High Times For Hate Crime

Reports Show Hate Groups, Attacks on the Rise Under Trump.

- Chandra Thomas Whitfield

SIXTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD NORRIS COOLEY, an African-American man, was working in the garage of his Spokane, Washington, home one Sunday night when, investigators say, two White men emerged from a neighboring home and began shouting racial slurs at him. It is also alleged the men punched Cooley in the face and pressed a gun to his nose in the attack last October before peppering his home with more than a half dozen gunshots. Self-described White supremacist Jason Cooper, 32, and Jason Pritchard, 36, both of Spokane, pleaded not guilty to charges including first-degree assault and malicious harassment.

Pastor Kenneth McNeil of the historically Black Willow Grove Baptist Church in the Waco, Texas, area, says he arrived one morning last August to find a broken door and window, a ransacked office and a swastika with the words “Trump” and “Satan” scribbled in ketchup and mustard on the floor of the fellowship hall where Bible study is held.

About five months earlier, avowed White supremacist James Harris Jackson, an Army veteran, was arrested and charged with murder as an act of terrorism after he jabbed a sword with an 18-inch blade into the chest and back of Timothy Caughman, 66, killing the beloved autograph collector and trash recycler on a crowded New York City street. Jackson told investigators he’d traveled there from Baltimore in pursuit of media attention and to get a “rush” from murdering “as many Black men as possible.”