This posed a dilemma for the Transportation board -- pitting first amendment rights vs seeming to endorse a KKK effort, albeit ostensibly one of good citizenship. The KKK has threatened to seek help from the ACLU and sue on grounds of free speech and discrimination.
The Board has nevertheless turned down the request. Today, the AJC printed the following letter from me to the editor:
Here would have been a way out of the dilemma arising from the KKK's application to participate in the Adopt-A-Highway project ("KKK group seeks Adopt-A-Highway OK," ajc.com, June 11). It honors first amendment rights and gives the KKK a chance to implicitly recant its racist past.I don't claim credit for the idea, which I first heard about when Missouri faced a similar dilemma with the KKK several years ago. I'm not sure of the outcome there. There is a Rosa Parks Highway in Missouri, but it doesn't say whether the KKK sponsors its cleanup.
Allow the group to adopt this stretch of highway and rename it something like the Martin Luther King, Jr. Parkway or the Rosa Parks Highway. Consider the image of the KKK cleaning up a road named for an African-American civil rights icon.
A spokesman for the KKK group said, "We just want to clean up the doggone road. We're not going to be out there in our robes." But Rep. Tyrone Brooks, head of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials urged rejection of the application, claiming that it would make the state complicit in helping "a domestic terrorist group" to rehabilitate its name and build membership.
This probably won't be the last we've heard of this. Look for a court case, which the ACLU will likely join.
Ralph
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