KKK Propaganda Unsettling for some Jacksonville Neighbors
By Jamie Muro
First Coast News
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JACKSONVILLE, FL -- In a new residential suburb of Jacksonville, near Oceanway, you'll find a neighborhood like any other. There are tools in the garage, a morning paper resting on the sidewalk, and a car in every driveway. For many, it's simply a good place to call home.
Take Tim Lockman, for example, who recently moved here from Alaska. He loves North Florida, but a surprise found in his mailbox has left him a little confused.
"I can't believe that this is still happening to this day," said Lockman.
What Lockman is talking about is a business card- size piece of paper adorned with Ku Klux Klan propaganda. The "card" reads, "Join the KKK and fight for race and nation." The drawing of the hooded Klansman next to the text is impossible to miss.
"I pulled this little card outside my mailbox and I couldn't believe it. I thought, "KKK?" I'm from Alaska and here I've got something like this. I feel like I'm going back twenty or thirty years."
Most of the neighborhood received the uncertified mail, including one black family that filed a police report with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office.
"It's annoying that something like this of such nature is being placed in a mailbox," Lockman said.
He adds his America has no room for antiquated belief systems. And while a white piece of paper has been unsettling for some in the Oceanway neighborhood, Lockman says he's found an appropriate place for it - the trash.
"I'm sure it brings the community a little closer together. It's just something that everyone thinks is in the past."
The police report states that neighbors did not see anyone passing out the information. The material was found about two weeks ago.
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KKK Cards Left In Residents' Mailboxes
POSTED: 3:25 p.m. EST January 2, 2004
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Betty Ross is fairly new to her Oceanway neighborhood -- she moved in just six months ago. But something she found in her mailbox Thursday made her wonder if she made the right move.
Ross (pictured, left) found a business card-shaped note that read, "Join the KKK and fight for race and nation."
"I found it a little unnerving," she said. "I didn't think the Ku Klux Klan exists anymore because I hadn't heard of it in years."
Ross then called police, who found cards in mailboxes all over the neighborhood and in Arlington. The cards were left at the homes of people of all races since Christmas Eve.
"To get this in my mailbox, I was wondering if I made the right move," Ross said. "Something was telling me, 'Maybe you should get out of here.'"
But she refused to be intimidated.
"I'm not scared. I guess [I'm] angry that in this day and time something like this would happen," she said.
The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office is conducting an open investigation into the incident, and trying to discover who is behind the cards.
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