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I grew up in Ann Arbor and remember when this rally happened. I wasn't at the event but I remember a lot of people being really angry that the Klan was speaking
by mtinkerhess 12y ago
I grew up in Ann Arbor and remember when this rally happened. I wasn't at the event but I remember a lot of people being really angry that the Klan was speaking. I also remember there was a group of people that took non-violence training and attended the rally with the intention of preventing violence. If I'm remembering right my parents took my and my brothers to a counter-protest about a mile from the main protest downtown.
At the time the Klan was mostly a historical organization that you learned about along with the civil rights era in school -- they weren't an especially powerful organization in 1996. But that was 19 years ago, and so the history was 19 years more recent than it is today. And there were rumors of KKK activity happening in nearby Howell, so the protest wasn't purely symbolic -- it felt closer to home than that.
Ann Arbor has a habit of taking to the streets. When we went to war with Iraq in 2003 almost my entire high school skipped class to protest downtown. When I visited over Thanksgiving I caught this one going down the street: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2MN6G0m8is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2MN6G0m8is