At least six Chesterfield County residents received flyers purportedly from a Ku Klux Klan group last week.
County police received five calls about KKK flyers being left at residences between March 17 and 19, according to spokeswoman Liz Caroon.
“Four of those calls were from the Woodlake area,” said Caroon via email. “At this point, distributing the flyers in this manner does not appear to be a crime, as the distributor did not trespass on anyone’s property and distributing the materials in this way does not violate the littering law. As always, we encourage residents to report suspicious activities or materials left in their neighborhoods.”
The flyers, which read that they are from the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, have a variety of bigoted and false claims against African Americans, Native Americans and Jewish people under the headline “Liberals – The Most Intolerant Hate Group in the World.” The flyer includes contact information for the Loyal White Knights, including an address for a post office box in Pelham, North Carolina.
According to the website for the Jewish nongovernmental organization Anti-Defamation League, the Loyal White Knights is the largest and most active Klan group in the country, and “follow a version of traditional Klan ideology infused with neo-Nazi beliefs.” The ADL says the group is based in Pelham, and that “in addition to being anti-black, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, and homophobic; they are also virulently anti-Semitic.”
Mary Ann Owens, a 69-year-old journalism instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said she first learned about the flyer on her lawn after a neighbor passing by spotted it and texted her on March 21. Owens, who hadn’t left her home in three days, found the note in a sandwich-sized plastic bag that had pieces of candy inside.
“That’s what bothers me. Candy would lure in children,” said Owens, who lives in Woodlake and didn’t contact police about the matter. “It’s awful.”
Owens says it appears that only certain houses in her neighborhood received flyers and speculates that she may have received one because of her last name.
“I do know a lot of people in the black community that have the last name of Owens,” she said. “What’s going to happen next, my house is going to be torched? I found it extremely unsettling.”
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s virtual “Flyering Map,” Virginia saw 133 incidents of flyers and banners from radical right groups in 2019, including 16 from the KKK. The SPLC, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization, compiles the map using information from social media platforms, news articles and tips received by the nonprofit.
Asked if there had been any similar incidents recently in Chesterfield, Caroon said police received a call on March 3 of KKK paperwork that had been found a week earlier in the front yard of a home in the 5600 block of River Road.
For Owens, receiving a KKK flyer in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic was the last thing she needed.
“With all that’s going on,” she says, “they’re out riding around and doing stuff like this.”
