Confederate Flag Waiving Trumpazoid Murders Two Police Officers In Iowa

Yet another right-wing racist nut case murderer…

Perhaps now some of the small verbose faction of hardhead cops who believe BLM is a “problem” will wake up to who the real threat is.

There is a big difference between black folks peacefully demonstrating and white whack-jobs with guns killing innocent cops.

 

Accused cop killer waved Confederate flag at football game to protest ‘cop haters’ sitting out anthem

The suspect in the “ambush” killings of two Iowa police officers was kicked out of a high school football game last month after clashing with black fans over his Confederate flag.

Scott Michael Greene was identified by police as the gunman who fatally shot the officers in separate attacks early Wednesday morning in the Des Moines area.

He remained at large as of 9:30 a.m. Wednesday and is considered armed and dangerous.

A YouTube video uploaded to an account belonging to Scott Greene appears to show him arguing with Des Moines police officers after he claimed he was assaulted by fans Oct. 14 at a football game at Urbandale High School.

The officers asked the man to leave school property after the altercation, which witnesses said Greene instigated by carrying an American flag and Confederate flag.

“I think I’ve been assaulted by you,” Greene says to the officers. “You grabbed me and shoved me around.”

Greene posted a photo of himself holding the flags as several black fans in the background appear to yell at him, which his caption shows he considered a “civil rights violation.”

He offered a tragically ironic explanation for his Confederate flag display in a comment posted on the YouTube video.

“I was offended by the blacks sitting through our anthem,” Greene said. “Thousands more whites fought and died for their freedom. However this is not about the Armed forces, they are cop haters.”

He posted three other short video complaints set to music about drafty windows at his apartment building, along with another viral video showing a Latino “gang member” threatening a group of bikers with a gun.

Greene was arrested in 2001 on charges of domestic assault, assault causing bodily injury and fourth-degree criminal mischief.

He was also charged with drunken driving in 2010 and with first-degree harassment in 2014.

 

 

Southern Baptists Reject confederate Flag

I wouldn’t have thought this possible as little as 20 years ago…

U.S. Southttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_tIxFJhR5khern Baptists Formally Repudiate Confederate Flag

The resolution calls for Southern Baptist churches to discontinue displaying the Confederate flag as a “sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ.”

The U.S. Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution on Tuesday repudiating the Confederate battle flag as an emblem of slavery, marking the latest bid for racial reconciliation by America’s largest Protestant denomination.

The resolution, passed at the predominantly white convention’s annual meeting in St. Louis, calls for Southern Baptist churches to discontinue displaying the Confederate flag as a “sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ.”

The action came four years after the denomination elected its first black president, Fred Luter, a pastor and civic leader from New Orleans.

Rev. Fred Luter was named the denomination’s first black president four years ago.

In 1995, a Southern Baptist committee issued a resolution apologizing to African-Americans for condoning slavery and racism during the early years of the denomination’s 171-year history.

The convention, currently made up of more than 46,000 churches nationwide, was established in 1845 after Southern Baptists split from the First Baptist Church in America in the pre-Civil War era over the issue of slavery.

The denomination now counts a growing number of minorities among its more than 15.8 million members and has sought in recent years to better reflect the diversity of its congregants and America as a whole.

“This denomination was founded by people who wrongly defended the sin of human slavery,” said Russell Moore, head of the convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. “Today the nation’s largest Protestant denomination voted to repudiate the Confederate battle flag, and it’s time and well past time.”

The flag carried by the South’s pro-slavery Confederate forces during the 1861-65 U.S. Civil War re-emerged as a flashpoint in America’s troubled race relations after the massacre of nine blacks by a white gunman at an historic church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015. The assailant was seen afterward in photographs posing with the flag.

The episode stirred a movement to eliminate the Stars and Bars flag – seen by many whites as a sign of Southern heritage, not hate – from South Carolina’s statehouse and many other public displays in the South during the months that followed.

 

Exorcising Evil – National Cathedral to Remove Confederate Flags From Windows

During the early 50’s initial Civil Rights victories in the Courts, confederate sympathizers attempted to place the confederate flag as a symbol of resistance to Civil Rights on damn near every outhouse and truck stop in the United States. This included adding confederate symbology to the State Flags of a number of States in the South, and hundreds of statues to line city streets…

And it included efforts to stick the confederate Flag in places with no association whatsoever with the cause of slavery.

