Perhaps there are some in the community who would rather just forget that during the election season someone, under cover of darkness, snuck onto private property and using black spray paint scribbled KKK on a campaign sign. Not just once, but several times, driving several miles to spread this angry message.
Part of me wants to forget it as well. I don’t want to believe that there are people in our community who know what the Ku Klux Klan stands for and who support their hateful mission. I can’t believe there are people who know of the heinous acts the KKK has been involved in and who think it is okay to represent them.
I prefer to think that the vandal is just ignorant. It’s hard to imagine that someone is so uninformed that they don’t know that the KKK is a terrorist group. But I hope that is the case. I hope it was just some foolish kids who sprayed KKK as some kind of graffiti, not really knowing what they were doing.
I think back to my junior high days, when a few of us insolent teenage girls thought it would be cool to decorate our notebooks with a swastika. Yes, we knew the symbol was somehow affiliated with the Nazis of Germany and we knew the Nazis were bad guys. But we didn’t have a clue just how evil they were. One teacher—Margaret Rasmussen— arranged a quick end to our ignorance.
We were invited into her classroom to watch a film strip. In horror, we sat through an hour or more of grainy black and white movies, filmed by the U.S. Armed Forces and allies who liberated the Nazi death camps—Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz. We watched, sick to our stomachs at the images of ovens and gas chambers and mass graves and starving prisoners.
How could mankind be so evil? How can one group of people turn on another? What can be done to keep this from ever happening again? We had a lot of good discussion with Mrs. R. We learned a lot and we decided that even though the swastika was originally a Hindu token of good luck, it had been tainted beyond measure by the Nazis who took it as their symbol.
We also learned about the acts of terror perpetrated in our own country by Europeans on the first Americans. We devoured Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, crying over the inhumanity of how the West was “won.” How could this happen? Genocide on our own soil, in our own history? What could be done to make reparation? What can be done to keep this from happening again? More thoughtful discussion with teachers about that era of American history.
We learned about the Ku Klux Klan as well, from its formation at the end of the Civil War to its role in the war against the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation. Cross burning, bombings and lynching— the murder of four little girls in a church fire. How could this be happening again in America?
Again, lots of discussion at school, but I think what hit home most about the ridiculous cruelty of the KKK was a comment by my mom about an incident in Duluth. I don’t remember when the event took place, but I remember my mom talking about it sometime in the late 1960s. Driving into Duluth on London Road, she pointed out a nice ranch style house—painted white with black shutters, like the house my parents had recently built.
Mom said she always liked the look of the house, the black shutters contrasting so nicely with the bright white siding. However, on one trip to Duluth she was mortified to see that the lovely little house had been damaged. Some hateful person who apparently did not want a black family in the neighborhood had spray painted a racial slur and “Go Home” in big black letters.
I remember Mom’s sadness when she talked about it. She doesn’t know what happened. There was nothing on the Duluth news about the incident. She said she always wondered if they were able to clean off the spray paint. Or did they have to paint over it—or even replace the siding? She wondered what became of the family—did they bravely stay put and become part of the community? Or were they driven away? She wondered if they had little kids. How did this hatefulness affect them?
We had a lot of good discussion. Was this done by the Ku Klux Klan? Or some random hateful person? How can this happen in America? And what could we do to keep it from happening again?
I’m lucky I had an empathetic parent to talk to about discrimination and cruelty and what can be done to try to overcome it. I wonder if the person who spray painted KKK on the election signs had that opportunity?
I hope that the community doesn’t forget this incident, because we need to talk about it. We need to let whoever did it—and his or her friends—know that this is unacceptable. We need to talk about the violence of the KKK so everyone is aware of it. Just as the formerly peaceful Hindu symbol has become synonymous with hate, the three letters strung together are the same. We need to make it clear that it does not belong here in our community. We need to do something to keep it from happening again. Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.
Charlotte Bronte
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