I hope you’re enjoying the MLK holiday. This day carries special meaning for me.
It was January 15, 1986—just days before the very first Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday on January 20—when the Ku Klux Klan marched through my hometown of Pulaski, Tennessee. It was not a proud moment. The town quite literally turned its back on it: the plaque that once celebrated Pulaski as the birthplace of the KKK was turned around, facing the wall, where it remains to this day.
Local stores closed. Residents were advised to stay home. I remember seeing cars with license plates from places we weren’t used to—Idaho, North Dakota—far-off states whose presence made it clear this wasn’t really about Pulaski. This was a spectacle imported from elsewhere.
As I was driving back to my university after a visit home, I was struck by an image that has never left me. Two elderly men—one white, one Black—were entering what I believe was the restroom in the historic courthouse by the town square.
I only caught a glimpse as I drove by, but the moment lingered. They didn’t speak. They didn’t glare. There was no visible animosity, no recognition either—just two men briefly sharing the same space.
I’ve always assumed the white man was an out-of-town Klansman, the Black man a local. At the time, about 20 percent of Pulaski’s roughly 7,500 residents were Black. I knew only one person whose family was rumored to be involved with the Klan, though he always denied it. No one was proud of that legacy—even those who supposedly sympathized with the so-called lost cause.
There were media crews everywhere—regional and national. I remember CNN being there. I was a freshman in college and hadn’t yet declared a major, but something clicked for me that day. Watching how quickly my town was reduced to a headline, I quietly committed to studying media and communications.
Because from that point on, I could never again say I was from Pulaski, Tennessee, without bracing for it.
“Home of the KKK?”
“Where’s your sheet?”
Some lazy punchline, some cruel stereotype—heard everywhere from New York City to Ukraine last summer (from a fellow Southern American, no less).
Even though Pulaski had rejected the Klan, it would forever be branded as its birthplace—a backwards, bigoted southern town—no matter how hard I tried to explain otherwise.
And yet, to this day, I remain amazed by how well people of different backgrounds get along there. Part of it is size; in a small town, everyone generally knows everyone. But as Nashville to the north and Huntsville to the south have boomed, Giles County has grown too. The population has more than doubled since I was growing up.
“Yankees” have moved in. And every time I go home, I’m reminded of just how much of a Yankee I’ve become myself—and how different many of the Yankees moving to Pulaski are from me, and how some of them are shaping my town in troubling ways.
Over the past decade, as the Republican Party has veered sharply right with the rise of Donald J. Trump, Gadsden (Don’t tread on me) symbols, Trump and Confederate bumper stickers and flags have multiplied across my hometown.
In the historic cemetery where my father is buried lies the grave of one of the first Grand Wizards of the KKK from the late 1800s. For years, the headstone looked like so many others from that era—darkened by time.
A few years ago, someone decided to polish it. Were they local? A transplant? Or an unwanted visitor passing through?
Either way, it now gleams bright white, just a few graves away from where my father rests.
My father was a blue-collar man—a farmer turned electrician who landed a good union job in Huntsville, Alabama, joined the United Auto Workers, and made sure his children had opportunities he and my mother never did. All of us earned four-year college degrees and grew up far more privileged than our parents ever were.
Most of my siblings chose religious universities. I chose Middle Tennessee State University—where, as it turned out, communications was one of its strengths. It was there that I first learned about the First Amendment.
Recently, the president of that same university—a man I’ve met—fired the dean of students for exercising her First Amendment rights after making an insensitive comment about Charlie Kirk following his murder. He buckled under pressure from Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, another person I’ve met and been unimpressed with.
The irony is hard to ignore.
The First Amendment is precisely why the KKK was allowed to march through my hometown in 1986. It protected their deeply unwanted speech. And yet, decades later, it failed to protect a university administrator at the very school where I first learned about those freedoms.
Just like in 1986, I notice that Trump, Gadsden, and Confederate symbolism often appear on the homes of people who “ain’t from around here.” You’ll see an Ohio State Buckeyes flag flying alongside a Trump flag—a dead giveaway they’re transplanted locals. Almost everyone from Giles County grew up a UT Vol fan, with a smattering of Vanderbilt or Alabama supporters.
Trump himself—another man I’ve met and found extremely unimpressive—isn’t a son of the South. He wasn’t raised in a hardcore evangelical Christian environment like I was.
But did that New Yorker ever learn how to weaponize victimhood, resentment, and outright hatred—and package it perfectly for a Southern audience?
An audience that, without the long-term invasion of Fox News and its hard-right offspring—OAN, Newsmax, talk radio, Facebook—might still resemble the hospitable, welcoming people they tend to be when politics, religion, and culture war boogeymen aren’t part of the conversation.
Astonishingly, Trump has been embraced by people who, by every measure of southern suspicion, should distrust a carpetbagging Yankee who doesn’t share their values or their history.
Now my small southern hometown—the one I once defended as a place where “everyone gets along” (I even produced a Raw Travel episode about tolerance there in Season Two—one I’m now loath to rebroadcast for fear of it being misinterpreted)—is beginning to show signs of narrow mindedness, bigotry, and hostility that even the KKK couldn’t successfully re plant in 1986.
It’s not just local. Nashville now attracts organizations like the Heritage Foundation, and Nazi sympathizers are repeatedly confronted by brave journalists like Phil Williams of WTVF Channel 5. Tennessee itself has become increasingly welcoming to hate, thanks to power-hungry demagogue politicians and, it must be said, far-right Russian propaganda. Yes, it’s very deeply connected.
And now I—a man who has traveled much of the world (including Russia, Auschwitz, Wounded Knee, the slave ports in Ghana and Colombia) but still loves his state and hometown deeply and cherishes every visit back—have sometimes felt like the untrustworthy Yankee, the carpetbagger, simply because I dare to use my own First Amendment rights to speak out against this man, his movement, and this divisive rhetoric and sick worldview; against actions that are profoundly un-Christian; against outright xenophobia and bigotry—this flaccid weakness disguised as brute strength—and against the immeasurable suffering it has brought to society, both around the world and back home in my beloved Pulaski, Tennessee.
It’s heartbreaking.
The photo is of me (middle, obviously), learning how to walk with the help of my two sisters