What they should do is replace the windows entirely, perhaps with a memorial to the Civil War dead.

National Cathedral to replace Confederate flags in windows

Washington National Cathedral says it will remove the images of a Confederate battle flag from its stained glass windows because, officials say, it is an image of hatred and racial supremacy.

The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde is the Episcopal bishop of Washington and interim dean at the cathedral. She said in a prepared statement on Wednesday that a task force examined the origins of the windows and the impact of racist symbols. The windows were installed in 1953.

After receiving the task force’s report, cathedral officials decided the flags will be replaced by plain glass on two 8-foot-by-4-foot windows. The cathedral is working to determine the cost and establish a timeline.

The windows honor Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

 

US House Passes Anti-confederate Flag Bill

In a fine bit of election year electioneering, the US House has passed a bill limiting confederate flag displays…

The march against the Confederate flag continued Thursday — this time in Congress

A year after America suddenly and overwhelmingly began unraveling itself from the Confederate flag, here’s more evidence our relationship with it is ending.

On Thursday, the House of Representatives — including 84 Republicans — voted to make it illegal to drape or hoist the flag prominently in national veterans’ cemeteries, including over mass graves. Those who want to mark their ancestors’ spot with a Confederate flag could do so with a small one, but only on two days a year: Memorial Day and Confederates Memorial Day.

It’s unclear whether this new limitation on the Confederate flag is actually going to become law, since it hasn’t yet passed the Senate. But the House tends to be the more populist chamber of the two, and as such, a reflection of what the rest of America is thinking.

“Over 150 years ago, slavery was abolished,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) who proposed the amendment. “Why in the year 2016 are we still condoning displays of this hateful symbol on our sacred national cemeteries?” The Hill’s Christina Marcos reports that no one spoke in opposition to it.

But many Republicans voted against it — 159, in fact — while about half as many (84) voted for it. And if Democrats have their way, the Confederate flag will be a campaign issue in the fall.

It’s no coincidence this comes after a racially motivated shooting in Charleston, S.C., nearly a year ago that killed nine black church members and spurred a shift in how Americans — and especially Southern Republican politicians — view the flag’s meaning. While acknowledging its symbolism of the South’s heritage, for the first time many prominent Republicans also acknowledged its ties to racism.

“That flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state,” said South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), who led the charge.

 

confederate Bombs Walmart For Not Selling Confederate Flag

“Heritage not Hate”?

Since Walmart and other stores have decided against selling confederate flags…This “upstanding citizen” decided to throw a bomb into a WalMart store…

Confederate flag lover throws bomb inside Walmart after online threat: ‘No messing around anymore’

A Mississippi man was arrested on Sunday morning for allegedly throwing a bomb inside a Walmart just days after threatening the retail giant and other businesses for refusing to sell Confederate battle flags.

According to the Tupelo Daily Journal, 61-year-old Marshall W. Leonard will be charged with placing an explosive device after allegedly throwing it inside a local Walmart.

“There was an employee on break, and the suspect told him, ‘You better run,’ Police Chief Bart Aguirre said. “The employee did run and was away from harm when the package went off. It wasn’t a large explosion. It didn’t cause a lot of damage to the store.”

Leonard named Walmart and the Daily Journal as targets in an Oct. 28 post on the newspaper’s Facebook page.

“Journal corporate, you are on final warning,” he wrote Oct. 28. “You are part of the problem. As a result of this, y’all are going down, along with Walmart, WTVA, Reeds department store, and all the rest of the anti-American crooks. I’m not kidding. No messing around anymore!”

Leonard told WAPT-TV last month that the flag, which has been derided as a symbol of slavery and oppression, had nothing to do with race.

“Changing the state flag isn’t going to change nothing,” said Leonard, who opposed a bill that would remove the symbol from the Mississippi state flag. “There’s still always going to be hate. There will still always be racism.”

WTVA-TV reported that Leonard was kicked out of the Confederate flag advocacy group Mississippi On Guard in August after protesting at a Tupelo City Council meeting while being draped in the flag.

