Not In Our Town needs your help. NIOT is trying to raise funds that will allow us to provide more communities with tools that will help them not only address hate as it happens but also prevent hate from happening in the first place.
For most of us, summer is a time of vacation and relaxation. Here at Not In Our Town, we worry. Some of the most heinous and high profile hate crimes have occurred in summers past.
The Summer of Hate in 1999 was particularly dreadful. In a series of violent hate attacks by "lone wolf" white supremacists, five people were killed across the country. Communities in California, Illinois and Indiana were terrorized as synagogues were torched, day care centers attacked, and well-loved local citizens—Gay, African-American, and Asian-American—lost their lives at the hands of virulently bigoted murderers.
anti-semitic hate crimes
It is said that there is power in numbers, but when an increasing number of injustices were committed in Hayden Lake, Idaho, it was a small group of concerned citizens that stunted the growth of an American Nazi movement.
Three decades later, the story of the campaign for human rights that brought down the Aryan Nations--a once powerful organizing force that incorporated a white supremacist ideology with a frightening mix of anti-Semitism, racism, and Christianity--is now told in a one-hour documentary, The Color of Conscience. (To watch the full-length documentary, click here.)
Director Jay Krajic (left) and producer Marcia Franklin pose with two of the
founding members of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human relations,
Early last month, a group of four vandals set out on a hate-fueled excursion in their Mount Dora, Fla., neighborhood--spray cans in hand. Their target was the Traditional Congregation of Mount Dora, a newly erected synagogue that was scheduled to open in two weeks.
On the morning of July 9, 2011, Mount Dora residents woke up to a shocking scene. Anti-Semitic graffiti, as well as other hate message and profane slurs, were spray-painted on several structures of the synagogue.
While it took police officials weeks to arrest James Maple, 22, two juveniles, and twenty-year-old Cory Gallman--the latter lived right down the street from the synagogue-- it took community members a mere two hours to react to the hate.
A community unites to clean up graffiti sprayed on the
News Organizations Have Served as Powerful Allies in NIOT Campaigns Across the Country