Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on May 12, 2014

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First of a two-part report.

The neo-Nazi charged with killing three people at Jewish centers outside Kansas City last month drove there from his home in the Ozarks, a hilly, rural, largely conservative part of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas with a history of attracting white supremacists.

The Kansas murders sparked a painful discussion in the shooter's community in Marionville, Mo., where bigotry is an especially divisive subject.

"I am not blind to the shortcomings of this area, and I will tell you, as a native, we are still mired in the past," says Nancy Allen, a professor and author in nearby Springfield, Mo.

Allen says most black residents fled Springfield after three black men were lynched on the town square in 1906. That left it a largely white city in a very white region endowed with a fiercely independent and insular culture. Allen calls it the "code of the hills."

Recently, the former mayor of Marionville was pressured to resign days after delivering this sound bite on TV: "Things going on in this country that's destroying us. We've got a false economy, and some of those corporations are run by Jews."

Visiting his town, you can see why he might be looking for someone to blame for its decline. Marionville has lost its university and factories that once employed hundreds. Downtown is boarded up.

The neo-Nazi accused of the shootings in suburban Kansas City a man known here as Frazier Glenn Miller bought a house nearby more than 20 years ago and made some friends.

"Yes sir, I knew him, real nice guy. He'd help somebody. He helped me quite a few times. Real nice guy," says Jason Click as he sits behind the wheel of a big old pickup with a rebel flag on the ceiling. He says bigotry Miller's or the former mayor's doesn't faze him.

More:
2 towns, 2 contrasting takes on tolerance

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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