective (which was set in Louisiana). “Every once in a while I remember that the Veiled Prophet Ball exists and that everything True Detective season 1 was about is real,” tweeted @WB_Baskerville, along with pictures from a recent Veiled Prophet Ball. “A fancy event put on by our local KKK, of which Ellie Kemper was once the Queen of Love and Beauty,” responded Thee Hannah, linking to an Atlantic story about the Veiled Prophet Ball by Scott Beauchamp from 2014, later posting an image of a newspaper article from 1999 about Kemper’s crowning as the Veiled Prophet queen. The internet firestorm begins.
Thee Hannah described the Veiled Prophet Organization as “our local KKK.” Technically, that’s false; the group has no known affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan. But the group’s history is still deeply problematic.
The Veiled Prophet was cofounded by former Confederate officer Alonzo Slayback and his brother Charles Slayback. Per St. Louis’s Cultural Resources Office, it was created by the town’s “white male community leaders,” which, as Beauchamp pointed out in The Atlantic, came a year after the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when Black and white railroad workers joined forces across the country in protest of poor pay and working conditions. The strike reached St. Louis, where almost 1,500 railroad workers banded together to halt rail freight for a week, with their demands including an eight-hour work day and a ban on child labor.
The strike eventually ended when 5,000 recently deputized “special police” joined with 3,000 federal troops in forcing the strikers to disperse, killing 18 of the strikers in the process. The initial goal of the Veiled Prophet Organization, Beauchamp writes, was to “take back the public stage from populist demands for social and economic justice.” It did just that in its inaugural event: The Veiled Prophet parade of 1878, a 17-float display celebrating St. Louis’s wealthy elite.
While the Veiled Prophet was founded under the auspices of class control, the organization has no direct ties to the KKK. The association likely stems from the similarities between the Veiled Prophet’s robes, depicted in a newspaper illustration printed on October 6, 1878, and the white robe and pointy hat of the Klan uniform, which the KKK started mass-producing in 1921. “To underline the message of class and race hegemony, the image of the first Veiled Prophet is armed with a shotgun and pistol and is strikingly similar in appearance to a Klansman,” writes Beauchamp in The Atlantic.
In 1979, just over 100 years after its founding, the Veiled Prophet started accepting Black members—placing it somewhere between the U.S. public school system (1954) and the Augusta National Golf Club (1990) in the race towards integration. However, this step toward inclusion came only after Black activists and civil rights groups had frequently picketed and criticized the Veiled Prophet and its ball for being racially exclusive and elitist. In 1972, a St. Louis social justice group called ACTION (Action Council to Improve Opportunities for Negroes) managed to infiltrate the ball and unmask that year’s Veiled Prophet, who turned out to be Tom K. Smith Jr., then a vice president of Monsanto.
The Veiled Prophet Ball is a debutante ball thrown annually for St. Louis’s wealthy elite, in conjunction with Fair St. Louis, which used to be known as the VP Fair. The high-society event has been held since 1878. During it, young women are introduced to society and presented to that year’s “Veiled Prophet”—usually one of the city’s richest, most prominent men—whose face and identity are hidden by an ornate, white-veiled headpiece.
The identity of the “Veiled Prophet” has only been revealed twice—the aforementioned unmasking of Tom K. Smith in 1972, and at the inaugural 1878 event, when the figure was revealed to be St. Louis Police Commissioner John G. Priest, who had an active role in crushing the railroad strike the year prior. Every year, the Veiled Prophet crowns one debutante the Queen of Love and Beauty, the title that Kemper won in 1999. Other famous attendees of the Veiled Prophet Ball include President Grover Cleveland and his wife, and Margaret Truman, the daughter of President Harry S. Truman.
Ellie Kemper, née Elizabeth Claire Kemper, comes from a long line of wealthy, white Missourians. Kemper’s great-grandfather, William Thorton Kemper Sr., was a banking and railroad magnate in Kansas City who created a dynasty of bankers, extending all the way to Kemper’s father, David Kemper: he’s the executive chairman of Commerce Bancshares, a bank holding company in Kansas City, Missouri. The Kemper name is known far and wide in St. Louis. Ellie’s grandmother is the namesake of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis. The Hy-Vee Arena, a concert venue and basketball stadium that hosted the Republican National Convention in 1976, was previously known as the Kemper Arena.
While she eschewed the banking route, Kemper did follow in her family’s footsteps in certain ways. She enrolled in Princeton University, following in the footsteps of her mother, Dorothy, who also attended Princeton and worked as an assistant regional director in the admissions office for a period of time. Coming from such a prominent Missouri family, coupled with Kemper’s own achievements in theater and track and field, it seems she was, perhaps, a shoe-in for the title of Queen of Love and Beauty.
Once the internet got wind of all this information about the Veiled Prophet Ball and Kemper’s wealthy upbringing, people had a field day on social media, cracking jokes left and right on Twitter at Kemper’s expense—though many of these tweets were metacommentary, rather than serious indictments of Kemper’s own character.
Some users, though, were ready to blast Kemper based on her association with Tina Fey, who cocreated Kemper’s starring vehicle Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Fey has come under fire multiple times for her work’s portrayals of nonwhite people, particularly Asian people. In February, a TikTok from @buiside went viral for criticizing Fey’s depiction of Vietnamese characters in Mean Girls, garnering 1.4 million likes on the video. Kimmy Schmidt itself also came under fire for its episode “Kimmy Goes to a Play!” in which Titus (played by Tituss Burgess) plays a geisha in a play, drawing ire from the Asian American community.
While the outrage over Kemper’s connection to the Veiled Prophet Ball stands on its own, Kemper’s working relationship with Fey probably didn’t help. It also didn’t help that conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro came to her defense.
Eventually, it became clear to those on the internet that while the Veiled Prophet Ball is a bastion of classism (which is inextricably linked to race), it is not affiliated with the KKK. In the same thread that began the drama, Thee Hannah eventually clarified that she should have labeled it “our local version of the KKK,” and more voices joined the chorus of those clarifying the origin of the Veiled Prophet Ball and Kemper’s involvement.
However in many ways, the damage was already done. As an actor, Kemper has made a career of playing incredibly naive, excessively sweet, and preternaturally good-natured characters like Erin on The Office, Becca in Bridesmaids, and the title character on Kimmy Schmidt. The chasm between Kemper’s persona and the revelation that she was a participant in a ritual led by a secretive, elitist, and, frankly, weird organization, was enough to temporarily break the internet. Misinformation crossed with caustic jokes gave birth to “Ellie Kemper is a KKK Princess,” which, while attention-grabbing, is not a true statement—obscuring a necessary critique of hegemonic white power structures.
Kemper has not yet addressed the situation publicly.
— A First Look at Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon
— 15 Summer Movies Worth Returning to Theaters For
— Why Evan Peters Needed a Hug After His Big Mare of Easttown Scene
— Shadow and Bone Creators Break Down Those Big Book Changes
— The Particular Bravery of Elliot Page’s Oprah Interview
— Inside the Collapse of the Golden Globes
— Watch Justin Theroux Break Down His Career
— For the Love of Real Housewives: An Obsession That Never Quits
— From the Archive: The Sky’s the Limit for Leonardo DiCaprio
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.