Noose causes controversy in Quilcene

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It’s been the subject of enough talk in Quilcene for The Leader to receive multiple calls about it, but relatively few folks who live in town wish to speak on the record about the noose that’s hanging in the window of the Whistling Oyster Cafe.

The Whistling Oyster is currently closed for business, and its building houses a number of woodworking projects under construction, but what’s attracted the community’s notice is a noose that’s been hanging since April inside one of the windows that’s facing the road.

Between the cafe building and the home of property owner William Bacchus, a reader-board with plastic letters bears the all-caps message “U S A FREEDOM TRUMP JUSTICE.”

Jefferson County Commissioner Greg Brotherton, who lives in Quilcene and operates one of his businesses there, cited the First Amendment in supporting Bacchus’ freedom to display what he chooses on his property, even as he expressed misgivings about Bacchus’ choices.

“The noose is a racially loaded symbol,” Brotherton said. “I don’t think it should be outlawed, but I do find it personally distasteful.”

While Bacchus declined to comment for this article, he noted that his property had been vandalized, which he believes was an act of protest against the noose.

Jefferson County Sheriff’s Sgt. Andy Pernsteiner confirmed that Bacchus had called in on June 2 to report that, sometime during the night prior, someone vandalized the cafe building with paint.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office has no suspects.

Sheriff Joe Nole added that the sheriff’s office had received roughly half a dozen calls of complaint regarding the noose, on April 8, 9 and 10, as well as May 3.

Nole recalled that the first thing he did was consult the Revised Code of Washington, then contact the Jefferson County Prosecutor’s Office, to ensure he correctly understood how the law applies to such a situation.

“He has a First Amendment right to display it on his private property,” Nole said of the noose. “That being said, I was surprised when I saw it. I don’t approve of it, and I don’t want outsiders who come here to think that this is what our community approves of.”

David Neiwert, a freelance journalist and author based in Seattle, wrote 2017’s “Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump,” and he offered historical context to the noose as a symbol.

Neiwert explained that, in the wake of the Civil War, groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts used lynchings to reinforce the oppression of black people in the South, well into the 1950s.

“In that sense, the South won the Civil War,” Neiwert said. “They lost it on the battlefield, but in the decade or more of reconstruction that followed, they won.”

According to Neiwert, the effect of those lynchings was so profound that it drove black people toward more urban environments, whereas previously they’d been more inclined toward rural farming.

Following release of producer-director D.W. Griffith’s pro-Klan film “Birth of a Nation” in 1915, the late winter through summer of 1919 became known as the “Red Summer” for the hundreds who died in anti-black terrorist attacks in more than three dozen cities.

“This led to the virtual ethnic cleansing of Tulsa in 1921,” Neiwert said. “Nooses became incredibly ominous for black people.”

More recently, Neiwert connected symbols such as the noose with some Trump supporters’ belief that a new civil war is inevitable, and the necessity of lynchings along with it.