 

A Conservative Sees the Light

Meet “The Southern Avenger“, late an advisor to Rand Paul,  in earlier times –

The ‘Southern Avenger’ Repents: I Was Wrong About the Confederate Flag

States’ rights? Heritage? I was wrong: The Confederate flag has always been about race.

As a Charleston, South Carolina-based conservative radio personality known as the “Southern Avenger,” I spent a decade defending the Confederate flag that is yet again the center of so much controversy.

I said the flag was about states’ rights. I said it stood for self-determination. I said it honored heritage.

I argued the Confederate flag wasn’t about race. I believed it. Millions of well-meaning Southerners believe it too.

I was wrong. That flag is always about race. Whatever political or historical points the flag’s defenders make, there will never be a time—and never has been a time—in which millions of Americans have looked at that symbol and not seen hatred.

We can argue for the rest of time whether this is fair or not. And for the rest of time, that symbol will still be seen in an overwhelmingly negative light.

Those who see hatred have political and historical reasons too.

This has always been the Confederate flag debate game. One camp’s arguments are supposed to trump the other’s.

I’m not here to settle those arguments. I tired of them years ago.

But I am here to say there is something at stake far more important than this symbol.

Heritage might not be hate. But battling hate is far more important than anyone’s heritage, politics, or just about anything else. We should have different priorities.

I now have different priorities.

Dylann Roof is a reminder of what’s at stake.

The week before a white supremacist murdered nine black men and women in my hometown of Charleston, I was angry at my fellow conservatives.

A 14-year-old black girl attending a pool party in McKinney, Texas, had been manhandled and thrown to the ground by a police officer. The girl had done nothing except talk. She was just standing there with other teenagers.

It was revolting to watch. I asked others to imagine it was their daughter.

The overwhelming response was that she was a “thug” who was “no saint” and needed to be taught “respect.” The comments were as revolting as the act—an adult mob praising the assault of a 100-pound, half-naked and scared black kid. Ipleaded again for people to stop defending this. It got uglier.

It bothered me greatly, probably because at one time I might have done the same thing.

In my role as a conservative radio personality, I would’ve likely joined in in calling a group of excited black teenagers, or protesters, “thugs.” I might have called illegal immigrants criminals or worse. Muslims would’ve been slandered asterrorists.

Ugliness was a stock-in-trade.

I thought a big part of being conservative meant picking a “side” and attacking the other. I thought not caring what others thought or felt was part of it. Some of my Confederate flag debates certainly reflected that mentality.

This is something ideologues do and is by no means exclusive to the right, as evidenced by the way some liberals cartoonishly portray conservatives, Christians, and, yes, Southerners.

Ideologues ridicule and dehumanize people at the expense of their personhood. Ideologues believe some groups must be attacked, and although the groups are comprised of flesh-and-blood human beings, it’s better not to think of them as people too much—it could get you off message.

It’s crude collectivist thinking. It’s an intentional lack of sympathy. It’s dehumanization. It’s at the heart of everything that’s wrong with our politics and culture.

In its most extreme form, it’s what’s wrong with Dylann Roof.

Between the reports of his racist words and manifesto, we know Roof had a mission: to murder black people. Entering the Emmanuel A.M.E. Church Wednesday and sitting with the group for an hour, Roof confessed that he “almost didn’t go through with it because everyone was so nice to him.”

But instead he chose to “go through with his mission.” He had to shrug off their kindness. These weren’t people. They were just “blacks.” They were on the wrong side.

Roof’s hateful tunnel vision led him to commit pure evil.

What is the polar opposite of such hatred? The forgiveness demonstrated by Roof’s victim’s families. Said the daughter of Ethel Lance, “I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you.”

“And have mercy on your soul. You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people but God forgives you, and I forgive you.”

This is humanity. It is a rejection of collectivist thinking. It is the epitome of sympathy. It’s grace. It’s love.

My attraction to libertarianism a number of years ago began a journey of rejecting groupthink and placing primacy on the individual. Once you start down the path of putting individual human beings above whatever group they belong to, it puts politics—and everything else—in a new light.

Putting people before an agenda or broad prejudices puts us all in a much better place. It can, and should, make us repentant of our past behavior. It did for me.

