KKK recruiting fliers found again in downtown Lafayette

LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Main Street business owners, for the second time in as many years in downtown Lafayette, found fliers recruiting for the Ku Klux Klan on their door handles and doorsteps when they opened Tuesday morning.

Denise Bootsma, owner of McCord Candies at the corner of Sixth and Main streets, said an employee found a resealable plastic sandwich bag outside the shop’s door when she opened around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday.

Inside the bag: a 4-by-5-inch flier blasting Jewish people and U.S. immigration policy – “Wake up white America!!!,” it read – and two business cards with telephone numbers and a website for the Loyal White Knights of the KKK, based in Pelham, North Carolina.

The baggie was weighted down by a small, smooth rock.

“I didn’t join the last time,” Bootsma said. “I don’t see why they think I’m going to join this time. I don’t get this.”

Bags with similar information were found in front of Artists’ Own, a gallery in the 600 block, and by a neighbor on Ferry Street, who sent photos to the J&C but declined to give a name because “I have a family to protect.”

It was reminiscent of Jan. 12, 2018, when McCord Candies and other Main Street businesses and cars parked on surrounding downtown Lafayette streets received another round of Ku Klux Klan recruiting letters on a snowy morning, just ahead of the national holiday to honor civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

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In that case, a man – traced in city-generated surveillance video, analyzed by the J&C – can be seen dropping off fliers for a group calling itself Soldiers of Christ, American Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The Moselle, Mississippi, group’s message on sheets of copier paper: “Why you should become a Klansman.”

No one ever took credit or was identified in that case.

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Capt. Brian Phillips of the Lafayette Police Department said police were aware of the fliers found Tuesday. But Phillips said that, as of 1 p.m. Tuesday, no one had filed a formal complaint or incident report.

“It saddens us, obviously, to see this in the downtown,” Phillips said. “But as to the content of the letters, we haven’t seen them. … Some businesses might have found them and threw them away.”

Israel Quintero, the city’s security officer in downtown, said he’d heard from one business to start the day Tuesday.

“Apart from what happened last year, this is the first I’ve heard of something else,” Quintero said.

There have been other fliers and threats tied to white supremacists found in Greater Lafayette in the past two years. Among them:

► In May 2017, West Lafayette police received numerous complaints about fliers rolled up around construction nails and delivered on doors and in driveways near campus with unsigned, uncredited death threats to singer-songwriter Jackson Browne and college professors, with warnings to residents: "Shut your mouth or pay the consequences!" Police investigated but did not report arrests. (Similar fliers were found in downtown Monticello, about 29 miles north, that same weekend.)

► On Jan. 21, 2018, someone tied bedsheet-sized banners on a fence outside the Unitarian Universalist Church, 333 Meridian St. in West Lafayette, with slurs about gays and lesbians, African Americans, Hispanics and – again – Jackson Browne. Those banners included threats, referencing a mass shooting at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas that killed 58 and injured more than 500 more people. West Lafayette police, assisted by federal law enforcement, investigated but made no arrests. A rally at the church a few nights later drew an overflow crowd of church members, city officials and clergy from other congregations.

► On Sept. 1, 2018, visitors coming to Labor’s Day in the Park, a Labor Day event that draws hundreds to Lafayette’s Columbian Park, found neo-Nazi fliers tacked to trees outside the Tropicanoe Cove water park and taped to fence outside Loeb Stadium. The fliers touted the National Socialist Legion, a spinoff of Vanguard America, a white nationalist group – then known as American Vanguard – that has distributed posters and propaganda in the past two years at Purdue University. Lafayette parks security, using park cameras, were not able to identify who left the material.

In Tuesday’s case, the Loyal White Knights of the KKK is listed as a hate group and one of dozens of Klan affiliations by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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No one answered at the number listed as the national office on the group’s business card. But the recorded message touted the group’s membership drive and its radio show, closing with, “If you’re white and proud, join the crowd.”

Bootsma said she’d planned to pitch what her staff found on the doorstep. She said she was glad to find the rock adding weight to the bag with the flier rather than finding it inside on the floor, among broken glass.

“I don’t feel threatened by them,” Bootsma said. “I just think they need Jesus.”

Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.