Yesterday, the same week that we commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht and about a week since the election of America’s first African American president, we are reminded that hate is not dead. Morris Dees and the SPLC have taken the KKK to court. The Klan’s hatred of and attacks on Jews, Blacks, Latinos and other even non Protestant Whites is well known. In 1928, they distributed flyers against presidential candidate and NY Governor Al Smith claiming the Holland tunnel in New York was to go all the way to Rome to allow the Pope to rule America if Smith – the first Roman Catholic ever to win a major party’s presidential nomination – won the presidency.
Just seven decades after the Holocaust, not a century after the horrific lynching of Leo Frank, and just 44 years after the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, the Klan is still here. But unlike the Holocaust, good people are not silent and they are not still. To read more about the trial please click here.
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