What happened in Bethel, OH?"I knew they were going to run into trouble. The question was how much?"

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/bethel-ohio-black-lives-matter-protest


Kathy Newman raises a sign she brought to the rally in Bethel, Ohio, June 14. Hundreds of armed counterprotesters confronted peaceful demonstrators at a Black Lives Matter rally in the town.

Anne Helen Petersen
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on July 5, 2020, at 10:01 a.m. ET

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.

<snip>

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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Link to tweet

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[UpInArms]

1. Worth reading the entire article

Definitely illuminates rural small town America...

[qwlauren35]

4. Wow.

That's AWFUL.

It was very brave of those white people who tried to take a stand about racism, and very telling that the bi-racial man could name so many incidents of it.

I wish they would press charges.

[dalton99a]

8. +1

“People have been telling you that your bigotry is bad, and you should feel bad,” he continued. “But Trump is there to tell you: It’s good.”

It wasn’t until the end of our conversation that Riley started telling me all the things that had happened to him as a child in Bethel. He listed them offhandedly, like reciting the groceries he needed at the store. The police had stopped him dozens of times without cause. An officer used to refer to him as “Tyrone” every time he saw him. One time, when Riley entered a restaurant in a nearby town, a white dude started singing Dixie and replacing the words with racial slurs. Another time he was riding his 10-speed and turned around in a driveway, and saw someone come out onto the porch. It was one of his classmates. He started yelling: “Get out of my driveway, nigger.”

“I could tell you stories for hours,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t fully grasp how wrong it was. It was just my life.”

[2naSalit]

9. +1.

[dewsgirl]

2. K and R

[captain queeg]

3. I just had a terrible thought. At this rate the Stars and Stripes will be looked at as the new Nazi

Flag by the rest of the world.

[cagefreesoylentgreen]

5. I already do

Thanks to severe racial bullying that involved being physically assaulted by American flags while having Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” sung at me by white classmates who decided because I was of Asian descent, I would never be a “real” American. And I was born here.

I still have to fight down panic when I see “patriots” waving the flag around.

[dalton99a]

6. "A school administrator bragged about going to the 'race riots' in the '60s with baseball bats"

"Bethel, whose official slogan is 'small town, big heart'"

What a worthless shithole. And there are probably hundreds of them in America.

[maxrandb]

7. "The people yelling at us weren't from here". BULLSHIT!

I was stationed in Pascagoula MS, Norfolk, VA, Lemoore, CA (about 40 miles south of Fresno), Millington, TN, San Diego, CA... and travelled to every continent in the world, including Antarctica during my 28.5 years in the Navy.

The most racist, hatefilled, backwards, inbred dipshits I ever encountered was during my recruiting duty assignment in Cincinnati OH.

We used to say Cincinnati and it's surrounding area were much more Northern KY than Southern OH. Hamilton County in Ohio was referred to as Hamiltucky.

I know it's difficult to accept that the place you call home is so full of racist asspickle, but I'm sorry, these fucksticks are your neighbors.

[maxsolomon]

10. "Why I left SW Ohio", Part MCXVII

Don't act like this culture isn't Cincinnati. It takes 45 minutes to drive downtown from Bethel.