Dozens of KKK fliers found in Glen Burnie neighborhood

Anne Arundel County police responded Saturday to reports of fliers promoting the Ku Klux Klan found strewn in a Glen Burnie neighborhood.

A dog-walker reported finding a flier near the intersection of Dorchester Road and Washington Avenue in Glen Burnie, and police responded around 11:50 a.m. The 30 to 40 fliers were inside bags of gravel, likely to weigh them down, and lying in people’s front yards, said police spokesman Lt. Ryan Frashure.

The county police Homeland Security and Intelligence Unit is not releasing photos of the fliers yet, but described them as KKK propaganda.

Though the contents of the flier are covered under the First Amendment’s freedom of speech protections, they are “highly offensive,” Frashure said, and the department is investigating their source. There are no suspects thus far.

The HSI detectives will look for surveillance video to determine the people responsible for the fliers. The incident is not being treated as a hate or bias incident, as the person who called police did not report it as such.

A neighborhood in South Baltimore encountered two similar incidents in October. Riverside residents twice woke up to find KKK propaganda distributed on the 1500 block of Belt Street.

Frashure said at this time “there’s no indication or evidence” the Glen Burnie and Riverside incidents are related.

Anne Arundel County has experienced a rash of racist incidents, stemming back to 2017, when two men hung a noose at Crofton Middle School. One man, Conner Prout, pleaded guilty to a hate crime and, as part of a deal with the Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office, publicly apologized and conducted community service alongside local racial justice groups, including the NAACP.

The other man charged in the case pleaded not guilty to a hate crime. He was found not guilty based on a technicality in the county’s code, which does not cover hate crimes aimed at a group of people.

Black students at Chesapeake High School and Chesapeake Bay Middle School have endured racist incidents over the course of the last year.

A Chesapeake High student reported an anonymous message containing a photo of a Confederate flag and the words “You n***s will rue the day,” on Oct. 31. A day later, someone found a noose made of toilet paper hanging in a boys bathroom Chesapeake Bay Middle.

Other incidents at the high school targeted black and Jewish students.

KKK activity in the county — and in the schools — is not unheard of. Students at Arundel High School in January 2017 circulated a petition to join the “Kool Kids Klan” and declare white supremacy over fellow black students. The petition garnered two signatures and contained racist words and stereotypes.

Reference to the KKK popped up on a school resource website in 2015.

In 1999, former Anne Arundel County Executive Janet Owens shut down an anti-litter program rather than allow a local branch of the KKK to sponsor a highway cleanup. stall at