A 14-year-old girl at a pool party isn’t a “thug” who deserves abuse. She’s a child. Decent people should view her as such.

We can be more decent….more…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thTyavsr3t0

 

It’s Not About Heritage

Heritage or Hate? I think the hate part comes through pretty clearly.

Here’s What It’s Like Inside A Pro-Confederate Flag Rally

More than 1,300 people were expected to attend a “Southern Heritage” rally in support of the Confederate flag on Saturday in front of the U.S. Capitol. Fewer than 50 showed up.

In the wake of this summer’s horrific murders of nine black churchgoers — committed by a manwho admired the Confederate flag — universities and state governments have faced heated calls to remove the flag from their public spaces. In response, many have taken down the symbols, prompting fierce backlash including pro-flag rallies in Alabama, Georgia, and now Washington, D.C.

In interviews with ThinkProgress, members of the small crowd said they wanted the U.S. government to hear their messages: preserve Confederate symbols, and squash the Black Lives Matter movement.

“This Black Lives Matter bull is racism that the government don’t see. It’s white genocide propaganda. They’re pushing folks to shoot cops and white people,” said Ron Feathers from Elliston, Virginia. Behind him, the crowd waved flags, let out “rebel yells,” and showed off their Confederate tattoos and belt buckles.

Looking across the park at a cluster of anti-Confederate protesters — who far outnumbered his own group — Feathers added: “If Robert E. Lee was alive today, this shit wouldn’t be going on. That’s when we had a true American in office.”  { Interesting, because Robert E. Lee never served political office to my knowledge}

Feathers, a self-identified Democrat who believes President Obama is planning to declare martial law and “rule the whole world,” said he’s been organizing “flag rollings” across Virginia — where people drive together with Confederate symbols on their cars — to push back against those he feels are “taking [his] history away.”

Unprompted, Feathers offered his thoughts about why “colored people in general” have a “ghetto lifestyle.”

“It’s because their daddies ain’t in the picture. All these kids are latchkey kids. They’re not being taught the right way. And they only do things in groups. They’ve got so much hatred.”

When DC artist and activist Sima Lee — who is black and indigenous — approached Feathers and yelled at him to get the Confederate flag out of her city, he repeatedly called her “babe” and told her, “Go back to that side where you belong.”

Though Feathers and other pro-Confederate demonstrators repeatedly prefaced their remarks by telling ThinkProgress they are not racist, several expressed anger at the Black Lives Matter protesters across the park.

“I am restraining myself because I am a southern belle,” said Ginny Meerman, a beauty pageant consultant and former “Mrs. Maryland” winner who sported a Confederate flag tattoo across her upper back. “But bless their little hearts if I got them in a quiet alley somewhere.”

When a group of several dozen local D.C. activists across the park began chanting “black lives matter,” she assured the group: “We are above them. We are so far above them they will never, ever be on the same plane that we are.”

“We are the Confederacy,” Meerman called out. “Look at the person standing to your left and right. That is the Confederacy. We are it.”

On the other side of the Capitol Hill park, dozens of local activists banged drums, held aloft homemade signs denouncing the Confederate flag, and spilled out into the street, blocking traffic.

Casey Udley, who grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina and now lives in Northern Virginia, told ThinkProgress she came out to demonstrate because she wanted to show that “there is another way to be white and southern.”

“I brought my sweet tea and my signs and I’m here to say that hate may be our heritage, but it doesn’t have to be our legacy,” she said. “It’s important for white people to stand up to other white people and teach what it means to be anti-racist.”

The anti-Confederate demonstrators told ThinkProgress that those waving the Confederate flag were perpetuating racism whether that was their intention or not.

“I feel scared when I see it — genuinely afraid. I wonder what the person holding it thinks of me,” said Winter Brooks, an African-American student at American University. “It’s a symbol of hate, of pro-slavery, anti-blackness, anti-minorities. It’s frightening.”

Though a line of Capitol Police and several hundred feet separated the two protests, at least one protester on the pro-Confederate side expressed fear that something dangerous might happen if the two crowds collided. Jason Berry, a Civil War reenactor from Detroit, said he had wanted to bring his mixed-race 12-year-old child to the event, but decided against it.

