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The 1960s were years of turmoil in the United States. Much of that turmoil centered around issues of "race." In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner to study race relations in the United States. After months of work, the commissioners concluded that the United States was moving toward two societies: "one black, one white, separate and unequal." In 1998, a similar commission appointed by President Bill Clinton and headed by African American historian John Hope Franklin described a somewhat different United States-a nation more united along racial lines, but one where "discrimination is still a fact of life."
A series of events in Montana in 1993 suggests how far the nation has come. It also reveals how far the nation has yet to go. In 1994, journalist Claire Safran reported:
On a quiet evening in Billings, Montana, early [in December of 1993], a stranger arrived at the home of Tammie and Brian Schnitzer. He stole across the lawn, a cinder block in hand. He stopped at a window decorated with Star of David decals and a menorah, the nine-branched candelabra that is the symbol of the Jewish festival of Chanukah Then he hurled the stone, sending tagged shards of glass into the bedroom of Isaac, 5.
By chance, the little boy wasn't there. He'd been in the family room watching TV with his 2-year-old sister, Rachel, and a babysitter. They heard the crash, but when the sitter searched for a cause, she missed the broken window. That remained for Brian to find when he came home. Shaken, he phoned the police and put the children to bed in the safest spot he could think of-bundled in sleeping bags under the four-poster bed in his bedroom "We're playing campout," he told Isaac.
Not long after, Tammie returned from a meeting of the human rights coalition she co-chaired. Seeing the look on her husband's face, she asked, "What's wrong?" He led her to Isaac's room. Shocked, she stared at the broken window. Tammie had felt a little nervous putting up the Chanukah decorations; in recent months a string of hate crimes had occurred around town. Now her worst fears had come home.
Waiting for the police to arrive, Tammie huddled in a rocking chair in her son's room. "I felt so cold," she recalls. "But it wasn't the winter air coming through the broken window. It was my sense of being so helpless. It was my fear of what would come next."
Some 80,000 people live under the big sky of this valley town sheltered by rocky hills. They drive pickups and family sedans, dress in jeans and business suits, and mingle in an easy, relaxed way. They are overwhelmingly Christian and white; about 50 Jewish families live here, and fewer than 500 blacks. Add Hispanics and Native Americans, all told, minorities in Billings make up a meager 7 percent or so of the population.
For some that's still too many. In 1986 white supremacists declared Montana to be one of five states comprising their "Aryan homeland." In the years that followed, racist incidents around the state became increasingly frequent; eventually they cropped up in Billings. . . .
By the end of 1992, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and a band of skin-heads had become visible presences in Billings. Klan newspapers were tossed onto driveways, and flyers surfaced attacking mainly Jews and homosexuals. One day a bumper sticker that read "Nuke Israel" was placed on a stop sign near the temple. Not long after, Tammie saw a flyer that named Brian, who'd recently become president of the Montana Association of Jewish Communities. "I felt sick" she recalls. "It really hit home."
At a meeting, temple officers chose not to speak out. Says Tammie, "They seemed to feel that to acknowledge a problem or identify ourselves as being different would make us stand apart." Tammie refused to stay silent. . . .
At the same time, Margaret MacDonald, . . . a mother of two and the part-time director of the Montana Association of Churches, was encountering resistance to another effort to draw attention to the problem: a petition that opposed hatred and bigotry. "There'd been an emphatic hard-line stance in the town, like a brick wall, that the less said about the skinheads and other racists, the better," she says. She persisted, however, and over the following months, more than 100 organizations and 3,500 people signed the resolution.
In the spring of 1993, after a conversation at a town meeting, Tammie, Margaret, and several others formed the Billings Coalition for Human Rights. "This wasn't a Jewish issue, it was a human rights issue," says Tammie. "We wanted to make the community aware of what was going on."
The hate activity escalated. In September, four days before the start of the Jewish New Year, vandals overturned headstones in the Jewish cemetery. And on the holiday itself, a bomb threat was made to the temple before the start of the children's service.
Tammie urged synagogue members to speak out. "I wanted to let people know what was happening. But some members felt that we would put ourselves in more danger. We didn't know what to do."
