Source: Worden Butler, Alexis Hartnett (J. Reuben Long Detention Center) / J. Reuben Long Detention Center)
It is almost 2024, and not only is racism still a persistent problem in America, but some racists have failed to come up with new ways to be racist. There’s just no other way to explain why a Black couple in South Carolina found a cross burning next to their house in the 21st century.
According to WMBF News, Shawn and Monica Williams, a retired couple, moved years ago into the Grand Strand in Conway, South Carolina. It was a place for them to live a peaceful life until Thanksgiving weekend when they walked outside to find the Ku Klux Klan’s favorite symbol of anti-Black terrorism, a burning cross, facing their home.
From WMBF:
The couple moved to Conway, settling into the perfect retirement home, but said their neighbors have made the last two years a living nightmare.
“He’s blatant with the ‘N-word,’” Monica said. “He chased off our surveyors. He’s chased off people from the water and sewer department.”
The couple even installed a fence, hoping to find peace, but it didn’t work. The cross burning was the final straw, so they called Horry County police.
Officers arrested their neighbors, 28-year-old Worden Butler and 27-year-old Alexis Hartnett, and charged them with second-degree harassment.
Police body camera footage reportedly caught Hartnett shouting racial slurs at the older Black couple, and a police report states that Butler—who already had at least five arrests for assault and disorderly conduct on his record—posted the couple’s address on Facebook, saying he was “going to make them pay.” (Presumably, for existing while Black.)
But the couple of apparent white supremacists with the throwback method for intimidating Black people was “out the next day” after their arrest, according to Monica.
“So now, what are we to do? Live next to a cross-burning racist who’s threatened to cause us bodily harm,” she said. “We feel that not enough laws are in place to deal with this, and there needs to be some accountability.”
South Carolina is one of two states that doesn’t have a hate crime law. (The other is Wyoming, in case anyone needed help compiling a list of states Black people should not reside in.) WMBF noted that “in the past three years, a hate crime bill has made it through the South Carolina State House but stalled on the Senate floor.” (We’ll leave it up to you to guess which political party is the holdout.) This has left it up to the NAACP to launch an investigation into the cross-burning with the hopes that it lights a fire, so to speak, under law enforcement.
“In these days and times, we don’t expect things like that to happen; it’s really appalling; the Emanuel Nine should have set the precedent for a hate crime law,” said Marvin Neal, 3rd vice president of the South Carolina State Conference NAACP. “We thought we were on the road in that direction when that happened, but here we are again.”
Neal was referring to the 2015 killing of nine Black people in a church in Charleston by white supremacist mass murderer Dylann Roof. It was a senseless crime so vile and evil that it’s unfathomable that it didn’t prompt a statewide hate crime law to protect Black people from Klan-ish terrorists like the ones currently threatening the safety and well-being of Shawn and Monica Williams, and other Black people who just want to exist in peace.