“They’re the most racist group there is,” he said, referring to Black Lives Matter.

 

 

Buy a confederate Flag…From a Black Guy!

Too funny!

 

So Much for the conservative “George Zimmerman isn’t a racist” meme

Hmmmm…didn’t take long for the bigot crew to latch on to the shooter’s race in the Virginia TV shooting yesterday….And even spuriously try and tie President Obama to the shooter…

George Zimmerman: Virginia “hate crime” shootings committed by “pansy” and condoned by “ignorant baboon” Barack Obama

George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin who was last seen hawking paintings of the Confederate battle flag that praised the Second Amendment, took to Twitter in the wake of yesterday’s shootings of Alison Parker and Adam Ward to condemn the “Black [piece of shit]” who murdered them and the “Ignorant Baboon” in the White House who mentioned gun control in his comments about their murders.

Presumably because he knows a thing or two about killing people in cold blood, Zimmerman expounded at Twitter-length on the murders of Parker and Ward, writing first that:

Follow

George Zimmerman‏@TherealGeorgeZ

Pansy Fester lee Flanagan, too much of a daisy to deal w/racism. Murders 2 whites. Hate crime, 100%. Racist Obama says nothing condeming.

“Pansy” is, of course, a reference to the fact that the shooter, Vester Flanagan II, was a homosexual, which is relevant here because Zimmerman inexplicably chose to make it so. Flanagan’s motivations, at least as they were communicated in his 23-page-long manifesto, were based on a combination of a personal grudge against Ward and his feelings about the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina earlier this year. But Zimmerman felt it necessary to denigrate his sexuality anyway, as well as complain about what to him was the lack of timely manner in which President Barack Obama addressed the murders:

Follow

George Zimmerman‏@TherealGeorgeZ

White woman & man get murdered by a Black P.O.S. 8 hours later B. Hussein Obama the divider still says NOTHING.

Putting aside the fact that Zimmerman’s complained, at length, that Obama jumped to conclusions about him and spoke too soon about his killing of Martin, it’s worth noting that Obama did, in fact, address Parker and Ward’s murder yesterday, sayingthat it “breaks [his] heart every time [he] read[s] or hear[s] about these kinds of incidents,” and that “the number of people who die from gun-related incidents around this country dwarfs any deaths that happen through terrorism.”

Follow

George Zimmerman‏@TherealGeorgeZ

“the # of people who die from gun-related incidents around this country dwarfs any deaths that happen through terrorism,” – Ignorant Baboon

 

A Funny Takedown of the confederate Flag

Except for the language (by kids) – this one is a riot

 

George Zimmerman, Confederate Flags, And Muslim Free Zones

OooooooKay….Right wing hero murderer George Zimmerman is at it again, profiting from bigots.

You can read all about it here.

 

And I Really Don’t Like the Curtains Either! Confederate Mania

Strange one. A Wisconsin man, enraged by the display of a Confederate Flag, barges into a woman’s home to remove it!

Wis. Man Arrested After ‘Shoving’ Woman to the Ground, Barging Into Her Home to Remove Confederate Flag: Report

This Wisconsin resident seems to really take issue with the Confederate flag.

Tajaun Boatner was arrested last week after he allegedly shoved past a woman, and barged into her home to remove the controversial flag that was hanging inside, the Daily Mail reports.

Boatner had reportedly spoken before to the woman, asking her to take down the flag, which she hung from her kitchen window. The woman moved the flag to the bathroom window, but Boatner was apparently not pleased at all.

The woman told police that she and Boatner got into a verbal argument before she ended up calling Boatner a racial slur, the Daily Mail reports. Boatner, at that point, had had enough and allegedly pushed past the woman and tore down the flag himself, according to the site.

The woman called police, who arrived at the scene and said that Boatner was combative. He allegedly struggled when they tried to handcuff him and refused to spread his legs so that they could pat him down for weapons. He allegedly continued to kick at officers as they put him in the police vehicle and attempted to close the door.

Boatner was charged with criminal trespassing, misdemeanor battery, disorderly conduct, misdemeanor theft and obstructing an officer.

 

 

Another Day…Another confederate Flag Down

The most violent part of the Civil Rights battle to desegregate was in Danville, Virginia.The violence, and threats against Civil RIghts demonstrators were as severe as any in the deep South.

