"Not in Our Town" Excerpt
“Not in Our Town”
(excerpted from “Not in Our Town,” Choosing to Participate Study Guide)
Resistance to social change is often expressed through hatred and violence. How a community responds to intolerance is one measure of its citizens’ commitment to democracy. During the early 1990s, hate groups in Billings, Montana organized a wave of racist and antisemitic violence. In 1994 journalist Claire Safran reported on the community’s response.
On a quiet evening in Billings, Montana, early [in December 1993], a stranger arrived at the home of Tammie and Brian Schnitzer. He stole across the lawn, a cinder block in hand. He stopped at a window decorated with Star of David decals and a menorah, the nine-branched candelabra that is the symbol of the Jewish festival of Chanukah. Then he hurled the stone, sending jagged shards of glass into the bedroom of Isaac, 5.
By chance, the little boy wasn’t there. He’d been in the family room watching TV with his 2-year-old sister, Rachel, and a babysitter.
Waiting for the police to arrive, Tammie huddled in a rocking chair in her son’s room. “I felt so cold,” she recalls. “But it wasn’t the winter air coming through the broken window. It was my sense of being so helpless. It was my fear of what would come next.”
As Tammie spoke with the police officer who’d arrived at her home, she swung between fear and outrage. “This isn’t just mischief,” she said. He agreed and advised her to take down the Chanukah decorations and avoid leaving the children with a babysitter.
Lying in bed that night, sleepless, Tammie thought how ironic it was that the attack on her home had occurred because of Chanukah—a holiday commemorating the Jews’ fight thousands of years ago to worship God in their own way. “I wondered what kind of struggle we were going to be in for, and how we could stop it before it became worse,” she says.
The next day, Friday, Tammie spoke with a reporter from the Billings Gazette. She told him how troubled she was by the officer’s advice. “Maybe it’s not wise to keep these symbols up,” she said. “But how do you explain that to a child?”
On Saturday morning Margaret [MacDonald] read Tammie’s quote in the paper. She tried to imagine telling her daughter, Siri, then 6, that they could not have a Christmas tree, or explaining to Charlie, then 3, that they had to take a wreath off the door because it wasn’t safe.
Margaret phoned her pastor, Keith Torney. “What would you think if we had the children draw menorahs in Sunday school?” she asked. “If we mimeographed as many pictures of the menorah as we could? If we told people to put them up in their windows?”
Reverend Torney had read the paper that morning too. “Yes,” he said. “And yes again.” He spent the rest of the day on the phone, enlisting other churches. That week hundreds of menorahs appeared in the windows of Christian homes in Billings. “It wasn’t an easy decision,” says Margaret. “With two young children, I had to think hard about it myself. We put our menorah in a living room window, and made sure nobody sat in front of it.”
Some, nervous about jeopardizing their families, checked first with Wayne Inman, the chief of police at the time. “Yes, there’s a risk,” he told callers. “But there’s a greater risk in not doing it.”
On December 7, the Billings Gazette published a full-page picture of a menorah to cut out and tape up. Local businesses also distributed photocopies of menorahs, and one put a message on a billboard, proclaiming: “Not in Our Town! No Hate, No Violence. Peace on Earth.”
As the Jewish symbol sprouted in Christian windows, the haters lashed out. Glass panes on the doors of the Evangelical United Methodist Church, graced with two menorahs, were smashed. Someone fired shots into a Catholic school that had joined the crusade. Six cars parked in front of homes that displayed menorahs had their windows kicked out; the homeowners received phone calls that told them to “Go look at your car, Jew-lover.”
Yet suddenly, for every menorah that was there before, ten new ones appeared. Hundreds of menorahs grew to be thousands. It’s estimated that as many as 6,000 homes in Billings had menorahs on display. “All along, our coalition had been saying an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us,” says Margaret MacDonald. “And God bless them, the people of this town understood.” . . .
The people of Billings kept their menorahs up until the New Year. As Inman says, “The haters could attack a couple of Jewish homes. They could make a second wave of attacks on Christian homes and churches. But they could not target thousands of menorahs.”
Confronted by a united town, the Ku Klux Klan and skinheads backed off. The acts of vandalism stopped, the hate literature disappeared, and the anonymous calls ended. But with no witnesses and no strong leads, the police were never able to make any arrests, a fact that leaves the community extremely uneasy. . . .
The town continues to stand together. In April [of 1994] more than 250 Christians joined the Jewish community for a seder, the traditional Passover meal. Not long after, hundreds attended a concert of Jewish music that the Schnitzers helped coordinate to show their appreciation to Billings.
