May 26, 2019

9 Klan Members Showed Up to Their Ohio Rally. 600 Anti-Racists Came, Too.

A KKK event in Dayton sparked a huge backlash.

Counter protesters seen holding placards as they face a Ku Klux Klan affiliated group at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, May 25, 2019.Megan Jelinger/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

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A branch of the Ku Klux Klan—the Honorable Sacred Knights of Madison, Indiana—planned a rally in Dayton, Ohio, on Saturday. But when the time came to march, only nine supporters of the group showed up downtown, and they were met by 500 to 600 counterprotesters rallying against racism.

City leaders feared a rerun of the tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. But this time the anti-racists massively outnumbered the racists in the city of 140,000 in western Ohio. Opponents of the Klan held signs that read: “You Are Not Welcome Here” and “Injustice Anywhere Is a Threat to Justice Everywhere.”

 

According to Time, one popular sign among local businesses read, “Get your hatin’ out of Dayton”

“This ugly chapter is over, but it means we have to get back to the real work – making sure that no matter what you look like, where you come from, or who you love, that you can have a great life here in Dayton,” Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley tweeted afterwards.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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