Ellington

Sept. 17, 2003

It's the most tasteless kind of three-way tussle one could imagine: The Clarion-Ledger and Councilman Kenneth Stokes are fighting over who's more under the sheets with the Ku Klux Klan. The current flare-up started Sept. 2 when WLBT-3 reported that fliers, tucked neatly into copies of the Thrifty Nickel, were being tossed into yards in Byram. Thrifty Nickel is a classified newspaper that typically doesn't offend a soul. The fliers reproduced an editorial as well as a poliical cartoon from The Clarion-Ledger, both on Stokes' comments about the city's new redistricting plan. The editorial labeled his remarks as "racial demagoguery at its worst."

The flier proclaims: "Wake up White America! There IS power in numbers. Don't just talk about it let your voice be heard! You DO need US," then lists a phone number, e-mail, and post office box for ORIONKNIGHTS, Star, Miss. The flier goes on to say, "If Stokes had been a WHITE Man in Mississippi like Trent Lott, they would still be chasing him out of town for his racial comments."

The Clarion-Ledger didn't mention news of the fliers the next day, or the next, but Lisa Ledet at the Thrifty Nickel told me that, evidently, someone had taken issues of their paper from their stands and stuffed them with their own fliers. When asked, why the Nickel?, she said, "We are a free paper ... so widely known. I mean somebody's not going to go pay 50 cents for 50 Clarion-Ledgers to go throw and put their own advertisement in."

The tampered-with papers targeted Brookleigh Hills, Forest Woods, Lake Dockery, and other largely black neighborhoods off Siwell Road. About a year ago, publisher Beverly Smith had this same problem with her Hattiesburg Thrifty Nickel. Ledet told me she was working in the Hattiesburg office then and called her father-in-law, the corporate lawyer for the Thrifty Nickel nationwide. "He was having complaints from all the papers; it was happening all over."

It does seem that stealin'-and-stuffin' is a strategy of the modern-day Ku Kluxer. The Champaign (Ill.) News-Gazette Online of Sept. 25, 1997, reported that KKK materials, wrapped inside copies of the Thrifty Nickel, were being found in Fisher, Melvin and Loda, Ill. The fliers all included a Rantoul, Ill., post office box number. KKK fliers were also found wrapped in copies of the Rantoul Press, a part of the Illinois Statewide Classified Network. Publisher Dennis Kaster told the News-Gazette: "[T]hese people are using legitimate newspapers with their material in an attempt to add credibility to their stuff."

Here in Jackson, Ledet echoed that sentiment, saying that the Thrifty Nickel allows paid inserts—but not that kind. "We would never, ever even let anybody pay us any amount of money to put something that would upset or offend ... It was breathtaking to think that somebody had really used our name and our market to promote such a thing," she said.

More than 200 calls came into the Jackson Thrifty Nickel office, complaining about what certainly appeared to be a Ku Klux Klan-produced flier. The first call was from a man whose small son had found the offensive flier when he opened the paper. The Mississipppi Link, Sept. 4-10, 2003, reported that, in response to the fliers, Stokes said, "The Clarion-Ledger and the KKK together are a perfect fit. ... To both The Clarion-Ledger and the KKK, 'Go to hell.' " (A councilman?)

Stokes' comments evidently served as The Clarion-Ledger's flashpoint. On Sept. 11, a "Real News, Real Mississippi" quarter-page ad ran—Executive Editor Ronnie Agnew and columnist Eric Stringfellow would respond to Stokes' recent comments on Sunday. No, they didn't have a fresh angle on the ID of the KKK perps. They were, apparently, just aching to swat back at Stokes and figured it would sell papers.

In his column, Stringfellow called Stokes' Klan-Ledger assertion "ludicrous." Agnew, in a column deriding "divisiveness" in its headline, wrote that he had "only tangentially heard about a flier circulating around town"—he's the editor of our fearless daily newspaper—and then turned around and upped the ante. "Stokes and the Klan are more alike than different in their attitudes on race." (This, apparently, is an example of not being divisive.) He declared that his paper would not back off Stokes, although a lot of folks, even white ones, have been asking him to.

Stringfellow ends by stating, rightly, that Mississippi must confess its sins and repent, adding: "This is the best antidote to people like Stokes and groups like the Klan." Got one for The Clarion-Ledger?