NEW SMYRNA BEACH -- Volusia County Chair Jason davis has no doubt the dropping of recruitment flyers in New Smyrna Beach's historically African-American Westside community was a deliberate act and as such sees it as a hate crime.
And although New Smyrna Beach police dismissed it as nothing more than freedom of speech, the US. Justice Department is now actively investigating the Nov. 12 incident.
"Here we are in the 21st century and I'm appalled this is happening in my county," said Davis, the first-year chairman and head of Volusia County government, who said wants no part of the divisiveness of the Ku Klux Klan and its history of lynchings, church bombings and bigotry, not just of blacks, but those of the Jewish and Catholic faiths.
And Davis, for one, believes the actions of the KKK in New Smyrna Beach were purposeful." "This was deliberate targeting and I believe a hate crime was committed," Davis told Headline Surfer®. "I am pleased the Justice Department is going to investigate."
Pator Lorenzo Laws of the Allen Chapel AME Church told his congregation during the Sunday sermon that the Justice Department's Miami field office called him after reading about the Ku Klux Klan incident in online media reports from Headline Surfer® and other press coverage.
News of the KKK has since mushroomed to postings and continuing to trend around the world through press and social media sources.
Headline Surfer® was second behind FOX 35-TV Orlando in the initial reporting and the 24/7 internet newspaper broke the story on the Justice Department angle in a visit to the Allen AME church on Sunday, the only media outlet to follow through on the story.
The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported on the story the day after the initial round of media reports and hasn't written anything since. The newspaper's longtime Southeast Volusia cops reporter, Mark I. Johnson, was among five staffers -- including a photographer and two veteran news editors -- the Daytona Beach newspaper jettisoned earlier this month.
And while other local and area politicians have been slow to react, Davis, the county chair, who served his country in 101st Airborne during Dessert Storm and was a recipient of the Bronze Star for Valor, was adamant "there's no place in our society for the KKK.."
Do they have the right of free speech?" Davis asked rhetorically, answering, "Yes, but not under these circumstances. If they're recruiting new members and the flyers are being left in African-American front yards, then that's targeting -- as far as I'm concerned that's harassment."
Davis, who lives in neighboring Edgewater, said, there's no way anyone would "tolerate that where I live so why should this be any different? I can't speak as to why other officials aren't speaking up; you'll have to ask them. but I think the more the better in telling them they are not wanted here -- not today, not tomorrow, not ever."
County Councilwoman Deborah Denys, whose district 3 seat incldes New Smyrna Beach, Edgewater, Oak Hill and part of Port Orange, has not returned calls or messages for comment.
Neither has New Smyrna Beach Mayor Adam Barringer, who also is a member of the all-white, all-male Anglers Club, established in 1913, with a longstanding lease for exclusive rights to waterfront acreage on the Intracoastal Waterway, including a clubhouse and docking with 46 boat slips. The Anglers pay a paltry $25 a year.
Barringer, a Republican, was hosting a fundraiser Tuesday night for Denys' 2014 re-election campaign at his So Napa Restaurant, the same place where he hosted a private retirement a year ago this month for Deny's opponent in the 2012 general election, former longtime City Commissioner Jim Hathaway, a Democrat. That party led to state ethics charges filed against the mayor in part for being the host and beceause a city credit card was used to pick up the tab for nerly four dozen guests.
And though Volusia County Republican Party Chairman Tony Ledbetter was getting fellow GOP and Christian-fundamentalist supporters lined up for a showdown for that same afternoon opposed to a high school history book that has a chapter devoted to Islam, he took the time several days earlier to put out a flyer of his own encouraging Republican supporters to attend Denys' campaign fundraiser in New Smyrna Beach. Ledbetter has said nothing of the KKK incident.
Davis is the only public official to speak out against the Klan flyers. Even on her Facebook page, Denys put up gratuitous photos and descriptions of an installation of officers at a Southeast Volusia Chamber of Commerce party and of the recent George Clooney movie-scene shoot in New Smyrna Beach, but she's avoided the KKK situation altogether.
Messages left for Commissioner and recently-appointed Vice Mayor Jason McGuirk, who made himself available for several photo ops with the Orlando TV stations and a profile story in the News-Journal with his mother's Dairy Queen included in the shoot, have gone unanswered rewgarding the KKK, as have messages left with fellow Commissioners Judy Reiker, Jack Grasty and Kirk Jones.
The commission doesn't have a black or other minority member.
About a dozen flyers placed in plastic baggies and weighted down with fishing weights and tossed onto lawns in the vicinity of the Allen Chapel AME church.
An elderly white woman on the beachside also received a flyer, New Smyrna Beach police said, though the only other reports were in the Westside, afency spokesman Master Sgt. Eugene Griffith said, acknowledging his agency took the one on the beachside and three others on the Westside.
Griffirh said he understands more flyers were dropped in the Westside, but added though police "dislike" the message of the klan, it is nonetheless coonsidered free speech and simply leaving the flyers is not a crime.
The historic Westside had segregated schools through 1969 and until several years earlier, was limited to swimming at Bethune Beach south of the New Smyrna Beach city limits, the dsesignated beach countywide for blacks.
Timothy Washington, a Westside resident who turned his flyer into the cops, said he's not surprised by the lack of concern or outrage shown by the mayor and other local officials. "Nothing has really changed," Washington said. "I'm not surprised. It's always been that way."