A student's story
Marcy is a Saint Olaf sophomore and experienced hate crimes in her home town. We can apply the principles of social psychology discussed to help explain how situations like Billings might have happened.
While I was growing up in Billings, there was some major hate crimes going on in the city. The first signs of disruptance came when fliers started showing up in mailboxes, on doorsteps, under windshield wipers. I remember coming out of church one day and finding a flier on our car telling about the Ku Klux Klan and their beliefs. The fliers and anonymous phone calls denounced Hispanics, Indians, blacks, gays, lesbians and welfare recipients but reserved special maliciousness for the Jewish community of 48 families. There was a united public reaction to the ugliness of these ideas. ìHate groups must be resisted, not ignoredî became the motto. The resistance was more than bluster but bigotry still resurface. A beer bottle was thrown through a glass door at the home of Uri Barnea, a very publicly known man who is the conductor of the Billings Symphony. A few nights later, a cinder block thrown through a window sent pieces of glass spraying over the bed of a 5-year-old. Both houses were decorated with Hanukkah menorahs. Both houses had children at home with baby-sitters. This scared me very much because my best friend often baby-sat for the Barnea family and by chance had not been baby-sitting because of a prior commitment the night the beer bottle had been hurled through the window. The threats to children aroused a fierceness in the city. Christian churches distributed photocopies of menorahs. The Billings Gazette published a black-and-white picture of a menorah with an editorial, then a full-page version in color. Several businesses began provided paper menorahs. Within days, the nine-candled symbol of Jewish perseverance and resistance was displayed in thousands of windows across the city. I clearly remember driving down the streets and seeing the paper menorahs prominently hung in just about every houseís front window. Civic leaders, churches and businesses declared their revulsion. But the ìhatemongersî returned. Over two weeks in December, they broke windows at two Jewish homes and two churches that displayed menorahs, and shot bullets through windows at Billings Central Catholic High School. This spasm of hate only created more resistance. The result was that many more people put menorahs in their window. It became physically impossible for the hate groups to harass and intimidate thousands and thousands of Billings citizens. While that may have been the front shown to the people committing the crimes, I know that several families were very wary. Some very close family friends would not leave their daughter at home alone because they displayed a menorah in their window and lived next door to a Jewish family.
Billings is not declaring victory but the hate groups seem to have backed off. A former skinhead thought that the gains were temporary, the solutions not nearly so simple but no noticeable rash of vandalism has occurred shank the incidents that December, and the literature and anonymous phone calls have diminished.