|
NOT IN OUR TOWN is the inspiring documentary film about the residents of Billings,
Montana who responded to an upsurge in hate violence by standing together for a
hate-free community. In 1993, hate activities in Billings reached a crescendo.
KKK fliers were distributed, the Jewish cemetery was desecrated, the home of a
Native American family was painted with swastikas, and a brick was thrown through
the window of a six-year-old boy who displayed a Menorah for Hanukkah.
To purchase a tape or DVD of this program, visit theworkinggroup.org for ordering information.
Rather than resigning itself to the growing climate of hate, the community took a
stand. The police chief urged citizens to respond before the violence escalated
any further. Religious groups from every denomination sponsored marches and
candlelight vigils. The local labor council passed a resolution against racism,
anti-Semitism and homophobia. Members of the local Painters Union pitched in to
paint over racist graffiti. The local newspaper printed full-page Menorahs that
were subsequently displayed in nearly 10,000 homes and businesses. The community
made an unmistakable declaration: "Not in Our Town." Since then, no serious
acts of hate violence have been reported in Billings. Learn More >>
Billings, Montana is the kind of town where everyone says Hello, where you can always find
a parking place, and where the shopkeepers know your name. But in 1993, the city was
struck by a series of hate crimes that escalated from the distribution of hate literature
to vandalism and finally, to violence.
Rather than resigning itself to the growing climate of fear and intimidation, the community
took a stand in response to each incident.
Police Chief Wayne Inman: If a police chief doesn't take a visible and active role,
then the assumption is hate groups have learned from experience that if a community
doesn't respond, then the community accepts. Silence is acceptance to them.
[Wayne Inman Story]
It began with hate fliers passed out around town. Residents who had attended a Martin
Luther King birthday celebration returned to find racist literature on their cars.
Tombstones were overturned in the Jewish cemetery. The local symphony director, Uri
Barnea, received threatening phone calls and had a bottle thrown through his front door.
Religious groups from every denomination sponsored marches and candlelight vigils. The
local labor council passed a resolution in support of those typically targeted by
hate groups, and held a "Stand Together Billings" rally to urge community adoption
of the anti-hate proclamation.
Then late one night, Dawn Fast Horses' home was covered with swastikas and racist
graffiti
reading "Die, Indian, Die." The next day, Sarah Anthony from the Billings Human Rights
Coalition visited Dawn Fast Horse to ask what the community could do to help. Dawn just
wanted the graffiti off her home as soon as possible. Sarah got a local hardware
store to donate paint and went to the Painters Union to ask for help. After pulling
their regular shift at the local refinery, over 30 painters showed up at Dawn's
house to volunteer to repaint the house. Along with the painters, over 100 community
members showed up to demonstrate their support.
Gary Modie, painter: "I end up standing on the sidelines too much. I would feel
something, but I never really did a lot about anything. I was really glad to help
paint the house, and more so, to convey a message to these guys that the community
will not stand for that."
Bob Maxwell, Painters Union representative: "For me personally, the thing that
bothered me the most was going over to that house and seeing the children there.
They were old enough to read, but not old enough to understand. And no matter what
we did - we covered the house up, made it look brand new, but what do you do with
those memories? They're scarred.
Clinton Sipes, ex-Klansman: "Once you've been attacked based on your race or your
sexual preference, you're scarred for life. And there are many people that I have
affected that way. There are many people who will never forget my face."
[The Clinton Sipes Story]
The harassment and intimidation continued. During the services of the small African
Methodist Episcopal Wayman Chapel, racist skinheads came into the church and stood
in the back, with threatening postures. In response, people from different races
and religious backgrounds began attending services at the church to support the congregation.
Reverend Bob Freeman: "Denomination didn't count, ethnic background didn't count,
it was just that we were one people all together. And they did rally round us
letting them know that hey, if you bite one, you bite us all."
Finally, things turned violent. A piece of cinder block was thrown through the
window of Isaac Schnitzer's bedroom where he had placed a menorah in celebration
of the Jewish holiday, Hanukkah. Tammie and Brian Schnitzer were active in the
human rights community and asked the newspaper to make this incident front page
news so that others could understand what it was like to be Jewish. In response,
the local newspaper, The Billings Gazette, printed a full-page picture a of menorah
and urged citizens to put them up in their homes and businesses.
Gary Svee, Billings Gazette editor: "I guess it was a question of looking for an
image to put this together. During the second World War, the Danish King is reputed
to have come out after the Jewish community was forced to wear stars by the Nazi
occupiers, that he was reported to have come out with a yellow star too."
Hundreds of people responded by placing the pictures of menorahs in their windows.
Bricks were
thrown through the windows of a school, and into two churches that had put the menorahs up.
Residents of several homes displaying menorahs received late night calls from individuals
making anti-Semitic comments and telling them to go outside and look at their cars,
which had all been vandalized. But this town did not give up. Police Chief Wayne
Inman urged more and more citizens to put up the menorahs. "Visible signs of support
for the Jewish community have to increase, not decrease. For every vandalism that
is made, I hope that 10 other people put menorahs in their windows."
By the end of December, more than 10,000 people in Billings, Montana had menorahs
in their windows.
Tammie Schnitzer: "So, I would like to have thought that if this had happened to
my Native American community, they would have put up a Native American symbol in
their window, if it happened to the gay and lesbian community they would put up a
pink triangle. I would like to think they would have done that."
[The Tammie Schnitzer Story]
Uri Barnea: "It's not an empty symbol. If it's not an empty gesture, then there is hope."
