Tony Rehagen is a freelance writer based in St. Louis, Missouri.

It was mid-August 2017, days after white supremacists had flocked to Charlottesville, when Aaron Lawlor learned that the same far-right hate that had boiled over in Virginia was supposedly lurking in his quiet corner of northern Illinois. The country seemed fixated on exposing where these tiki torch-toting bigots might be hiding, so the Chicago Tribune ran a piece citing a national list of hate groups. Illinois had 32 of them: an anti-gay group in Naperville, an anti-Muslim outfit in Des Plaines and something called the White Boy Society that seemed to be all over the state. And right there among them, was Gurnee, marked with its own white hood in recognition of the chapter of the Ku Klux Klan said to be based there.

Gurnee seemed like an unlikely location for this kind of activity. A well-to-do suburb of some 30,000 people, the town is bisected by Interstate 94, which brings traffic north 40 miles from Chicago and south 50 miles from Milwaukee. Lake County, in which Gurnee sits, has the highest median family income in the state. The town is the home of Six Flags Great America amusement park and the Gurnee Mills indoor shopping mall, anchored by its 133,000-square-foot Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World store. Key Lime Cove, a tacky Florida Keys-inspired indoor water resort recently closed and is due to reopen this summer as something called the Great Wolf Lodge. Because of its prime location on Lake Michigan, the area draws more than 26 million visitors who spend $1.3 billion annually.


In eight years on the Lake County board , Lawlor could not remember any signs of KKK activity in Gurnee—no crosses burned, no graffiti, and certainly no official Klan demonstrations, rallies, speeches or protests. Not so much as a nasty flier. In fact, in February, Lawlor had helped put together a county-wide summit promoting unity and tolerance. It was an attempt to tamp down the uptick of hate speech and intimidation against the local Latino and Muslim population in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. The health department had put up signs in English and Spanish welcoming people of all races, religions and sexual orientations. And Lawlor himself had given a speech in which he revealed that he is gay. “One of my primary focuses as a board chair and an openly gay county official, is that we are not only seen as an open place, but that we are an open place,” he says. “We’ve tried to build the narrative that when you are Latino, black, Muslim, whatever…you are welcome here.”

Now, however, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the self-styled national watchdog for hate groups, had bestowed upon Gurnee the kind of label that makes a small-town official like Lawlor wake up in a cold sweat. Towns typically earn their reputations as harbors for hate groups in very public ways. Perhaps they’re unlucky enough to be the place the Klan decides to march and someone dies (see: Charlottesville) or they’re Topeka, Kansas, a more or less normal city that happens to be the hometown of a media-trolling bigot like Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church. But for a handful of towns like Gurnee, designation as one of the 917 locales on SPLC’s Hate Map comes without warning, and almost without explanation.

Worried not only about the bad publicity but also that Gurnee might actually become a magnet for white supremacists, Lawlor got on the phone with the police chief, who had read the same story. He had his staff scour their records for evidence of Klan presence. “If it exists, it’s something we need to know about from a public safety standpoint,” says Gurnee police chief Kevin Woodside. “From a law enforcement perspective, we wanted to be sure there wasn’t somebody who posed some sort of risk.”

“If it exists, it’s something we need to know about from a public safety standpoint,” says Gurnee police chief Kevin Woodside. “From a law enforcement perspective, we wanted to be sure there wasn’t somebody who posed some sort of risk.” | Darren Hauck for Politico Magazine

They found nothing, so Woodside and village mayor Kristina Kovarik contacted the SPLC directly. They figured that this was a mistake, something that could be easily remedied. The SPLC’s response was polite, but insistent. “I know it is disturbing to find hate groups in your community,” the email read, “but I don’t think that should be seen as a reflection of what I am sure is a wonderful community.” But the map was only updated once a year, they said, call back in January.

Gurnee was not content to sit and wait. Instead, city and county officials embarked on a months-long campaign to restore the town’s good name. And what they found is that it’s a lot easier to get on that map that it is to get off.

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In many respects, the SPLC wrote the book on public shaming of hate groups. Before it was founded in 1971, there was no single entity that catalogued the hundreds of hatemongers across the country who seemed to be popping up in direct response to the gains of the civil rights movement. In the early 1980s, the SPLC created Klanwatch, an attempt to monitor the activity of the nation’s oldest and most notorious hate group. The effort was rebranded as the Intelligence Project in 1998, when the mission expanded to include other hate organizations—neo-Nazis, skinheads, white nationalists, neo-Confederates and even black separatists. The following year, the SPLC released its first annual directory of hate groups, classified by affiliation, and as technology evolved, these groups were plotted out on the interactive online Hate Map, which is easily sortable by affiliation and by state. (If you’re wondering, Indiana apparently has more hate groups than Mississippi, and Alabama isn’t the heartland of hate, it’s California.)

