Youths in costumes appearing like Klansmen spark concern after they are caught on camera

Images of individuals wearing white sheets and pointy hats at the doorstep of a Spokane County home circulated across the internet last weekend. An outfit reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, the local NAACP has pointed to the incident as evidence of racism being very much alive in Spokane.

“While we do not know the context of this picture, anyone who feels compelled to wear what appears to be a KKK costume is either aligning themselves with bigotry or attempting to intimidate,” NAACP Spokane President Lisa Gardner said in a statement Sunday.

Taken from home surveillance video, the images show three figures wearing white sheets with eyes cut out over the top of blue jeans. Underneath the white cloak appears to be a pointed hat – giving the costume a notable resemblance to the infamous robes of the Ku Klux Klan.

The screenshots were initially posted to the Colbert WA Community Group Facebook page by group moderator Jay Pounder.

“This took place near Mt. Spokane high school near Maverik in the past 30 minutes to a good friend of ours,” Pounder wrote. “I’d like to know if someone is missing bedsheets. We need to chat with these young men.”

According to Gardner, the NAACP addressed the incident to make sure the community is aware this conduct is going on in Spokane.

“It is a community safety issue at this point,” she said. “While we don’t know the context of actually why they’re in that costume, it’s still very alarming, and it’s triggering, especially to those who are Black Americans.”

The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the incident occurred last week at a home in north Mead. The individuals seen in the video came up to the door at approximately 11:30 p.m., rang the doorbell and ran away before the door was answered.

The homeowners reported the incident at the time, and the Sheriff’s Office is investigating what occurred. But Spokane County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Mark Gregory said there is “nothing to indicate” the individuals were part of any organized group or that the incident had any racial motivation. Everyone living at the home is white, he added.

“It appears to be nothing more than kids being dumb,” Gregory said. “Still, we very much understand the concern of many community members.”

The Sheriff’s Office has not identified the individuals in the video.

The Ku Klux Klan formed after the Civil War and gained considerable power in multiple periods of American history. Its members were responsible for lynchings, assassinations, bombings and other acts of violence meant to intimidate African Americans and other groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. It has targeted Blacks, Jews, Catholics and others. A bomb placed by the KKK at a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 killed four Black girls.

The group’s popularity was not limited to the South. In Spokane, for instance, news reports in 1924 indicated there were nearly 1,000 local members of the group when the KKK imperial wizard came to town to give a speech. The year before, 400 KKK members stood in front of a burning cross in Five Mile just north of Spokane and made a pledge “to work for the supremacy of the white race.”

Even if the youths were ignorant of history of the KKK, Gardner said Spokane should take the incident seriously.

“We have people in this community that take things like this lightly, and they shouldn’t,” she said. “We have those in this community who are in denial of racism. They are in denial that we have racism that lives among us. These are the symbols of that racism. The symbol of that white sheet screams racism. It screams intimidation. We’re not going to put a blind eye to it.”

Gardner also noted that she reached out to Sheriff John Nowels about this incident.

“I think at the county there’s a belief that there is no racial undertone by these kids or these young men in the hoods. But again, as someone of color when you see that, it is a trigger and it is intimidating,” she said.

Pounder declined to be interview by The Spokesman-Review. In a video posted to Facebook, Pounder said he wrote the original post for the perpetrators to “understand the seriousness of the implication” of their costume.

“Let’s make sure that the young people who did this do get brought to justice,” he said. “But there is no criminality here. I want to repeat. There is no crime in this. These were people trying to scare a family – a white family in our community.”