INTOLERANCE: Elwood students form group to battle bias

April 20, 2008 11:20 pm

— By JESSICA KERMAN

ELWOOD — Marisol Salinas, 17, was surprised, not offended, when a supposed friend flashed his Ku Klux Klan card her way.
The Elwood Community High School sophomore, whose parents are black and Hispanic, is one of a few non-whites at the high school. Salinas, who does not live with her parents, said she has never had problems as a minority in this mid-sized district of about 1,800 students.
According to Indiana’s preliminary records for the 2007-08 school year, 94 percent of the Elwood High School student population is white. The school reported having 21 students of Hispanic descent, 12 multi-racial students, one student of Asian descent and no black students.
From the time she was in third grade and moved into the district, Salinas has always felt accepted and content in Elwood Community Schools.
“I’m friends with almost everyone here,” she said. “There are more black people moving to Elwood. I haven’t had any problems.”
According to Anderson Community Schools’ principals, racial targeting is also rare at Anderson’s two high schools, which have more minority students than Elwood.
Madison County’s most diverse high school, Anderson, records less than 10 racially-charged offenses annually, Principal Phil Nikirk said. Of the 1,495 students the school reported to enroll for the 2007-08 school year, 65 percent, or 979 students, are white. Anderson High School reported 375 black students and 78 Hispanic students enrolled.
“The problems that we have in this building that are racially motivated are pretty rare,” he said. “Usually they are instances where kids don’t get along where it has more to do with the circumstances and less to do with race.”
Of six incidents this school year where a racial slur or ethnic slur was attributed to a student, four were directed at another person, Nikirk said. In the two other instances, the offending students made general statements rather than targeting another student.
Highland High School, the only other Madison County high school with more than 10 percent minority enrollment, reported having 275 black students, 20 Hispanic students and 1,145 white students in its enrollment for the 2007-08 school year. Principal Mark Finger of Highland said the school has about five racially-motivated incidents a year.
“We have students who use that type of language on each other, and we’ve had instances where it’s been written on the wall,” he said.
Finger said the school investigates such problems thoroughly.
“To say that there’s no racial tensions in school is a misrepresentation,” he said.
Last year, the school expelled a student because of a racially charged incident, and this year the deans have suspended a couple of students for such problems, Finger said. “Mostly, our kids are tolerant of their ethnic diversities in their school.”

‘A safe placeto come and talk’
Very few racially charged incidents are reported in schools throughout the county each year, according to Nikirk, Finger and other principals. But what about more subtle forms of prejudice and discrimination in the hallways and classrooms?
“I still think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done,” says 17-year-old Maggie Cunningham, one of the founders of Elwood High School’s student group People’s Action for Rights (PAR).
Cunningham and some others in the school started PAR to work for all human rights, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexuality or other differences.
“We target all human rights,” Cunningham said. “We started this year as a safe place for someone to come and talk.”
Cunningham and her friends are aware of a white supremacist presence in Elwood and her high school, but she said “The KKK is dying. They try to get anybody they see as an Anglo-Saxon white male. They go after socially awkward kids, loners.”
Makala Wagner, who is in third grade at Edgewood Elementary in the Elwood school system, has never had a problem in the school because of her race, according to her adopted mother, Liz Wagner.
“She felt more accepted here (than at her previous school in Clinton County),” said Wagner, an English teacher at Elwood High School. “She experienced a lot of bullying, comments there.
“I remember her first day of school in Clinton County. She didn’t know about racism. A little girl came up to her and said, ‘My family doesn’t like black people.’ I was just devastated. But Edgewood is such a positive experience. She loves it.”
Wagner grew up in Anderson and had some “preconceived notions” about Elwood when she brought her Ethiopian child to the city.
Elwood once had a reputation for being a bastion of intolerance. KKK rallies in the city in the 1920s attracted thousands. In the 1970s, there was a cross burning in Elwood, and the Klan demonstrated there. The city officially denounced the Klan in 1995 when the KKK planned a rally in Elwood, but 10 Klan members marched in the city in 2001.

‘The right to believe, the right to belong’
Elwood police have tracked no activity from the local KKK group since 1979, when the FBI investigated suspected Klan activities in Elwood but made no arrests.
“We weren’t aware we had any active groups, anything like that until the kid (took the KKK card) to school,” Elwood Police Chief Jack Miller said. “Usually, if we have activity, the skinheads would try to recruit, or you would start seeing them with their heads shaved and wearing combat boots. We haven’t observed anything like that to this point. This kid at the high school that was passing these out, we do not know why he was doing it.”
Elwood High School Principal Chris Walker gave Elwood police the KKK card, which listed a New Jersey chapter and included a Pendleton P.O. box, and the local police then passed the case along to the Indiana State Police.
Sgt. Keith O’Donnell of the state police said they gathered information, but nothing came of the investigation.
Miller said he hasn’t seen any signs of a growing Klan group in Elwood. Such signs probably wouldn’t show up in the schools, said Imperial Wizard Ron Edwards of the Imperial Klans of America, an independent spin-off of the KKK that started in 1996.
“We recruit over the Internet,” he said. “Very seldom do we recruit on the streets.”
The IKA, based in Kentucky, has membership in 38 states and 14 countries. Edwards would not say how many people were in the group or whether they were in Madison County because, he said, the FBI was trying to find out the same information.
“We stay within the letter of the law,” he said. “People may not like me, but I have the right to believe, the right to belong.”
The IKA, or modern Klan, includes atheists, Catholics and others who were once persecuted by the KKK, Edwards said. “Our goal is to grow and try to help take our country back for the white people. We don’t have rights anymore.”
The IKA Web site cites religion as the basis for the group’s belief that the white man is the “chosen person.” Black people, gay people and others do not act according to the Bible and should be segregated from the chosen people, the Web site maintains.
Gay students targeted at school
Schools and colleges have been the scene of several instances of perceived racial bias in the past couple of years:
n In December 2006, six black students were charged with the beating of a white student in Jena, La. Months later thousands rallied behind the black students, who claimed racial discrimination in court proceedings.
n In July, basketball coach Ronny Thompson quit his job at Ball State, claiming the university had created a racially hostile environment.
n In August, a rope tied in a noose was found hanging outside the University of Maryland’s African-American cultural center.
n A quick search on the World Wide Web shows several other race-related incidents at schools and on college campuses.
At Elwood High School, gay and lesbian students have become the target of hatred, Cunningham said.
“Some of my best friends are gay,” she said. “The word ‘fag’ and the word ‘dyke’ are thrown around, used in a derogatory way. We’re more accepting toward everybody, but I don’t see it yet with gay people. People don’t even talk to you if they think you’re gay.”
However, Cunningham said, the fight for gay rights is much different than the civil rights movement.
“You can walk down the street and be gay (without it being obvious),” she said. “I never want to overshadow the civil rights movement and the race rights movement with the gay rights movement because they’re not the same.”
Wagner believes attitudes toward black people and others who are different are changing as a younger generation populates Elwood.
“What would be sad is if this generation left,” Wagner said. “As this more open-minded generation stays in the community, you’re going to have a total change in mindset.”

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