“I knew they were going to run into trouble. The question was how much?”
Lois Dennis started teaching second grade in the village of Bethel, Ohio — official population just under 2,800 — back in 1976. People in town call her Mrs. Dennis. And that’s the name people used online when they started denouncing what happened that Sunday afternoon in June when Bethel made national news for an explosion of violence on its streets: I can’t believe they did that to Mrs. Dennis.
Lois’s adult daughter, Andrea, was visiting from Chicago. Earlier in the week, they’d heard that local substitute history teacher Alicia Gee was planning a small demonstration in Bethel in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. They made some signs on poster board, and Lois put on a blue T-shirt with “I TEACH” and the Superman logo.
They parked at the middle school and began walking east on Plane Street, the main thoroughfare through the village. “That’s when we were accosted by the counterprotesters,” Andrea recalled. “They started pushing us, being aggressive, yelling at us. We couldn’t believe it. We were stunned.”
On one side of the street, they saw around 50 Bethel residents — teachers, city council members, hairdressers, retirees — who’d shown up for the BLM demonstration. On the other, there were hundreds of people, including representatives from four different biker gangs, who, at the invitation of a local construction worker, had come to “protect” the town from looters and rioters and rumored antifa. Ultimately, the number of people “uptown,” as Bethel residents refer to the center of the village, swelled to over 800.
Watching footage of the day, you can see the energy grow darker and heavier. You can hear a man yell “you came to the wrong fucking town,” a woman scream “you’re supporting the goddamn niggers,” another man threaten to “break your fucking jaw, bitch.” You can see rifles and handguns and a literal bag full of baseball bats. You can see a woman in a pink sweatshirt repeatedly calling a Black woman the n-word. You can see people grabbing sign after sign from the pro-BLM demonstrators and ripping them to shreds. You can see a biker come up behind Nick Reardon and punch him directly in the skull. And you can see the police officers watching the encounter do nothing.
“People were screaming at us to go back where we came from,” Anwen Darcy, who attended the demonstration with her mom and sister, recalled. “But I was looking around, and I saw Mrs. Dennis, who’d been a teacher for 30 years. I saw my mom, who’d been on the PTA for years and served as the drama director. I saw the woman who ran all the prom fundraisers and a city councilman. The people yelling at us weren’t from here, because if they were, they would’ve known we were home.”
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And that place is a distinctly Ohioan version of Appalachia. As one local saying goes, it’s “as far North as you can be and not be South, and as far South as you can be and not be North.” Several homes in the uptown area, as the center of the village is called, were stops on the Underground Railroad. In 1844, former US senator Thomas Morris, a Bethel resident, ran for vice president under a third party advocating to abolish slavery. The first mayor of the town was the father of President Ulysses S. Grant.
Still, when the Klan revived across America in the 1910s, more than 1,000 people joined in surrounding Clermont County, and local newspapers recounted its activities the same way they’d cover the work of, say, the local Red Cross. Nearly a century later, KKK literature, some of it aimed at recruitment, began popping up all over Bethel — including on the doorstep of James and Olivia Hundley and their six children. “This is something I would expect to tell my children that their ancestors experienced,” Olivia Hundley said in 2005. “Nothing that they would actually have to experience themselves.” These days, few in town can remember that family, or when they moved.
On the bus to away football games, a former cheerleader reported, the players would talk about “beating those niggers” on the opposing team. An administrator at a local school, according to one former teacher, used to brag about going to the “race riots” in the ‘60s with baseball bats. Another teacher posted on Facebook that just this year, a white student told a student of color that “his family would have owned her,” while another raised his fist, in class, and yelled “white power!”
The shock of these stories has faded for many white residents — or has just been ignored. They maintain that Bethel is not racist; there’s no need for any fundamental reexamination of how power and race align in a town that’s more than 96% white. “Mayhem, racism, and anger does not describe this village in any way,” Village Council member Bryan Coogan told me in an email. “I have lived all over this great country and moved to Bethel to stay away from just the sort of stuff I just described.”