Before coming to Billings, Montana, Inman served as a police officer in Portland,
Oregon. While he was there, in 1988, an Ethiopian student, Mulageta Seraw, was
beaten to death with a baseball bat. Three men with ties to a white supremacist
organization, The Aryan Nation, were charged with his murder. When Inman saw
the escalating hate crimes in Billings, he was not willing to stand by and wait
for more violent acts to occur.
"Over time the acts of these hate groups, in particular the skinheads and the
Aryan Nation, resulted in the death of a black man, for no other reason except
that man was black. That was the wake-up call for the city of Portland. Now,
based on that experience, I knew a community can respond and doesn't have to
wait until there's a serious act like a death before everybody says Not In Our Town."
From the time he was 14, until he was 21, Clinton Sipes was an ardent and
violent racist. Sipes moved to Billings, Montana from Northern California.
He says he's no longer a white supremacist. After years in prison and a lot
of soul searching, he is now trying to make up for everything he did. When
he saw the hate crimes begin in Billings, he decided to help the local
police and alert the community to the danger of hate crimes.
Excerpts from the interview with Clinton Sipes:
Sipes talks about his experience in prison. Authorities feared he might stir
up racial activity and placed him in isolation.
"I was put in isolation, administrative segregation. I had a lot of time to
think about things. I was burning crosses, I was putting toothpaste on the
wall and putting toilet paper on it and lighting on fire and burning
crosses into the paint of the wall. I didn't have anything in my cell to
keep me occupied so I had a lot of time to think.
They assigned me a Black counselor who naturally didn't believe in my
beliefs and we didn't get along from the very beginning but the thing that
overshadowed was the love that he carried and the respect that he had for
humankind. He respected me as a person and a human being and he saw through
the hate and always treated me with respect.
I really had no intentions of changing, but the two days before I left he
came up to my cell and said through the glass window. 'You know its nothing
personal all of the problems we've had together, I know you're not going to
change, but I wish you the best anyway' and then left.
I tried to envision life differently. I started feeling some remorse. I started
thinking about some of the victims. Some of the people that I affected and how
I had affected them and how I was being affected. I felt a lot of pain, a lot
of misery. I wasn't happy. I had no direction in my life. I was tired of hurting."
Clinton responds to a question about how dangerous, if at all, these people
and these groups really are.
"Yeah, there's definitely a danger, because these people have no respect for
other human beings outside of their own race. People say that the Klan's
changed. The Klan's changed its face and its tactic so many times over its
history, but it always had a history, even to the current day, the Ku Klux
Klan is a violent organization.
It's lynched Blacks, hundreds and thousands of Blacks over its hundred -year
history. There's no way you can deny that or say that it's not something to
fear or something to be afraid of, something not to be concerned about.
These people aren't here because they're our friends and our neighbors- they're
here to get rid of people they don't want."
Sipes spoke openly about his own involvement in racist activity.
"I was very violent. It only takes a small handful of people like the person
that I was, when I was involved, to do a lot of damage to a lot of different people.
During the time I was involved, there was an operation going on, it was an
underground operation called operation warlord. The goal was to form white
youth gangs called wolf packs, and you'd have four or five or as many as
thirteen people. A group of people go out on a nightly basis and assault,
intimidate, harass minorities and gays and homosexuals. We'd go up to San
Francisco a couple of times a month and assault people and there're people
that have been ran over. So it's been pretty brutal, my involvement, but it
all started out just putting posters up.
There's hundreds of white supremacists, active white supremacists throughout
the world. We have to remember - I know this is brought up a lot- we have to
remember how many supporters individuals like Adolph Hitler started out with just a handful."
Sipes on Martin Luther King
"The house I grew up in, when MLK was mentioned on TV, there's a great human
being, it was there's that agitator, that problem-maker. All I ever heard was
bad things about MLK. I always listened to his speeches, and I always thought,
outside of being white supremacist and being involved with the organizations
I was involved with, I felt that he wasn't that bad of a person, just
basically crying out for civil rights.
I envisioned what it would be like to live like him...when I was in prison
I tried to envision what it would be like to love someone, have a black friend.
I read his writings, looked to him for inspiration."
Clinton spoke about why he thought he came to adopt racist beliefs
"It's hard to know the right thing to do when you've got no education, no
vocational training and you've got small support. I grew up in a predominantly
white area. My grandfather was involved with the KKK in the 30's. That's when
I first experienced any white supremacist activities, when I visited my
grandfather in Galveston, TX when they were having all the problems with
the fishermen, the Vietnamese.
I think if someone had come and told me, tried to teach me some things about
people, I might have felt differently. I wouldn't have been so angry, but no
one ever did. The things I was involved with, I should have been in prison for
the rest of my life. All I can do is tell people of my experience and hopefully
people will listen."
Tammie Schnitzer is a third generation Billings native who grew up Lutheran,
married and converted to Judaism. She met her husband Brian, a physician,
when he moved from Virginia to Montana to work with the Indian Health Service.
She speaks about the quality of life before and after being the target of prejudice.
"I met my husband 14 years ago and he sat me down after a few days and said
that there was something he had to confess to me, and I couldn't imagine what
it was going to be about. That's when he confessed that he was Jewish. I
thought it was so strange that he felt like he needed to confess that he
was Jewish. To confess that I was Lutheran would just have been absurd.
Maybe because I converted, it was easier for me to take a stance because
I knew what it was like to be in Billings, Montana and not being Jewish. I
knew what that quality of life was all about and I wanted that same life for my kids."
Back to top>>
|
