Town Must Fight Racist Perception

Mayor Ron Chaney had a chance to address misperceptions about Sandpoint and Idaho last month but fumbled it away. Blind friendship prevailed.

The mayor told the nation’s press that former Los Angeles policeman Mark Fuhrman is a decent guy - his taped racist remarks notwithstanding. Said Chaney: “I am completely confident, knowing Mark as well as I do, that he was telling a story, and he is a great storyteller.”

Yeah, right, and what great storyteller uses racial epithets freely and proudly boasts of lying, pounding suspects into unconsciousness, falsifying police reports and stopping people based solely on the color of their skin?

Chaney’s unabashed defense of his new-found friend sends a wrong message that racists are welcome in Sandpoint and North Idaho. Rather than rolling out a red carpet, Idaho’s elected officials should denounce racism loudly - as Kootenai County officials did in the 1980s.

If possible, the Sandpoint area has a bigger problem now than Kootenai County did then. Fuhrman’s move to Sandpoint and the Ruby Ridge hearings have focused the nation’s gimlet eye on North Idaho. One news magazine, for example, filmed a correspondent driving from Fuhrman’s front door to the Aryan Nations compound. The message? They’re only a stone’s throw apart. And the nearby presence of former Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Beam, the Militia of Montana and Bo Gritz doesn’t help the area’s image.

Bonner County began fighting back this summer when 500 people packed the Sandpoint Middle School to denounce the county’s growing racist presence. Recently, City Council members reluctantly joined human rights activists by approving an employees’ request for a Human Rights Day observance.

But one rally and one holiday aren’t enough. Like the fabled tortoise, human rights leaders must persist.

First, they need to remind supremacists that Idaho has strong human rights laws which include criminal and civil penalties for malicious harassment. Then they need to form human rights clubs in their schools and a victim-support committee, celebrate Human Rights Day communitywide, march in parades, conduct workshops and speak out against all racist acts, speech and literature.

The Mark Fuhrmans of the world will be watching. If nothing is done, they will come.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = D.F. Oliveria/For the editorial board