Danville was the last Capital of the soon to be defeated confederacy. Some things die hard.

 

After 20 Years, Confederate Flag In ‘The Last Capitol Of The Confederacy’ Comes Down

The small town of Danville, Virginia has been locked in a contentious debate for several years over whether or not to remove a Confederate flag that flies in front of a city-owned historical museum. But late last Thursday night, the town’s city council officially voted to take down the rebel emblem, ending a 20-year stretch of waving the national flag of the Confederacy on public grounds.

According to GoDanRiver.com, the Danville city council voted 7-2 last week to remove the Third National flag of the Confederacy from the lawn of the Sutherlin Mansion, a historic building which houses a museum paid for with public funds. The flag was erected in 1995 on the house’s lawn to commemorate its historical significance — namely, that it hosted the last official meeting of the Confederate presidential cabinet, making it the “Last Capitol of the Confederacy.”

The council meeting — one of several that addressed the issue over the years — was packed with supporters and opponents of the flag. Representatives from both camps waved American and Confederate flags and offered rival speeches to officials, but the council ultimately voted for its removal and dispatched a police offer to take it down.

“The Confederate flag must come down. We must stand on the words, ‘We believe that all men are created equal,’” Rev. William Avon Keen, president of the Virginia Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said in an address to the council.

The town’s controversy over the Confederate flag has raged for decades, but not necessarily because of local support to keep it flying. Rather, city council officials have long been frustrated by an odd legal conundrum: Local Confederate heritage groups argue that the flagpole constitutes a memorial to veterans, which would make it protected by an obscure section of Virginia law. Thus, when officials voted last November over whether to remove the ensign, the city council argued that “under Virginia law it does not have the legal authority to remove the Confederate flag.”

But that all changed last week, when Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring sent a letter to the city council directly addressing the issue. In an official opinion, Herring argued that Danville officials could remove the flagpole because it only recognizes the “historical significance” of the museum building, and thus doesn’t constitute a memorial to veterans.

“It is my view that [state law protecting memorials] applies to monuments commemorating certain wars and veterans of those wars, but not to monuments commemorating buildings,” Herring’sstatement read…

here were some who were upset about the decision, however. As crowds gathered near the museum to watch the flag come down at around 9:00pm, several of the banner’s supporters shouted in anger as police removed it with the help of a crane. Meanwhile, the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has vowed to sue the city, arguing that the Attorney General’s opinion is only an opinion — not law. Local heritage groups also responded to the vote by putting up a large Confederate battle flags in various sections of the city over the weekend — but this time on private property.

Yet local news stations noted that some of the representatives who spoke in favor of the flag at the city council meeting were not from Danville, but from just over the state line in North Carolina. That area known to house a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan that staged a rally at the South Carolina State House last month in support of the Confederate flag.

 

Republican White Supremacist Blows Leg off Trying to Make Bomb

Another Faux News listener, and confederate flag waiver. Making bombs filled with BBs and nails…

“Republican” you ask…Look at the Bush/CHeney signs still hanging up in the garage.

And “BBs and Nails” in an explosive aren’t going to do much good “blowing up stumps”…except creating your own.

New York white supremacist blows off his own leg while making bombs at his house: prosecutors

An upstate New York man who blew his leg off in his garage making improvised explosive devices will be held in federal custody without bail because law enforcement found white supremacist paraphernalia and believe he’s dangerous,WGRZ reports.

Michael O’Neill, 45, a former Niagara County corrections officer, is accused of making seven bombs and was arrested two weeks ago after one of the devices accidentally went off. O’Neill was rushed to a hospital where his leg had to be amputated. He was the only one injured, WGRZ reports.

“Luckily, he is detained,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Alsup told Time Warner Cable News. “He is no longer at large in the community with or without some of the physical disabilities he’s going to have going forward, but luckily for the community, he only hurt himself.”

Pictures of the KKK, Nazi imagery and the Confederate flag were found inside his home, which he lives in with his stepfather, William Ross, who chairs the Niagara County Legislature, WGRZ reports.

Even with his leg now missing, prosecutors believed it would be too risky for the public if O’Neill was released from custody.

