Flag fuels tensions in Maplewood (MN)
9/21/2015
by LAURA HAYES and CHRIS ROGERS
... They gathered at Winona's Maplewood Townhomes, where, late last month, Ryan Kauten, an 18-year-old white man from small rural town of Altura, was assaulted after hitting an African-American child with his truck. Kauten's girlfriend, a minor, lives in Maplewood, and he often came there — a public housing development with a large population of black families in the predominantly white city of Winona — with a Confederate battle flag flapping proudly from the back of his truck ...
Being told to stop may have made those young men more determined to show off the flag. Jacob Moore had flown it from his pickup truck for around five years. "I don't know if it was because I was angry or if I just wanted to push back and say we weren't backing down," Moore said when asked why he wanted to come to Maplewood and drive around with the flag ...
When asked what he thought when he heard black people say they felt angered or threatened by the flag, Kauten responded, "You know I think they are more racist than white people. I don't have any problem with the black people who lived out there … and I would have had no problem with taking it down if they asked me to take it down" ...
Moore came back to Maplewood on Thursday with a petition instead of a Southern flag. He talked to residents and collected signatures on a sheet of notebook paper, asking the City Council to install speed bumps. When asked why he was going around with the petition, he said, "I was hurting them, and I thought I could maybe push it to the right" ...
http://www.winonapost.com/Article/ArticleID/45778/Flag-fuels-tensions-in-Maplewood
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