The Redneck Shop was a hub for the KKK. Years after the store’s closure, a Southern city is reckoning with this history

R&I – TXPAT ***

By Brandon Tensley, CNN

Updated 6:02 AM ET, Sat November 20, 2021

A grassroots organization is forcing a South Carolina city to reckon with its history of White supremacy — a past some residents would rather leave buried.

Since 2019, the Echo Project has been working to convert the building that once housed “the world’s only Klan museum” into a center for remembrance and reconciliation that will include a learning area and various exhibitions.

The Redneck Shop, located in a former segregated movie theater in Laurens, in upstate South Carolina, opened its doors in 1996. It sold and showcased a wide range of racist paraphernalia: spectral Ku Klux Klan robes, photographs of burning crosses, T-shirts that broadcast bigoted messages (“If I had known this was going to happen, I would have picked my own cotton”; “Save Our Land Join the Klan”).

Until it closed in 2012, the store also operated as a hub where the Klan and the American Nazi Party would gather and recruit.

Continued

Carl Sagan

Article URL : https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/20/us/redneck-shop-south-carolina-race-deconstructed-newsletter/index.html