By JAN McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
Like clockwork, Ron Bolander was on his 6:30 a.m. walk Sunday with Grace, a little spaniel, when he spotted a flyer in his front yard on Wolfly Avenue in Bowling Green. When he turned down the alley, there was another flyer blowing in the wind.
“I saw the ‘KKK’ on the bottom,” and picked them up to take home, Bolander said.
“I was flabbergasted,” his wife Deb Helmbold said when she read the flyers.
Bolander and Helmbold were jarred to see the KKK propaganda in their neighborhood.
“How did it get this far?” Helmbold said Sunday evening.
The couple soon learned they were not alone, with others in Bowling Green, and a friend in Sugar Ridge reporting the same flyers in their neighborhoods. For the last few months, similar flyers from groups affiliated with the KKK have been showing up communities across Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
The two flyers found by Bolander were both from the Trinity White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, with a national office listed in Maysville, Kentucky. The papers said the group is “calling all like minded white Protestants.”
One of them shows a caricature of Uncle Sam with his foot on top of a cage with people inside, suggesting that people self-deport to avoid detention. “Help us protect our homeland,” the flyer stated.
The other flyer targets Black Americans, with an image of Uncle Sam and two smiling white children, next to a photo of a menacing looking person of color behind bars.
The flyers list phone numbers for the Trinity of the White Knights at offices in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee – and ask for payment to receive an information packet and application.
A call to the “Realm of Ohio,” went straight to a recording. The message spoke of the changes coming in January, especially for immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. “We will always secure the existence of our people and future of white children,” the recording said, wrapping up with “Have a blessed day.”
Bowling Green resident Rick Busselle called the phone number for the “Realm of Ohio,” after seeing the flyers posted on Facebook.
“It was disturbing,” he said of the recording and the flyers.
“I just feel like it’s a sign that people who don’t have the country’s best interests at heart are emboldened,” Busselle said.
Amy Craft Ahrens, a neighbor of Bolander and Helmbold, was also disheartened.
“I feel anger and frustration that we’re not beyond this,” she said.
And Connie Donald, who also lives in the same part of town, expressed similar feelings.
“I’m just sick,” she said. “We’re watching our country burn down. It’s horrifying.”
Bowling Green Mayor Mike Aspacher said Monday morning that he felt anger and disgust when seeing the flyers.
“On behalf of myself, the entire City Administration and City Council, I want to emphatically reject the hate and divisiveness projected in these flyers. Furthermore, I want to say in the strongest possible terms that this type of hateful garbage is deplorable and reprehensible and is not welcome here in Bowling Green,” Aspacher said.
“We must make it perfectly clear to those responsible for spreading these disgraceful flyers that this filth does not represent the values of the Bowling Green community, our residents or our business community and will not be tolerated in the City of Bowling Green and should also be rejected by our society as a whole,” the mayor said.
As of 5 p.m. on Sunday, no one had reported the flyers to Bowling Green Police Division. BGPD Lt. Adam Skaff said that short of seeing someone littering with the flyers, there is little the police can do.
“While loathsome and disheartening, it is not a crime to print them,” Skaff said.
In response to the flyers showing up in the community, the Bowling Green Human Relations Commission will meet on Friday, Feb. 28, at 8 a.m., in the City Council Chamber Conference Room, 305 N. Main St. This meeting is to discuss and vote on a statement addressing the recent dissemination of the discriminatory flyers.
