Racism still haunts Kirksville

The fight for understanding between whites and blacks has been a tumultuous and difficult one in Kirksville. Discrimination, prejudice, stereotypes and racism plagued Kirksville's past and continue to affect students' interactions with the community today.

Blacks first came to Adair County as slaves, said John Sparks of the Adair County Historical Society. Farms were small in the area, though, so only the wealthy had slaves. He said they owned relatively few.

"If you had any money at all from colonial days to 1860, you probably owned slaves," Sparks said. "Most of the slave owners had very few. If you had 10, you had a lot."

Most of the newly freed slaves in Adair County moved away after the Civil War ended.

"They just didn't stay around here," Sparks said. "They didn't feel welcome."

While former slaves were leaving, the Ku Klux Klan was moving in. The KKK was especially active in Kirksville in the 1920s and 1930s, and their advertisements and accounts of their meetings occasionally were featured in the Kirksville Daily Express.

Only one or two black families lived in the town at the time, and if there were any acts of violence as a result of racism, they were not documented. Jim Crow laws were prevalent in Kirksville, however.

Before Brown vs. The Board of Education in 1954, there was a black high school on the edge of town. Downstairs in the Adair County Historical Society building, which was formerly the town library, a bathroom door still read "Coloreds" until it was painted over in the late 1990s.

"This town was very definitely segregated," Sparks said. "Nothing was said about it. It's just the way it was."

KKK members were documented in Kirksville as late as 1979, when three members visited the town square. One of them, Joe Shatto, the Grand Titan, or leader, of the Northeast Missouri KKK chapter, made a presentation about the KKK to a sociology class at the University.

A video in the special collections department of the library is titled "The Klan in Northeast Missouri." It documents an interview the sociology department had with Shatto before his presentation at the University in 1979.

The KKK recruited members from Kirksville after its visit to the square that summer.

"We gained two new members off the square," Shatto said in the July 12, 1979, issue of the Index. "They haven't been approved yet but will be in July."

Although there have been no documentations of the KKK in Kirksville since 1979, some people maintain that it still has members in the area.

Robert Mielke, professor of English, said he thinks white supremacist groups remain in the Kirksville area.

"I think you have it all out here," Mielke said. "You've got paramilitary. You've got white supremacists. You've got Nazis. You've got Klan. But it's all kind of under the robes. I hear -- it's all a dirty little secret -- it's still around, but they're very, very low profile. Most of these people are very nervous and jittery about their ideology, so they won't open up."

Mielke pointed to the lack of diversity in the community as a possible contributor to racism.

"When I got here, there were basically one or two African-American families," Mielke said. "So it wasn't really all that diversified a community. During the first few years I taught here, I never saw a face of color in any of my classes. Of course, any African-American student will talk about how they get followed extra-special at Wal-Mart or something like that. There's more paranoia tied to their presence."

Junior Harry Cecil said he experiences prejudice occasionally in the community.

"In the community, I think it's a problem of ignorance," Cecil said. "I've only had one bad experience at Wal-Mart. I asked someone where the Kool-Aid was, and he said, 'Yeah, you people like red, don't you?' I pretty much ignored it."

Senior Aesha Williams said that when she goes to stores, sometimes children stare at her when she walks by.

"They say, 'Mommy, look, a black person,' and one little boy and his sister were following me and my friend around the store," Williams said. "It was more of a shock to them, I think. They have no idea. Kirksville doesn't have a black population here, so all they see is black people on TV, and that's not always a good portrayal."

Some black students said people are becoming more educated about racism, so signs of it may be more subtle now than in the past.

Senior Angela Ballard said minority students often are more aware of racism than other students.

"I think there's a problem, but I think it's hidden because I think people try to hide it," Ballard said. "It's something being a part of a minority population you can recognize without people saying things about other groups of people."

Mielke also said racism in the community is sometimes outright, but more often it is beneath the surface.

"You certainly hear some people using the n-word every now and then," Mielke said. "I think that any kind of racism here is institutional and problems in general with multiculturalism. You want to include people, but if they're different, you don't like it, and they may not get as far in the system and be punished in other kinds of ways."

Others in the community denied that racism exists in Kirskville. Charlie Donaldson, owner and operator of Donaldson's, a local barbershop, said racism was not a problem in Kirksville.

"To me, there's no problem with racial discrimination," Donaldson said. "Anywhere."

"The minorities aren't that bad," he said. "There's no problem around here -- not in Kirksville. I don't have much problem with minorities because bad people are just as bad as minorities. Bad people are worse than minorities because minorities can be good unless they turn bad. They're all right unless they get bad."

Donaldson said most racism is created by minorities and the media as a way to receive attention.

"You can make some racial tension," Donaldson said. "They'll lie to you, make some, [because] everybody likes a good fight. That goes back to the O'Reilly spin zone. You spin it, and after a while, you try to make it smell worse. If you really want to sell papers and make [them] sell, you go after it."

Segregation of the races is because of the simple laws of nature, Donaldson said.

"Birds of a feather flock together," Donaldson said. "If you want to call that discrimination, that's fine. If you see a bunch of colored people and they're happy, you're not going to go up to them, are you? You're going to leave them alone. That's what happens with animals. Just watch your cat and dog."