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Excuse the waste of bandwith, my favorite Christian Menorah story. I seem to post it every year.
NOT IN OUR TOWN is the inspiring documentary film about the residents of Billings, Montana who responded to an upsurge in hate violence by standing together for a hate-free community. In 1993, hate activities in Billings reached a crescendo. KKK fliers were distributed, the Jewish cemetery was desecrated, the home of a Native American family was painted with swastikas, and a brick was thrown through the window of a six-year-old boy who displayed a Menorah for Hanukkah.
To purchase a tape or DVD of this program, visit theworkinggroup.org for ordering information.
Rather than resigning itself to the growing climate of hate, the community took a stand. The police chief urged citizens to respond before the violence escalated any further. Religious groups from every denomination sponsored marches and candlelight vigils. The local labor council passed a resolution against racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia. Members of the local Painters Union pitched in to paint over racist graffiti. The local newspaper printed full-page Menorahs that were subsequently displayed in nearly 10,000 homes and businesses. The community made an unmistakable declaration: "Not in Our Town." Since then, no serious acts of hate violence have been reported in Billings. Learn More >>
Billings, Montana is the kind of town where everyone says Hello, where you can always find a parking place, and where the shopkeepers know your name. But in 1993, the city was struck by a series of hate crimes that escalated from the distribution of hate literature to vandalism and finally, to violence.
Rather than resigning itself to the growing climate of fear and intimidation, the community took a stand in response to each incident.
Police Chief Wayne Inman: If a police chief doesn't take a visible and active role, then the assumption is hate groups have learned from experience that if a community doesn't respond, then the community accepts. Silence is acceptance to them.
[Wayne Inman Story]
It began with hate fliers passed out around town. Residents who had attended a Martin Luther King birthday celebration returned to find racist literature on their cars. Tombstones were overturned in the Jewish cemetery. The local symphony director, Uri Barnea, received threatening phone calls and had a bottle thrown through his front door.
Religious groups from every denomination sponsored marches and candlelight vigils. The local labor council passed a resolution in support of those typically targeted by hate groups, and held a "Stand Together Billings" rally to urge community adoption of the anti-hate proclamation.
Then late one night, Dawn Fast Horses' home was covered with swastikas and racist graffiti 
reading "Die, Indian, Die." The next day, Sarah Anthony from the Billings Human Rights Coalition visited Dawn Fast Horse to ask what the community could do to help. Dawn just wanted the graffiti off her home as soon as possible. Sarah got a local hardware store to donate paint and went to the Painters Union to ask for help. After pulling their regular shift at the local refinery, over 30 painters showed up at Dawn's house to volunteer to repaint the house. Along with the painters, over 100 community members showed up to demonstrate their support.
Gary Modie, painter: "I end up standing on the sidelines too much. I would feel something, but I never really did a lot about anything. I was really glad to help paint the house, and more so, to convey a message to these guys that the community will not stand for that."
Bob Maxwell, Painters Union representative: "For me personally, the thing that bothered me the most was going over to that house and seeing the children there. They were old enough to read, but not old enough to understand. And no matter what we did - we covered the house up, made it look brand new, but what do you do with those memories? They're scarred.
Clinton Sipes, ex-Klansman: "Once you've been attacked based on your race or your sexual preference, you're scarred for life. And there are many people that I have affected that way. There are many people who will never forget my face."
[The Clinton Sipes Story]
The harassment and intimidation continued. During the services of the small African Methodist Episcopal Wayman Chapel, racist skinheads came into the church and stood in the back, with threatening postures. In response, people from different races and religious backgrounds began attending services at the church to support the congregation.
Reverend Bob Freeman: "Denomination didn't count, ethnic background didn't count, it was just that we were one people all together. And they did rally round us letting them know that hey, if you bite one, you bite us all."
Finally, things turned violent. A piece of cinder block was thrown through the window of Isaac Schnitzer's bedroom where he had placed a menorah in celebration of the Jewish holiday, Hanukkah. Tammie and Brian Schnitzer were active in the human rights community and asked the newspaper to make this incident front page news so that others could understand what it was like to be Jewish. In response, the local newspaper, The Billings Gazette, printed a full-page picture a of menorah and urged citizens to put them up in their homes and businesses.
Gary Svee, Billings Gazette editor: "I guess it was a question of looking for an image to put this together. During the second World War, the Danish King is reputed to have come out after the Jewish community was forced to wear stars by the Nazi occupiers, that he was reported to have come out with a yellow star too."
Hundreds of people responded by placing the pictures of menorahs in their windows. Bricks were 
thrown through the windows of a school, and into two churches that had put the menorahs up. Residents of several homes displaying menorahs received late night calls from individuals making anti-Semitic comments and telling them to go outside and look at their cars, which had all been vandalized. But this town did not give up. Police Chief Wayne Inman urged more and more citizens to put up the menorahs. "Visible signs of support for the Jewish community have to increase, not decrease. For every vandalism that is made, I hope that 10 other people put menorahs in their windows."
By the end of December, more than 10,000 people in Billings, Montana had menorahs in their windows.
Tammie Schnitzer: "So, I would like to have thought that if this had happened to my Native American community, they would have put up a Native American symbol in their window, if it happened to the gay and lesbian community they would put up a pink triangle. I would like to think they would have done that."
[The Tammie Schnitzer Story]
Uri Barnea: "It's not an empty symbol. If it's not an empty gesture, then there is hope."