The explosives he created contained nails and BB pellets, according to reports. One was labeled “powder with nails.”

His attorney said O’Neill was just planning to blow up some tree stumps.

“The fact that there were some items that we described in court as consistent with, white supremacists, to include the Ku Klux Klan, and the Nazi imagery, some of the verbiage which was particularly on the Nazi picture, also the Confederate battle flag, means that law enforcement has more work to go,” U.S. Attorney William Hochul told TWC News.

O’Neill will remain in the custody of the U.S. Marshalls while he recuperates, then will be transferred to a detention facility.

After the explosion, a neighbor told local WKBW that O’Neill spend hours on end

“We only know that we see him at night, in the middle of the night, all hours of the night, all seasons, just out in the garage, out in the back yard,” the neighbor told the station.

Ross told reporter he didn’t know what O’Neill was doing and if he did, he would have alerted authorities.

 

Tales of The End of Segregation – Prince Edward County, Va. Schools

This may seem like ancient history to some folks, but I lived through some of this in an adjoining county – and I’m not retirement age yet.

Desegregation in Virginia, as I as it was in other southern states was a battle. In Prince Edwards County, only about 25 miles from Washington, DC. it extended into the longest battle in the country.

My Mom actually taught at the sister school to this one. It was a one room school, without electricity. She later taught at the Cub Run School, another one room school located on the grounds of what is now the Udvar-Hazy Air Museum adjacent to Dulles Airport from 1949 to 1952.

Desegregation of schools didn’t happen overnight, and some counties actively resisted until the bitter end. There was the requisite violence by the usual suspects, as well as threats and intimidation. One of my cousins lost 4 years of High School because the county just shut all the schools down, instead of desegregating. He would get a GED through a program sponsored by the local churches for black kids caught up in this, because why go back to high school at the age of 18, to graduate at 22? The white folks didn’t suffer, they opened segregated Charter Schools.

The Prince Edward Foundation created a series of private schools to educate the county’s white children in 1959 after shutting down the Public School System in the County. These schools were supported by tuition grants from the state and tax credits from the county. Prince Edward Academy became the prototype for all-white private schools formed to protest school integration.No provision was made for educating the county’s black children. Some got schooling with relatives in nearby communities or at makeshift schools in church basements. Others were educated out of state by groups such as the Society of Friends. In 1963–64, the Prince Edward Free School picked up some of the slack. But some pupils missed part or all of their education for five years.

Not until 1964, when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed Virginia’s tuition grants to private education, did Prince Edward County reopen its schools, on an integrated basis. This event marked the real end of Massive Resistance.

And you have to wonder why folks my age despise Charter Schools…

Prince Edward County’s Long Shadow of Segregation

Among the segregated schools that Ed Peeples photographed in Prince Edward County were the all-black Mission Elementary School (above) and the all-white Green Bay Elementary School (below).

I was sitting in the dark den of the last living founder of the white private school I had attended, an academy established after public schools in my Virginia hometown were closed in 1959 to avoid desegregation.  Having worked as a reporter for years, I was used to uncomfortable conversations. But this one felt different. This conversation was personal.

I wanted to interview Robert E. Taylor about desegregation in Prince Edward County and to find out how he felt about it in 2006, decades later. Weeks before his death, he told me he was still a “segregationist” and expressed no remorse for the school closings. Breathing with the help of an oxygen machine, he used tired stereotypes to describe black teenagers in my hometown as dating white teens, impregnating them, and leaving the teenage girls’ families with “pinto” babies that nobody would want.

Taylor was talking about me. I grew up in this damaged town, but left for the West Coast and married a multiracial man of American-Indian descent. We were thinking about having kids—mixed-race children that Taylor pitied and reviled. I had, on some level, defied him and other white county leaders including my own grandfather by embracing what they most feared. White leaders wanted to protect the integrity of the white race and they had believed that integrating the schools would lead to blacks and whites dating, marrying, and having mixed-race children.

