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From KKK to BLM — Is Vidor, Texas turning over a new leaf?
Thoughts from a native Vidorian on the recent rally for black lives in the former sundown town
Last weekend, more than a hundred people gathered at Gould Park in Vidor, Texas to speak out about the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Nearly three decades ago, that exact same spot played host to an altogether different kind of rally. Instead of black lives, they were talking about white power.
In the early 1990s, there was an attempt to desegregate Vidor’s all-white housing projects that prompted KKK organizations from around the state to descend on the tiny Texas town. Vidor was formerly a “sundown town” — a place where blacks weren’t allowed after dark — and it had a reputation as a local stronghold for the Klan.
The hate group resolved to force the newly relocated black residents out through terror. The handful of new black residents — a homeless laborer named Bill Simpson as well as a few single mothers and their children — faced death threats and intimidation by armed white men who would drive by the projects with guns peeking out of the windows.
The Klan reportedly offered a bounty to high school kids to beat up the black residents and claimed that they would level the entire complex with a…
