Racial strife in Belleville: Making a comeback?
A five-foot-tall wooden cross scribbled with racial epithets was burned early Dec. 8 in front of a Belleville home owned by a black man in a racially mixed neighborhood.
Monday’s story, Cross burning recalls Belleville’s past racial divide, explains that just days earlier, newsletters referencing the Ku Klux Klan were thrown in the driveways and lawns of several Belleville and Shiloh neighborhoods.
Racial strife has run deep throughout the Belleville area in the past. But things seem to be changing — or is it?
âBelleville has made so much progress, this won’t stand in our way,” said Bill Clay, who became Belleville’s first black police chief this year.
The police chief doesn’t believe that the cross burning or newsletters are part of a concerted effort to return Belleville to its past.
“The running theory is that some kids who don’t understand the cross burning significance are behind this,” said the chief.
But some think that the community is ripe for a revival from groups like the KKK.
“It’s the classic kind of city where the Klan could try to establish a following, despite any progress,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. âThey try to feed on places with a past history of racial trouble.”
But Johnny Scott, of the NAACP, hopes the recent incidents aren’t part of a wider effort to rekindle racial animosity.
Is racial strife making a comeback in Belleville? Or are these couple of incidents just isolated pranks by kids that don’t know any better?
Hmmmmm: I heard on the radio last night that black students were caught at some college while they were hanging nooses from tree limbs.
How do they know what color the people were who put up the cross? You can’t presume they were of any race unless they were seen by reliable witnesses.