But being first poses its own challenges in terms of gathering data. There is no federal law enforcement database for hate crimes or official government registry for branding groups, people or locations as agents of discrimination. And there’s really only one other major private group that does similar work—the Anti-Defamation League, which focuses on anti-Semitic groups. So this means the SPLC is more or less on its own when it comes to research and that means its methods are necessarily somewhat scattershot. According to Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project, she and her team comb news clippings, blogs, and TV news; publications of the groups themselves; online bulletin boards and chat groups like white nationalist “Stormfront” and the neo-Nazi “Daily Stormer,” looking for the slightest mentions of a new chapter here or a leader or activist who may have moved there. They contact law enforcement and field inquiries and reports from cops in towns all across the country. And they send their own five or six reporters into the field to interview and research for the SPLC’s Hate Watch blog, their online profiles of prominent groups and leaders, and their magazine, Intelligence Report. “We get to know a lot of the leaders of these organizations,” says Beirich. “Sometimes, they’ll just tell us where their people are.” In fact, Beirich says that sometimes smaller groups seeking legitimacy literally beg to be included on the list—apparently, any publicity is good publicity.

Given the low threshold for inclusion on the list, perhaps it is not so surprising that it would on occasion pull in some towns with otherwise unblemished reputations. In 2004, for instance, Olathe, Colorado, a mountain town of 1,600, earned a dreaded white hood icon because a self-proclaimed “international imperial wizard” from Indiana told a Denver newspaper that a chapter in Olathe, “a little Klan klavern,” had asked him to come and speak. The group couldn’t afford to pay his expenses, he explained. Neither he nor any of the town officials interviewed for the newspaper story could name any of the members. Nevertheless, Olathe stayed on SPLC’s list for three years. Last year, Amana, Iowa, part of the Amana Colonies—founded in the 1850s by Pietists escaping persecution in their native Germany for their Reformist Lutheran beliefs, and which are now on the National Register of Historic Places—earned its place on the hate map. Someone at the SPLC spotted a chat thread on the Daily Stormer, in which someone with the screen name “Concerned Troll” had proposed a neo-Nazi “book club” meeting in an Amana café. No one in Amana was able to confirm to the SPLC whether or not the meeting actually took place, but that was enough to earn the corn-carpeted state its only swastika.

Darren Hauck for Politico Magazine

Gurnee’s connection to the alt-right was almost as tenuous as Amana’s. Back in 1992, a fight between some black and white students at a local high school had climaxed with someone burning KKK into the grass of the football field. But no one had suggested that a Klan chapter was at work there. Then, in November 2016, someone claiming to be an “exalted cyclops” of an Illinois klavern posted on a KKK website. The person listed his name and an address of simply Gurnee, IL, 60031, not even enough information to get a letter properly delivered. A personal Gmail address was also provided. According to Beirich, the SPLC sent an email to the address asking how they could get involved with the group, what they’ve been up to, and requesting more contact information. In this case, the SPLC received a reply. “We obviously try to verify their existence in other ways, too,” says Beirich. “Through press reports or online postings or through law enforcement contacts.” With Gurnee, the email reply was sufficient, and the village was fitted with its white hood.

The Gurnee Police Department was less than convinced by SPLC’s investigation. They were unable to find anyone by that name living in Gurnee and unable to find any previous address attached to that name. They checked with the Illinois Terrorism Task Force and found no evidence of previous messages or communication from or to Gurnee associated with that name.

“We looked into it and found no basis,” says Woodside, the police chief. “We were not able to substantiate that that person even existed. We told the SPLC we believed it to be erroneous information.” In other words, if they were investigating this as a crime, the police would have closed the case for lack of evidence.



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Beirich has been working with the Intelligence Project since 1999. She stands by the SPLC methodology and the results it yields. If anything, she worries that the Hate Map is not extensive enough. “We know our map underreports this data,” she says. “These people hide in the shadows.”

Law enforcement relies on this data, often calling with questions about various organizations and people. The SPLC magazine goes to 55,000 law enforcement agencies. And the SPLC puts on training for agencies all over the U.S., in which they highlight local groups that they consider particularly dangerous. “Federal law enforcement can’t continuously monitor what appear to be dangerous groups because of restrictions put on them,” says Beirich. “So when they open a file, they may not know that much about an organization.” All of that’s why, she says, the SPLC is reluctant to change the results under any circumstances. In her nearly two decades working on the list, she can only remember three towns ever having actually challenged their spots on the map.