The Wayne Inman story
Before coming to Billings, Montana, Inman served as a police officer in Portland, Oregon. While he was there, in 1988, an Ethiopian student, Mulageta Seraw, was beaten to death with a baseball bat. Three men with ties to a white supremacist organization, The Aryan Nation, were charged with his murder. When Inman saw the escalating hate crimes in Billings, he was not willing to stand by and wait for more violent acts to occur.
"Over time the acts of these hate groups, in particular the skinheads and the Aryan Nation, resulted in the death of a black man, for no other reason except that man was black. That was the wake-up call for the city of Portland. Now, based on that experience, I knew a community can respond and doesn't have to wait until there's a serious act like a death before everybody says Not In Our Town."
The Clinton Sipes story
From the time he was 14, until he was 21, Clinton Sipes was an ardent and violent racist. Sipes moved to Billings, Montana from Northern California. He says he's no longer a white supremacist. After years in prison and a lot of soul searching, he is now trying to make up for everything he did. When he saw the hate crimes begin in Billings, he decided to help the local police and alert the community to the danger of hate crimes.
Excerpts from the interview with Clinton Sipes:
Sipes talks about his experience in prison. Authorities feared he might stir up racial activity and placed him in isolation.
"I was put in isolation, administrative segregation. I had a lot of time to think about things. I was burning crosses, I was putting toothpaste on the wall and putting toilet paper on it and lighting on fire and burning crosses into the paint of the wall. I didn't have anything in my cell to keep me occupied so I had a lot of time to think.
They assigned me a Black counselor who naturally didn't believe in my beliefs and we didn't get along from the very beginning but the thing that overshadowed was the love that he carried and the respect that he had for humankind. He respected me as a person and a human being and he saw through the hate and always treated me with respect.
I really had no intentions of changing, but the two days before I left he came up to my cell and said through the glass window. 'You know its nothing personal all of the problems we've had together, I know you're not going to change, but I wish you the best anyway' and then left.
I tried to envision life differently. I started feeling some remorse. I started thinking about some of the victims. Some of the people that I affected and how I had affected them and how I was being affected. I felt a lot of pain, a lot of misery. I wasn't happy. I had no direction in my life. I was tired of hurting."
Clinton responds to a question about how dangerous, if at all, these people and these groups really are.
"Yeah, there's definitely a danger, because these people have no respect for other human beings outside of their own race. People say that the Klan's changed. The Klan's changed its face and its tactic so many times over its history, but it always had a history, even to the current day, the Ku Klux Klan is a violent organization.
It's lynched Blacks, hundreds and thousands of Blacks over its hundred -year history. There's no way you can deny that or say that it's not something to fear or something to be afraid of, something not to be concerned about. These people aren't here because they're our friends and our neighbors- they're here to get rid of people they don't want."
Sipes spoke openly about his own involvement in racist activity.
"I was very violent. It only takes a small handful of people like the person that I was, when I was involved, to do a lot of damage to a lot of different people.
During the time I was involved, there was an operation going on, it was an underground operation called operation warlord. The goal was to form white youth gangs called wolf packs, and you'd have four or five or as many as thirteen people. A group of people go out on a nightly basis and assault, intimidate, harass minorities and gays and homosexuals. We'd go up to San Francisco a couple of times a month and assault people and there're people that have been ran over. So it's been pretty brutal, my involvement, but it all started out just putting posters up.
There's hundreds of white supremacists, active white supremacists throughout the world. We have to remember - I know this is brought up a lot- we have to remember how many supporters individuals like Adolph Hitler started out with just a handful."
Sipes on Martin Luther King
"The house I grew up in, when MLK was mentioned on TV, there's a great human being, it was there's that agitator, that problem-maker. All I ever heard was bad things about MLK. I always listened to his speeches, and I always thought, outside of being white supremacist and being involved with the organizations I was involved with, I felt that he wasn't that bad of a person, just basically crying out for civil rights.
I envisioned what it would be like to live like him...when I was in prison I tried to envision what it would be like to love someone, have a black friend. I read his writings, looked to him for inspiration."
Clinton spoke about why he thought he came to adopt racist beliefs
"It's hard to know the right thing to do when you've got no education, no vocational training and you've got small support. I grew up in a predominantly white area. My grandfather was involved with the KKK in the 30's. That's when I first experienced any white supremacist activities, when I visited my grandfather in Galveston, TX when they were having all the problems with the fishermen, the Vietnamese.
I think if someone had come and told me, tried to teach me some things about people, I might have felt differently. I wouldn't have been so angry, but no one ever did. The things I was involved with, I should have been in prison for the rest of my life. All I can do is tell people of my experience and hopefully people will listen."
The Tammie Schnitzer story
Tammie Schnitzer is a third generation Billings native who grew up Lutheran, married and converted to Judaism. She met her husband Brian, a physician, when he moved from Virginia to Montana to work with the Indian Health Service. She speaks about the quality of life before and after being the target of prejudice.
"I met my husband 14 years ago and he sat me down after a few days and said that there was something he had to confess to me, and I couldn't imagine what it was going to be about. That's when he confessed that he was Jewish. I thought it was so strange that he felt like he needed to confess that he was Jewish. To confess that I was Lutheran would just have been absurd. Maybe because I converted, it was easier for me to take a stance because I knew what it was like to be in Billings, Montana and not being Jewish. I knew what that quality of life was all about and I wanted that same life for my kids."