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Re: [OM] Racist Graffiti in Fort Wayne

Subject: Re: [OM] Racist Graffiti in Fort Wayne
From: Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 08:22:35 -0400
Very interesting. I was born and grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan until age 15. That's only 100 miles north of Fort Wayne. I then moved to California (1958), Texas (1964), New York (1965), Virginia (1971), New York again (1975), Florida (1985), Massachusetts (1995) and New York again (2007). In my entire life I've never seen any of what you've described.

Chuck Norcutt


On 7/21/2014 5:33 AM, Chris Crawford wrote:
True, but the history of racism here is long and deep. As recently as the
1990s, there was a big KKK presence here.

One day in the late 90s, I ran into the national imperial wizard of the
KKK at a gas station in Fort Wayne. He was putting gas in his pickup, and
was wearing a T-shirt that had a Klan hood on it with the caption "Boyz in
da Hood." This was around the time that the movie "Boyz in the Hood" came
out (the movie is about kids in the inner-city black ghetto of Los
Angeles). Still mad at myself for not having a camera with me that day.

When I was seven years old, I watched the Klan march through Waynedale,
the area of Fort Wayne where I grew up. My grandpa told me the KKK burned
a cross on his next door neighbor's front yard when he was a teenager in
the 1940s! He grew up in Fort Wayne. Most of the small towns near here,
including Huntington (former Vice-President Dan Quayle's hometown) had
signs on the edge of town that warned blacks that they were not welcome
after sunset: "Nigger, you don't live here so don't stay around to see the
sunset!" The signs didn't come down until the 1960s. "Sundown Towns" were
common in the midwest, and rare in the deep south.

Indiana University has a mural depicting Indiana history, painted by
Thomas Hart Benton. One of the things is shows is a group of Klansmen
burning a cross!
http://www.indiana.edu/~benton/
He painted it in 1933. Just a few years earlier, Indiana's governor and a
large portion of the state legislature had been KKK members, and statewide
more than 40,000 men belonged to the Klan in the 1920s.

Given our history, this is probably a sentiment shared by many more people
than just the guy with the marker.

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