From under the floorboards of a large, white building in Maysville, Kentucky, African American slaves making the arduous, secret escape from the south would hide one final time. Freedom, across the Ohio River to the north, was in clear sight.
The Underground Railroad term was thought to have first been coined in Maysville, when Tice Davids, a slave, escaped a life of cruelty in 1831 by swimming across the roiling Ohio River. For tens of thousands of people such as Davids, the river was the final barrier to freedom, separating the free state Ohio from slavery in the south.
But today, more than 150 years since the legal end of slavery, shards of a hateful past appear to live on.
A local resident has attracted attention by using Maysville’s post office as the so-called “national office” of a Ku Klux Klan faction called the Trinity White Knights.
The extremist, who is known to local police and an FBI field office in Louisville, is believed to have been involved in several flyer drops across Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and in Springfield, Ohio, in recent months, causing anger and unrest.
“I don’t agree with promoting the negative aspect of what he’s putting out here. He’s using a PO box here in town to promote a negative message that we don’t condone, but he is also versed in his first amendment rights,” said Michael Palmer, Maysville’s chief of police.
“We do not appreciate it in this city. We have a very good community. We do not support it at all.”
Recently, long-dormant white supremacist activity has ramped up in northern Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana.
A gathering of KKK members at a “Klan grounds” in northern Indiana was organized last Saturday, according to flyers distributed across Kentucky last month by the Trinity White Knights faction.
An hour’s drive north-west of Maysville, in Ludlow, Kentucky, flyers depicting an “Uncle Sam” figure kicking a Muslim family and the words “Leave now. Avoid deportation” and calling for people to “track and monitor” immigrants were found on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration last month. Flyers have also been distributed by the Trinity White Knights group in Indiana and east Tennessee in recent weeks.
A call to a phone number printed on the flyers was answered by recorded voicemail that describes a way for people to join the group and said: “Come stand with us and help fight illegal immigration, homosexuality, and every other form of wickedness and lawlessness,” among other racist troupes.
While the extremists’ messaging is protected under first amendment rights, their actions have not been without consequence for cities and communities.
A May 2019 rally held in Dayton, Ohio, and attended by nine KKK members from Indiana cost the city $650,000 in police pay.
This month, the Republican mayor of Springfield, a town 30 minutes from Dayton where a growing Haitian community has been targeted by Trump and extremist groups, announced that the city is suing Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi hate group, for “engaging in, and inciting, a campaign of harassment and intimidation, motivated by ethnic and racial hatred, against those who supported Springfield’s Haitian community”.
Blood Tribe made several appearances in Springfield last year – both before and after Trump’s televised comments in September. Those remarks included false claims that Haitian immigrants in the town were eating pets, fueling bomb threats as well as school and office closures.
The Maysville-based Trinity White Knights group also targeted Springfield last fall, distributing flyers with hate rhetoric in majority-African American neighborhoods.
“Recruitment is one of the major things that they are about. Extremist groups love the idea of growing, whether it’s the Klan or anyone else. They love attention,” said a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who asked not to be identified for fear of being targeted by extremist groups.
“But they also have their finger on the pulse. Right after [Trump] spoke about people eating dogs and cats, the [Trinity White Knights] started flyering in Memphis and Chattanooga [in Tennessee] about deportations. They see the rhetoric being used [at the national level] as being Klan rhetoric. On some level, they are trying to associate themselves with the messaging that’s going on today but was common in the 1920s. Back then, the Klan had a role in getting the most restrictive immigration bill passed.”
On 7 February, armed neo-Nazis hurled racial slurs at people and unfurled posters and flags over a highway in Lincoln Park, Cincinnati, an area that’s home to a large African American community. A neighboring district, Lockland, has seen thousands of Mauritanian and Senegalese refugees begin new lives in recent years.
But local African American groups have struck a defiant response.
“There is outrage [but] the community is empowered. They have made specific demands to legislators. We are not afraid or intimidated by their threats,” said Treva Reid of the Hollman Center for Social Justice, an Urban League initiative.
“We will not be silenced or disturbed by these groups [attempting to] terrorize our community. We will not allow any of these to undermine our progress. We need to unify.”
Bobbie Brothers, who has a property in downtown Maysville, wasn’t aware that the KKK was running a PO box out of the local post office but was surprised and disappointed.
“I would prefer that it was not here; I would prefer that it was not anywhere. I would like to think that they don’t even exist,” she said.
“It’d be nice if [the police] could shut down [the post office box] but I doubt that they can.”
The post office is located next to the town’s police station. United States Postal Service rules regulating the use of post office boxes follow federal, state and local laws, none of which outlaw hate groups.
Palmer, the Maysville police chief, said the Trinity White Knights recruiter lives close by and that police found out his identity accidentally, when he approached them on a separate issue related to the post office box. He said that two of his officers are working with the FBI as taskforce officers. The FBI, he said, has spoken with the individual “within the past six months”.
“He’s been here for a long time; this is nothing new,” he said.
While the flyers have been shared publicly for two or three years, Palmer wouldn’t speculate on whether the president’s anti-immigration efforts were fueling these incidents of hate.
“We know this individual is in our area; we have spoken with him, and I’ve brought in the FBI to speak with this individual to talk to him about the flyers,” he said.
“If you can catch him throwing the papers on the ground you could probably cite him for littering, but that’s it.”
