Black Preacher To Turn World s Only Klan Museum Into A Racial Healing Community Center
The recently founded Echo Project has raised more $375,000 to renovate and the former KKK meeting place and white supremacist museum.
January 18, 2021 at 4:39 pm
Two South Carolina men have formed an organization to renovate a once well-established place of segregation and white supremacy into a place for racial healing and remembrance.
Officially forming the Echo Project in 2019, Laurens, South Carolina, residents Regan Freeman and the Rev. David Kennedy have so far raised more than $375,000 to transform the historic Echo Theatre, later the Redneck Shop and once known as the World s Only Klan Museum, into a community center that will recognize its racist history while also promoting the fight against racial injustices, according to CNN.
A former White supremacist store and Ku Klux Klan meeting space is being turned into a community center to promote healing
A South Carolina preacher and local resident are turning what once was a Ku Klux Klan meeting place into a community center dedicated to educating and fighting against racial injustice.
Deep in Laurens stands the historic Echo Theater, perched in between diners and cafes bustling with customers and ’50s music that can be heard from the street.
But that building carries a history much darker than the cheerful life that surrounds it.
In 1996, the once segregated movie theater became home to the Redneck Shop, a White supremacist store that sold White nationalist and neo-Nazi paraphernalia, Klans robes and Confederate memorabilia up until its forced closure in 2012.
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Work begins to turn SC racist store into racial harmony site December 31, 2020 at 8:47 am
LAURENS. S.C. (AP) Regan Freeman had spent more than a year organizing a project to tell the story of a Black South Carolina pastor who reached out to Ku Klux Klan members who wanted him dead because of his race.
Freeman thought he knew the story well. Then came a tweet that led to two gray storage tubs of some of the most racist newspapers, flyers, posters, photographs and other material he had ever seen.
That brought Rev. David Kennedy’s struggles as well as his patience, love and caring for all men even those with evil in their hearts into sharper focus for Freeman, who is working to turn what was once a store filled with racist merchandise into a diversity center and museum on racial reconciliation.