KKK Fliers Appear In Virginia On MLK Weekend
Image by Getty Images
By Josh Nathan-Kazis January 15, 2018
Residents of Leesburg, Virginia, discovered fliers purporting to be distributed by the racist terror group the Ku Klux Klan over the weekend.
According to local news channel WTOP, the fliers denigrated Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday is celebrated nationwide on Monday.
“The timing of it we think was pre-emptively planned by this individual or individuals that are doing this, specifically to target this weekend because it’s an upcoming holiday and specifically because it honors the legacy of a great man that once existed,” Leesburg police spokesman Sam Shenouda told WTOP.
Leesburg is named for Thomas Lee, a slaveholder and Virginia governor and the great-grand-uncle of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, whose birthday is also celebrated on Monday in some Southern states.
At least 10 people had found fliers, the Associated Press reported. Police told news outlets that the fliers appeared to have been distributed randomly.
Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
