About 700 people gathered May 20 at the Lancaster County Courthouse to speak out for equality while the Ku Klux Klan was preparing to burn a cross a few miles away.
The East Coast Knights of the Invisible Empire announced on its website and on a forum called Stormfront that it would hold “a family event” near Quarryville and promised to burn a 40-foot-tall cross.
“This is going to be one of the biggest cross-lightings in a long time,” the announcement said.
The event was to be by invitation only, and it was not clear how many KKK families might have attended.
Lancaster has had previous experience with the Klan — a march down Queen Street in the center of town in 1991 and a march that fizzled in 2001.
With its obsession with white people, the Klan may also have been drawn to a place that is known as the refugee capital of America. The Church World Service Lancaster has helped settle 1,300 refugees since 2013 and has been featured in The New York Times and on the BBC. Nobel-recipient Malala Yousafzai visited Lancaster in April to honor the city for its efforts.
The Saturday event was organized by the Lancaster Chapter of the NAACP and included a wide variety of organizations, including the Music For Everyone Community Chorus, which specializes in world music.
Mark Stoner of the Lancaster Human Relations Commission told the crowd that, when Lancaster County defunded its Human Relations Commission in 2000, he predicted “that this day would come.” But he said he was very encouraged by what he saw Saturday on the courthouse steps.
Cheryl De Marco of the Citizens’ Immigration and Refugee Action Committee turned around the language of anti-immigration activists, saying to the Klansmen, “Go back where you came from. You are not welcome here.”
And Shayna Watson, chair of religious affairs for the Lancaster chapter of the NAACP, pledged, “This is not the last public witness we will have,” and she led the crowd in singing, “I’m gonna keep on a walkin’, keep on a talkin’, gonna build a brand new world.”