White county leaders in Prince Edward took one of the most dramatic steps in the country to prevent that from happening. Facing a court order to desegregate the public schools, white officials instead voted not to fund them—an option Prince Edward officials had considered for years. A 1951 walkout by black students to protest the conditions at the county’s black high school had resulted in a lawsuit that was later folded into the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education.White leaders worried that their little community, in the heart of Virginia, would be held up as an example to the rest of the nation and required to integrate its schools early. Bolstered by Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., the powerful Virginia politician who suggested rejecting Brown and the town newspaper, The Farmville Herald, Prince Edward altered the way it funded its schools. By switching to a month-by-month budgeting process, county leaders would be able to cut off funding and shut down the schools quickly if required by the courts to desegregate. Meanwhile, white businessmen made quiet plans to establish a private school for their children.

When the public schools were locked and chained in the summer of 1959, white leaders sprang into action. By the time Labor Day rolled around, the county’s church basements and social clubs had been outfitted with desks that white volunteers made from scrap materials. These schools, funded with a combination of donations and public monies, were far from perfect—tiny classrooms were scattered around the region without cafeterias or playgrounds.  Yet these schools showed the lengths white families were willing to go to avoid having their children attend classes with black students.Black families, meanwhile, debated what to do with their children. No one knew how long the schools would be closed; black leaders didn’t think it would be more than a year or two. Opening another private school would have contradicted what they were trying to accomplish. Some parents who had resources sent their older kids across the state line to a North Carolina college that had agreed to educate some of Prince Edward County’s high-school students. Others asked relatives to take in their children; some even allowed their kids to live with strangers so they could attend school. Some snuck their children over county lines to be educated in adjacent communities. But the vast majority of children stayed home and their only formal education would come in the form of church training centers. There, for a few hours a day, volunteers taught the kids basic skills. Many children simply played or, if they were old enough, went to work in the fields with their parents and pick tobacco. Some would never return to school.

State leaders did not come to the defense of the black children and their families. The Farmville Herald and other newspapers across the state supported the county’s decision. A lawsuit to reopen the schools slowly made its way through the courts, as black children—and some whites—went year after year without educations. It would take another Supreme Court decision to force county leaders to reopen the schools in 1964.

When I was growing up, I knew this story in only the most general of ways. I didn’t have black neighbors, black friends, or black teachers. I hadn’t a clue how the closures had affected the only black person I knew as a child—my family’s housekeeper, Elsie Lancaster. Elsie worked for my grandparents when my mother was a child then worked for my parents for decades, too. She had sent her own daughter Gwen to live with an aunt in Massachusetts when the schools closed. My grandparents never even asked about Gwen after Elsie had accompanied her to Cambridge.

I attended the white academy my grandparents had helped found. I was entering eighth grade when Prince Edward Academy first admitted black students in 1986 in order to have its nonprofit status restored by the federal government. After college, I worked as a journalist, moving to Oregon, California, and Massachusetts. I began to recognize the privileged circumstances in which I had been raised and took an interest in writing about marginalized communities—people of color, immigrants, and those living in poverty. After I met my husband, Jason, and we thought about having children, the story of my hometown took on more meaning. I knew that the history of my hometown would be our kids’ history, too.

A classroom, heated by wood stove in one of the segregated schools for black kids in Prince Edward County

When I delved into Farmville’s past, it became clear that I couldn’t just blame my hometown for the shameful school closures. My family was also at fault. During the course of my research, I discovered that my late grandfather, S.C. Patteson, had been a founding member of the Farmville chapter of the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, which sought to prevent desegregation.

As I worked to describe what had happened in my hometown before I was born, affected students opened up and shared the stories of their childhoods, their wounds still raw. White members of the community—many of whom knew my grandfather—were more reticent to speak with me. By telling the story of my hometown, I was picking at a scab that was never allowed to heal. Even my high school history teacher shut down the conversation, suggesting the story had already been told.

And yet the history of the county is still relevant. Decades later, the impact of those years of missed education can still be felt through the county’s 16-percent illiteracy rate, four points higher than the state average, and 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty level. And the once-closed school district is now a failing system. Declining school enrollment has left it with a steadily falling budget and supervisors have declined to raise taxes to fix the problem. The private school—now renamed and open to students of all races—is still a symbol of segregation to some of those denied an education…(More)…

Pro-Segregation Rally. The Confederate Flag Was Used as Symbol of “Massive Resistance” against Integration of Public Schools During Civil Rights Movement