Page: 1 | 2 | 3
The 1960s were years of turmoil in the United States. Much of that turmoil centered around issues of "race." In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner to study race relations in the United States. After months of work, the commissioners concluded that the United States was moving toward two societies: "one black, one white, separate and unequal." In 1998, a similar commission appointed by President Bill Clinton and headed by African American historian John Hope Franklin described a somewhat different United States-a nation more united along racial lines, but one where "discrimination is still a fact of life."
A series of events in Montana in 1993 suggests how far the nation has come. It also reveals how far the nation has yet to go. In 1994, journalist Claire Safran reported:
On a quiet evening in Billings, Montana, early [in December of 1993], a stranger arrived at the home of Tammie and Brian Schnitzer. He stole across the lawn, a cinder block in hand. He stopped at a window decorated with Star of David decals and a menorah, the nine-branched candelabra that is the symbol of the Jewish festival of Chanukah Then he hurled the stone, sending tagged shards of glass into the bedroom of Isaac, 5.
By chance, the little boy wasn't there. He'd been in the family room watching TV with his 2-year-old sister, Rachel, and a babysitter. They heard the crash, but when the sitter searched for a cause, she missed the broken window. That remained for Brian to find when he came home. Shaken, he phoned the police and put the children to bed in the safest spot he could think of-bundled in sleeping bags under the four-poster bed in his bedroom "We're playing campout," he told Isaac.
Not long after, Tammie returned from a meeting of the human rights coalition she co-chaired. Seeing the look on her husband's face, she asked, "What's wrong?" He led her to Isaac's room. Shocked, she stared at the broken window. Tammie had felt a little nervous putting up the Chanukah decorations; in recent months a string of hate crimes had occurred around town. Now her worst fears had come home.
Waiting for the police to arrive, Tammie huddled in a rocking chair in her son's room. "I felt so cold," she recalls. "But it wasn't the winter air coming through the broken window. It was my sense of being so helpless. It was my fear of what would come next."
Some 80,000 people live under the big sky of this valley town sheltered by rocky hills. They drive pickups and family sedans, dress in jeans and business suits, and mingle in an easy, relaxed way. They are overwhelmingly Christian and white; about 50 Jewish families live here, and fewer than 500 blacks. Add Hispanics and Native Americans, all told, minorities in Billings make up a meager 7 percent or so of the population.
For some that's still too many. In 1986 white supremacists declared Montana to be one of five states comprising their "Aryan homeland." In the years that followed, racist incidents around the state became increasingly frequent; eventually they cropped up in Billings. . . .
By the end of 1992, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and a band of skin-heads had become visible presences in Billings. Klan newspapers were tossed onto driveways, and flyers surfaced attacking mainly Jews and homosexuals. One day a bumper sticker that read "Nuke Israel" was placed on a stop sign near the temple. Not long after, Tammie saw a flyer that named Brian, who'd recently become president of the Montana Association of Jewish Communities. "I felt sick" she recalls. "It really hit home."
At a meeting, temple officers chose not to speak out. Says Tammie, "They seemed to feel that to acknowledge a problem or identify ourselves as being different would make us stand apart." Tammie refused to stay silent. . . .
At the same time, Margaret MacDonald, . . . a mother of two and the part-time director of the Montana Association of Churches, was encountering resistance to another effort to draw attention to the problem: a petition that opposed hatred and bigotry. "There'd been an emphatic hard-line stance in the town, like a brick wall, that the less said about the skinheads and other racists, the better," she says. She persisted, however, and over the following months, more than 100 organizations and 3,500 people signed the resolution.
In the spring of 1993, after a conversation at a town meeting, Tammie, Margaret, and several others formed the Billings Coalition for Human Rights. "This wasn't a Jewish issue, it was a human rights issue," says Tammie. "We wanted to make the community aware of what was going on."
The hate activity escalated. In September, four days before the start of the Jewish New Year, vandals overturned headstones in the Jewish cemetery. And on the holiday itself, a bomb threat was made to the temple before the start of the children's service.
Tammie urged synagogue members to speak out. "I wanted to let people know what was happening. But some members felt that we would put ourselves in more danger. We didn't know what to do."
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