“What can a community do when a hate group comes to town and targets a wide variety of organizations, each of which have different ideas of how to respond — or not?
“That’s what happened in Charleston and Wheeling, West Virginia in March 2010. The Westboro Baptist Church hate group announced it would picket Jewish and Catholic institutions, a local university, and, as a last-minute addition designed for maximum emotional anguish, the Montcoal Mine, where a dozen miners had just lost their lives.
“How could the community respond, particularly when some people preferred to keep a low profile, while others wanted to stage a loud counter-protest? Who could even lead such a community response, given the different values of the targeted groups?”
Read the rest of the article from the National Not in Our Town website
Lessons from NIOT:
Be inclusive.
Focus on the positive.
Be as broad based as possible.
Princeton has been targeted before and we pray it won’t happen again — but if we are, here is our potential action plan.
Judy Lindenberger responded this, noting that “in our community, the YWCA Trenton has done something similar with the Stand Against Racism event and website.”