Olathe police protested the town’s white hood in 2006, saying they found no signs of the Klan in the tiny town, but SPLC held firm, at least for a while. In 2007, SPLC quietly dropped Olathe from the map; Beirich says it’s likely that whatever KKK activity had been reported eventually stopped or fallen off the radar and the following year’s report reflected that cessation. “If the chapter doesn’t exist, we simply don’t activate them, which is what looks like happened here,” says Beirich. “There is a lot of churn in the list year to year—about a third of chapters disappear which shows how relatively unstable this movement is as people move, or change groups, or organizations just fall apart.”

Nestled on the plains of central Iowa, Amana is famous for its winter holiday festivals, particularly Christmas, when the quaint villages are decked in lights and garland. The SPLC knew it for its Nazi book club, which it spotlighted in late 2016. When first contacted by POLITICO Magazine in December 2017, Dave Rettig, executive director of the Amana Colonies Convention and Visitors Bureau, was preparing to welcome the yuletide tourists and not eager to discuss the previous winter’s lump of coal from the SPLC. “It was not the most wonderful time of the year,” he said, declining further comment. Perhaps it was that humbug attitude that stirred the SPLC to come as close as it ever had to immediately removing a name from the Hate Map in response to Amana’s complaint. Beirich says her team decided that the Nazi book club did in fact meet in Amana because the post on the “Daily Stormer” said so, but they allowed that they couldn’t be certain the participants were actually from Amana. So it came up with a solution: The SPLC expanded the designation on the map to include all of Iowa, making the group a state-level chapter without pinpointing the colonies. In effect, the remedy was to make a sweeping generalization based on no new information.

As for Gurnee, Beirich says nothing could be done. “Even though the police couldn’t locate them doesn’t mean that they’re not there,” she says. “If we were to remove all the communities that hate the fact that there’s a hate group in their town, we wouldn’t be providing the data.” The SPLC told Gurnee to wait until next year, to see if there was any Klan activity in, or referring to their village, and hope their white hood icon would simply fall off the map. Basically, they had to wait for nothing to happen, which city officials would argue was the case already.

None of this is to say that either Beirich or anyone at the SPLC was unmoved by these towns’ pleas. In fact, after Gurnee and Amana came forward last year, the Intelligence Project expanded its online explanation of the methodology behind the annual Hate Map. “This list was compiled using hate group publications and websites, citizen and law enforcement reports, field sources and news reports,” the disclaimer now reads below the map. For her part, Beirich feels emboldened by the passionate response of city and county officials who don’t want to be associated with these nefarious groups. She says Gurnee’s reaction to being on the map showed why it’s not, in fact, a bastion of hate. “The press they’ve created by saying they are against hate, is fantastic from my perspective. County officials saying on the record saying this stuff is bad. You shouldn’t have to hide behind a door to say the time to battle this is now.”

Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2018, in Gurnee Illinois. | Darren Hauck for Politico)

But one wonders why a town should have to defend itself at all if there’s only one person (and a somewhat spectral one at that) who seems to be publicly espousing these hateful ideas. And if one person spewing racist doggerel is all it takes to brand a city, then one might ask how many places in America don’t deserve a Hate Map icon of some sort.

After months of futile appeals to the SPLC, Gurnee officials remained surprisingly well-disposed toward the group, which had done so much to tarnish their town’s reputation. “They are doing important work and one of the few people doing it,” says Woodside. “When we became aware we took it very seriously. And we had a positive, productive conversation about removing it.”

“It isn’t just about getting off a map arbitrarily, we take these things seriously,” says Lawlor. “But we don’t want to be painted unfairly if a group like this does not exist.”

Or maybe they just wanted to avoid further antagonizing the SPLC as the release date approached for the latest version of the map. Based on conversations with SPLC, which said the KKK chapter in question was inactive over the last 12 months, they had reason to believe the town would lose its hood. Last week, the Gurnee Police Department received an email from Beirich. “Gurnee will not be on our hate map for the 2017 calendar year,” it read. “We release the new numbers next week and the new map. I wanted to say that I’ve been so impressed with your community’s commitment to rooting out hate and having a hate free community. If we can help with other issues in any way, please let us know.”

When Lawlor received the forwarded message, he was relieved and more than a little vindicated. But, officially, he’s taking the high road, sort of. “Removing Gurnee from the SPLC Hate Map is an important correction to a devastating error,” he says. “The SPLC's efforts to publish a national hate map are essential to eliminating hate-fueled, domestic terrorist organizations like the KKK… If there was a map identifying communities committed to ending racism, bigotry and hate, Lake County would be on it.”