WTF people WTF, fighting ignorance with racism makes us all look like idiots.
Jaimi Hajzus woke up Saturday morning to a string of worried texts.
Friends in her hometown of Coudersport, Pennsylvania, said someone had gone house to house the previous night and left plastic Baggies filled with lollipops, rocks and paper fliers on dozens of lawns in the town’s main thoroughfare.
Inside, they found a disturbing message.
“Are there troubles in your neighborhood?” the fliers read. “Contact the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan today!”
Printed on the crinkled slips of paper was an image of a hooded Klansman pointing a finger in the style of the iconic Uncle Sam recruitment poster, along with something of a slogan: “You can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake.”
Hajzus said she and others believe a new white supremacist cell in the area might be behind the campaign, but they’re struggling to decide what the strange parcels mean for the town of 2,500, and how the community should respond.
“I feel like they’re trying to pick a fight, and I don’t want to bring a gun to a knife fight,” Hajzus told The Washington Post Monday. “It’s hard to know how strongly to approach this.”
Coudersport isn’t alone.
Similar packages have recently turned up in communities around the country — from California to Kansas to New Jersey — many of them in the roughly 15 months since Dylann Roof allegedly gunned down nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Each incident follows a similar pattern, with residents waking up to find small plastic bags on their front lawns containing pro-KKK missives. The bags are often weighed down by rocks and sometimes come with a few candies stuffed inside.
Just a day after residents in Coudersport discovered the Baggies on their lawns, nearly identical packages showed up at homes in Whittier, California, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The flier inside contained a disparaging screed against African Americans and came with a rock and a lollipop, one longtime resident told the paper. It also listed a phone number and a mailing address for the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, she said. A week earlier, 100 residents in Fullerton, California, found similar packages at their homes, the LA Times reported.