EASTVILLE, Va. (WAVY) — The Northampton and Accomack County sheriff’s offices are investigating what they are calling hate propaganda.
The material contains apparent recruiting and racial hate material from the Ku Klux Klan.
It appears 10 different messages were placed in at least 135 plastic bags, along with bird seed to make them fly through the air more easily to the yards of innocent people.
One of the flyers reads “Make America White Again.” It landed in the yard of a woman who doesn’t want to be identified, but she told us, “someone just throws something out of a car window in a Ziploc bag until I just picked it up, and read it, and wondered where did this come from? Who would do something like that?”
The flyer gives contact information to a P.O. box in Pelham, North Carolina. It encourages social media contact, and shares a website.
Lavinia Ames found a bag outside her church, but threw it away without reading the message inside.
Once she learned what was going on, she went to retrieve the bag.
She read the note: “‘They are raiding our schools,’ etc, etc, etc. That’s crazy … what hatred. That is terrible. Why would someone do this?”
Northampton County Sheriff David Doughty doesn’t think it’s a local person spreading the hate.
“We had one of our residents see a red maroon pickup truck, and an extended cab, and a similar call to Accomack with a similar description of the vehicle, and witnesses saw them throwing out the propaganda.”
It appears the note is designed to recruit people to the KKK.
“To me it just promotes division against our citizens, and that is not who we are on the Eastern Shore. It’s very upsetting that it impacts people in our county,” Sheriff Doughty says.
Doughty thinks whoever did this drove south down Highway 13, taking the main secondary roads through towns like Exmore, Franktown, Nassawadox and Eastville to name a few.
“I want to tell our citizens to remain strong, and united against this type of behavior. I spoke with all law enforcement, and none of us is going to tolerate this type of behavior.”
The note gives a phone number, which 10 On Your Side called with the sheriff.
The voice on a recorded message says, “Greetings from the Royal White Knights of the KKK. If you are white and proud join the crowd.”
The sheriff adds, “we have not been able to rule out that it is not someone form our community, but it would be my belief it is someone from outside our community who was passing through.”
The woman who doesn’t want to be identified added, “it’s like, what do they have against us African Americans? What did we do to them to make them feel that way about us?”