Re: High Schooler Dresses up as KKK member for Halloween
This happened at my school one year after I had graduated.
It was halloween 1989 and the 2 kids were actually wearing their granddaddys' authentic KKK outfits.
School sent them home or something but it wasn't over there.
Their families argued that if an african-american student can wear a Malcolm X t-shirt or something referring to Black Power then whites should be able to do the equivilent with White Power or Klan costumes.
The real KKK got involved in the issue somehow and arranged to march in my home-town backed by the ACLU.
Some Nazi Skin-heads joined them.
Oxford, OH is a small town of about 8k to 10k residents and about 18k college students at Miami University. So this was pretty big news around the area.
The police were called on to 'protect' the KKK and skin-heads from the angry protestors who turned out.
Many people stayed home on the belief that ignoring them was the best option.
But a lot of people turned out and ended up being arrested for throwing rocks that hit the cops, etc.
Cops were only doing their job of course and really didn't want to be doing it...but some of the idiots looked at the cops as being Klan sympathizers.
A few people also decided it was a good idea to bang on the police-station's front door until it broke. I think they were mad at one of the cop's when he arrested a copuple of the protestors.
I was there with a tape-recorder for the college radio-station as well as a video-camera for a potential student-documentary which I never got around to doing.
I should still have the tape somewhere.
another reporter who I know was there got clobbered by a pretty big rock and it shattered the radio station's rather pricey tape-recorder.
I came away unscathed.
The demonstration itself was incredibly lame. Just a couple dozen KKK and skin-heads walked around the streets, then met uptown at the main-square and said a few things that nobody could hear over the protestors' screaming. Then they left.
A couple of them were bleeding a little from having been hit by a rock or a bottle.
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