Racism in our schools

Koch further reported that McNeil told police he had lent his personal computer to Anthony Rowlingson before the murder and that Rowlingson had "taken liberties with my laptop" and downloaded details of his involvement with the KKK. Koch wrote:

"I asked him (after the murder) to destroy whatever information he had on me," McNeil said in his police statement in July 2007.

"I asked him to do this because I didn't want that information getting into other people's hands.

"I made it clear that, in my position, if that is found out, it's going to cause a lot of problems for me and my family.

"The material included letters I wrote to address the Klan, copies of order forms for stuff to come across, and emails to other (KKK) officers."

The reason this particular story resonates with me is that this man could’ve been responsible for sending me, or ordering others to send me, those awful letters that I received when I first started publicly fighting for the removal of the word “Nigger” from a relic sign of a racist past back in 1999.

Much of the mail that I received, and routinely handed to police forensic unit for testing, had letterheads depicting images of white-hooded Ku Klux Klan figures and bearing the words “White Pride, White Power”. One letter concluded with “And remember - Don’t snigger nigger the Klan is getting bigger” with an image of a Klansman holding a noose at the bottom of the page.

Another letter read:

Steve Hagan - You low life “Nigger” mongrel
How dare you attempt to extort money from the
White Australian taxpayers of this community.
We will never submit to your demands regarding
The Nigger Brown Stand
Be silent or we will pay you a visit.
CC: To the Mayor of Toowoomba - a copy of this
Letter has been sent to that troublesome “Coon”
Steve Hagan - Keep it in mind that we are
On your side.
Best wishes the KKK

Another incident that I made public was the threat, found in a student’s diary at a local Toowoomba high school, to kill Aboriginal students at the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month in 1999. On the day of the planned attack most Indigenous parents kept their children at home as did several non-Indigenous parents. There was a big media presence at the school but fortunately the day came and went without incident.

A couple of days later when police raided the house of a boy and his friends in question and found suspicious items of interest, the media built the story up as a copycat of the Columbine High School massacre that occurred in the United States earlier that year.

It wasn’t until weeks later that the truth behind the harassment of the Aboriginal students by this disturbed boy became clear. It was alleged that his father had arrived at the school weeks earlier and passed a baseball bat through the window of his car, telling his son to take care of the “troublesome niggers”. The “troublesome niggers” were my nephew and his friends who attended the same high school.

I’m not sure of the motive of the local news outlets in Toowoomba to leaving out that important KKK information from their coverage of McNeil (the teacher) and Rowlingson (the converted KKK high school student) - possibly lazy journalism or a deliberately sinister suppression of an awkward topic - only they could answer that question.

Perhaps I’m being a little over-sensitive by drawing a parallel between my decade long battle with operatives who purported to represent the Ku Klux Klan in my community and this obnoxious man who hid behind the veil of class-room-teacher respectability to solicit impressionable and disturbed students to his right-wing-racist organisation.

Maybe now is the time, following this incident, for school principals to be more vigilant of strange activities or liaisons their teachers engage in with their students, especially young white boys in high schools who feel isolated and undervalued by their peers.

I hope during their lengthy period of incarceration both McNeil and Rowlingson find time to read Jasmine Guy’s famous quotation, “Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth” and break free from the shackles of xenophobia that are suffocating them.