Les Schwab billboard between Eureka, Arcata vandalized with anti-KKK imagery - Eureka Times-Standard
Editor’s note: This story contains an image with language that might offend some readers.
A billboard along the Eureka-Arcata safety corridor was vandalized seemingly overnight with words and images denouncing the Ku Klux Klan.
The Les Schwab Tire Center billboard originally featured three workers, the company logo alongside the word “Tires” and stated “Doing brakes for over 30 years.” It was altered so the three workers appeared in KKK hoods, the logo and word tires were changed to read “F— the KKK!!” and the statement about doing brakes was altered to “Hiding under sheets for over 155 years.”
“We’re in the process of reporting the vandalism and having it taken down,” Dale Thompson, Les Schwab’s chief marketing officer, told the Times-Standard by phone. “It’s not common. I’m not aware of it happening in the past, but I’m sure it does since things get vandalized.”
Geoff Wills, owner of AllPoints Signs, said he’s no stranger to graffiti because billboards get routinely vandalized.
“It’s been happening forever,” Wills said. “As long as billboards have been around.”
The vandalism ebbs and flows as things change in the world, but can also be random, Wills said. In 2010 there was a professional graffiti artist in the area who would tag the same two billboards on a weekly basis for a month straight before disappearing, he said.
“With the Black Lives Matter movement, there were three or four boards like a month ago that got tagged,” Wills said.
The KKK was started roughly 155 years ago following the Civil War as a vigilante group intended to intimidate Southern Black people who had just gotten access to civil rights that would soon be stripped away.
Les Schwab, on the other hand, was started 68 years ago in 1952, according to the company website.
Other anti-racist messages have been going up across the community, particularly since the protests in late May, early June surrounding the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in Minnesota. Several of those were torn down in Eureka and one in Ferndale was vandalized with racist messages.
Sonia Waraich can be reached at 707-441-0506.
2020-08-21 20:23:32Z
https://www.times-standard.com/les-schwab-billboard-between-eureka-arcata-vandalized-with-anti-kkk-imagery
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