Mom says NC police chief told her ‘throw it away’ after KKK bag showed up at her door
A Statesville woman who started a petition to remove a Confederate soldier statue from the city’s downtown said she is upset that someone left a bag with an intimidating Ku Klux Klan message at her door and the police chief told her to ”go ahead and throw it away.”
“I have a trunk full of them,” Genesis Houpe said Statesville police Chief David Addison told her.
The bag contained a KKK business card, some candy and the message ”We See Everything” in black marker, which flanked larger “KKK” letters written with red marker.
Houpe said she called Addison, who also is Black, on his cell phone after her 11-year-old son found the bag outside her apartment Saturday morning and ran into her home office “freaking out, crying.” He knows what the KKK is, she said.
“‘Mommy, do we need to move?’” she said her son asked. “What are we going to do? Are they going to come back and hurt us?”
“He was really upset,” Houpe said. “And it made me angry. Just the whole situation.”
She said Addison told her: “I’ve been running around town and the county picking these up for people and at this point, you should just throw it away.”
No one else, however, got a bag at her complex or two apartment complexes on either side of hers, and a housing development a block away, Houpe said she later learned.
“I’m still angry,” Houpe, a 33-year-old international currency investor who leads an investment team of 40 told The Charlotte Observer on Tuesday.
Addison didn’t return two messages from the Observer on Tuesday.
Clear half-gallon-size bags containing the cards and candy also were tossed in the yards of 66 homes in the Old Mountain Road area, 7 miles west of Statesville, Iredell County Sheriff Darren Campbell told the Observer.
Houpe led a Change.org petition drive calling for the removal of the 1905 statue outside the Old County Courthouse on South Center Street. The building houses county government offices.
Houpe’s petition drew nearly the number of signatures she’d hope for: 2,500.
“Why do we need a 27 foot reminder of White Supremacy?” Houpe asked in the petition.
Commissioners voted on March 2 to move the statue to either Fourth Creek Cemetery or Oakwood Cemetery, although no timetable has been announced, The (Statesville) Record & Landmark reported.
Muslim group condemns KKK action
The nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group on Tuesday condemned the KKK’s action.
“All Americans should be free to exercise their First Amendment rights without fear of intimidation by organized hate groups,” Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement.
“This disturbing incident shows why all symbols of white supremacy and racism must be removed from our society,” Hooper said.
Bags tossed outside Houpe’s and other homes contained the business card of the East Coast Knights of the True Invisible Empire, which didn’t return email and phone messages by the Observer on Tuesday.
Campbell told the Observer it’s unknown if anyone in the Old Mountain Road area was similarly targeted, although his office continues to investigate, he said.
‘Most infamous’ hate group
The KKK is the “oldest and most infamous of American hate groups,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The group for years has used mass drop-offs of candy with its literature to recruit members, The Washington Post reported in 2014.
Campbell, the Iredell sheriff, said he discussed the local cases with Addison, the police chief, as recently as Tuesday morning.
He said investigators will review surveillance footage to try to identify a car and those responsible for distributing the bags.
It is still unclear if bags found outside Houpe’s and several other Statesville homes are connected with those in the Old Mountain Road area, the sheriff said. They were not entirely the same, he said.
Sheriff’s investigators last saw such KKK materials six years ago, in Harmony in rural north Iredell, Campbell said.
Muslim group praises vote
The commissioners’ March 2 vote followed months of protests at the statute and drew praise from CAIR, the nation’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization.
The vote will remove “a symbol of slavery, racism and white supremacy from the grounds of an institution that must treat every person equally before the law,” CAIR’s Hooper said after the vote.
Houpe said she participated in but didn’t lead the summer protests at the Old County Courthouse.
She said she never touched anything in the bag that her son found last weekend, in case police decide to investigate and retrieve fingerprints from it.
Houpe’s so angry that she was told to throw the bag away that she’s not going to call the department again, she said.
“They’re going to have to come to me,” she said.
This story was originally published March 9, 2021 at 4:06 PM with the headline "Mom says NC police chief told her ‘throw it away’ after KKK bag showed up at her door."