FREEPORT — Residents of South Freeport Road awoke Monday morning to find Ku Klux Klan brochures littering their driveways.
Augusta Police Chief Robert Gregoire told the Kennebec Journal that similar Ku Klux Klan fliers were found in driveways and on building porches in an Augusta neighborhood Monday morning
Jack May, who has lived near the center of South Freeport village for six years, went for a run at 6:30 a.m. and saw the flyers, folded and enclosed with pebbles in Ziploc bags, in a number of driveways along his route. He went home and called the police.
The single-page, multi-colored flyer announces a Ku Klux Klan neighborhood watch and encourages people to call a “24-hour Klanline.”
“You can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake!” the flyer states. “Are there troubles in your neighborhood? Contact the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan today!”
May said he was shocked when he saw what the flyers said, and said he’s never seen anything like them in Freeport.
“Everyone knows everyone in this town,” he said. “It’s a very small town, a very sweet town.”
A call to the toll-free number is answered by a message stating that the group is “unapologetically committed to the interests and values of the white race” and “determined to maintain and enrich our cultural and racial heritage … (the organization) is simply a movement of white people to uphold the highest standards of western Christian civilization.”
Callers are asked to press different keys to get a return phone call, “check on the status of (their) application” or receive an information packet.
A dozen houses down South Freeport Road, Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon drove out of her driveway Monday morning and didn’t see flyers — but saw a number of Freeport police cars at the ends of driveways. When she drove home a few minutes later, she saw the police at houses farther down the road, she said Monday.
Gideon said she was disturbed and angry about the flyers, but also determined.
“I and my neighbors and fellow Freeporters, at least, because I don’t know where else this has landed, will absolutely stand together and say that there is no place for these people anywhere in our community,” she said. “The values they represent on that flyer or their voicemail is not ones any of us share and that we will absolutely, loudly drive them away.”
After May called police, Freeport officers collected flyers from 12 to 15 driveways along South Freeport Road and South Street, where the road continues into downtown Freeport, according to Freeport Police Chief Susan Nourse.
“We went and collected them because they were reported to us as being offensive,” she said. “It’s something we wouldn’t want left at the end of driveways — it’s not like they were delivered to a residence, from the way they were packaged.”
But aside from littering, Nourse said the flyers themselves aren’t illegal.
“It’s an informational flyer, so it’s letting people know what the phone number is and that the organization exists,” she said.
Still, Nourse said anyone who found these or any flyers and feels threatened by them should call Freeport police.
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