Trump to hold “crime and safety” rally in Michigan city known for White Supremacy

On Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is holding a “crime and safety” rally in Howell, Michigan. Howell is the site of a White Supremacists march in July and the “KKK capital of Michigan.”

July rally participants chanted “We love Hitler. We love Trump.” They also “carried flags with antisemitic and racist messages.”

Demonstrators, at least one of whom [resident Stacey] Farrell said appeared to have been part of the Downtown Howell protest, also made their way several miles eastward to the Latson Road/I-96 overpass in Genoa Township, where pictures from a community Facebook group show them hanging Nazi and KKK flags over the side to be visible to traffic. One picture also showed them with a Trump flag.

Despite the theme of the event, “[s]tatistics show violent crime has been declining after a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to the Detroit Free Press.

According to both Talking Points Memo and the Washington Post:

Howell has long been associated with the Ku Klux Klan because of the rallies Michigan-based Grand Dragon Robert Miles held on a nearby farm in the 1970s and 1980s, although community leaders have worked to shake off that image.

Miles “was among five people convicted in 1971 of planning the bombing of school buses slated for court-ordered desegregation in Pontiac [MI].” He was also convicted of conspiracy in the “tarring and feathering of Dr. R. Wiley Brownlee, a high school principal in Ypsilanti who supported desegregation.”

However, in 1988, at least three men burned “a six-foot wooden cross … on the lawn of a retired Black couple in Howell,” Henry and Shirley Griffin.

About a week after the burning, three young men, all from Howell, were arrested. One of the men told a detective the burning was retaliation because he was “robbed by some Black men in Detroit.” All three were charged with harassment by incendiary device, a four-year felony, but two were later indicted on federal charges instead, with penalties up to 10 years in prison.

Miles died in 1992.

Racism did not end when Miles died.

In 1994, the KKK held a rally in Howell.

The Michigan Advance notes that the community has contemporary links with White Supremacy, such as “a well-publicized auction of a Klan robe in 2005.” In 2014, Howell students posted hate messages on Twitter “after a basketball game with a racially-mixed” team. “The tweets referenced ‘white power’ and hashtags like #HitlerIsMyDad.”

In 2018, drivers found flyers from the Patriot Front Group on cars parked in Downtown Howell:

“PATRIOTS! Your ancestors did not die fighting for generations to conquer and sustain this nation, only for it to be lost now, subverted and usurped by a rootless, global elite. Be among those who will reconquer their birthright, and forge a new America.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Patriot Front is “a white nationalist hate group that broke off from Vanguard America after the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.” Charlottesville was Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” moment.

In 2021, Brighton Area Schools students made a video using blackface that contained racist and homophobic content. A home had KKK graffiti spraypainted on it.

And last year Tatayana Vanderlaan filed a lawsuit against the school district that alleged she was “exposed to an openly racist environment that, left unchecked, escalated into direct racial harassment and ultimately culminated in explicit threats of white supremacist violence, all of which was tacitly endorsed by teachers and by school and district leadership.” The case is in discovery.

This year, an America First Movement organization honored the Livingston County Board of Commissioners and Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy “for their opposition to gun control policies signed into law in 2023.” In 2017, the organization’s executive director referred “to white supremacists rallying in Charlottesville, Virginia, as ‘civil rights heroes’.”

Finally, last month, students at Pinckney Community Schools filed a lawsuit alleging the school “’failed to meaningfully address’ racism against minority students.”

According to the suit, Black students in Pinckney “have been called ‘cotton picker,’ ‘monkey,’ the ‘N-word,’ physically assaulted, racially profiled and threatened to be killed because of their skin color.” […]

The lawsuit accused PCS Superintendent Rick Todd of having “personal knowledge of the racism within his district for at least the last decade” and said he “has failed to take meaningful action to correct the problem.”

Header image: Wikimedia Commons

 
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