This Saturday as the Ku Klux Klan rallies across town, Memphis, TN residents will gather for a day of events that celebrate the city’s diversity and cultural life.
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Vassar students stand up to hate group
Students at Vassar College have raised more than $84,000 for The Trevor Project, which provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBT youth, in response to a visit from a hate group.
According to college newspaper The Miscellany News, students started to organize their counterprotest immediately after hearing that the Westboro Baptist Church were planning to picket the college on Feb. 28. The fundraiser was intended to raise $4,500, $100 for every minute the hate group intended to picket the college. Instead, they raised twice that amount in under twelve hours.
In early February the Memphis, TN City Council voted to rename three parks whose names are associated with the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan.
Renaming the parks would be a victory for racial equality nationwide, say local activists. Memphis resident Kennith Van Buren told The Huffington Post. “How can we have unity in the nation when we have one city, right here in Memphis, which fails to be unified?”
The Ku Klux Klan protested the University of Mississippi's efforts to ban a racist chant in 2010. Not In Our Town covered this protest and response here.
In response to the park renamings, the Ku Klux Klan has applied for a permit to hold a protest in Memphis on March 30. A representative told Action News 5, a local television station, that he was expecting “thousands of Klansmen from the whole United States” to descend on the city in protest.