Seth Grossman tried to bridge the gap created between him and the second district’s black communities at a NAACP meeting in Millville on Tuesday, but at the end of a mostly civil meeting, tempers flared as the Republican congressional candidate faced renewed allegations of racism.

While his opening speech was met with respectful attention, Grossman encountered some hurdles when he began taking questions from the meetings attendees.

The clear moment of contention came near the end of a meeting, when a white man the chapter president said she had never seen before launched into a verbal attack and called for Grossman to rescind his positions claiming that the Ku Klux Klan was never active in New Jersey.

“No, your history is fake and you’ve been brainwashed with every Hollywood movie, every media thing, the crap they’re teaching in schools, and I know it because I had to teach at the college. It’s a false thing,” Grossman said. “Remember, the KKK was dead after the Civil War.”

The hate group has existed in various forms since 1865 and continues to exist today. KKK fliers were distributed in towns in Cumberland County in 2015, and in Burlington County in 2017.

Later in the meeting, Grossman moderated those comments, saying that the hate group was not as active in New Jersey as it was elsewhere.

“The KKK, yeah they burned a cross in Egg Harbor Township, and yeah they went out to Bridgeton, but they never had any real following in New Jersey,” Grossman said.

He also pointed a finger at Democrats over the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the KKK, claiming the party orchestrated the creation of the movie to stop black voters from siding with the Republican party.

“The Racism was revived by Democrats because they didn’t like blacks voting Republican, and there was probably the most horrible, racist movie ever created,” Grossman said. “In fact, this movie was so effective that the Nazi Joseph Goebbels actually watched that movie demonizing blacks, called Birth of a Nation, and he made a movie just like it to demonize Jews in 1940.”

Unfortunately for Grossman, the tough moments didn’t end there.

At one point, he claimed that segregated buses and water fountains did not exist in the state and was immediately interrupted by an elderly NAACP member who went to a segregated school

“I guarantee you nobody here had to sit in the back of a bus, a public service bus, in New Jersey,” Grossman said.

The woman, Ella Boykin, 75, said she attended a segregated school in Quinton Township in 1947. In his response, Grossman said he was born in 1949.

Grossman was also put in the uncomfortable position of defending President Donald Trump in front of a crowd that largely viewed the latter unfavorably or disavowing the president and upending a key part of his campaign platform.

“Sometimes in life, good people do very bad things and bad people do very good things,” Grossman said. “What I’m saying right now is Donald Trump for whatever – and I’m not going to defend his personal lifestyle or even his character – but at this moment in time, when no one else was stepping forward, he stepped forward.”

Grossman named many of Trump’s policies as priorities of his own, including a pledge to shield the president from impeachment proceedings in the House as a result of the special counsel investigation into collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

After the meeting, Grossman told the New Jersey Globe that he attended the event at the invitation of a friend to start a conversation on race that he saw as being continually put off by political leaders.

“You can’t undo 50 years of problems in one night,” Grossman said. “But, I wanted to begin the process.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated with further comment from Grossman at 4:23 p.m. on Aug. 22.