A county Republican Party in Alabama has apologised after posting Ku Klux Klan imagery to its Facebook page.
The Lawrence County Republican Party, which covers an area west of Decatur in the northwest portion of the state, has said that it intended to post a graphic of the elephant often used as a mascot for the Republican Party but posted a version in which the spaces between the elephant’s legs look like hooded Klansmen.
“I would like to offer a deep and sincere apology for a picture that temporarily appeared on this page last night,” Shannon Terry wrote in a Facebook post apologising for the image. “A google search picture of a GOP elephant was used and later found to have hidden images that do not represent the views or beliefs of the Lawrence County Republican Party.”
The image was not originally drawn to flatter the Republican Party. It came from a 2020 Mother Jones article in which longtime GOP strategist Stuart Stevens described the party as racist at its core.
The image came at the bottom of a post announcing that county party chairman Daniel Stover would be stepping away from the role and thanking him for his service.
State Rep Anthony Daniels, the House Minority Leader, condemned the use of the image in a tweet.
KKK imagery has a particular history in Alabama, a state that was a bastion of segregationist politics and violent resistance to the Civil Rights Movement. According to research from the University of Missouri at Kansas City, 299 Black people in Alabama were lynched between 1882 and 1968.
The state continues to grapple with its history of slavery, as well. In February, the University of Alabama’s Board of Trustees voted to remove the name of Bibb Graves from a campus building. Mr Graves, who ran the state in the 1920s and 1930s, ran a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan out of a campus building. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Klan is still active in Alabama today.
