Black farmer threatened with lynching after dispute over a cow
A black farmer and his Native American wife have been the target of racist threats after they were accused of being cow thieves.
A black farmer and his Native American wife have been the target of racist threats after they were accused of being cow thieves.
The dispute began when Daniel Cummins and his wife, Ashley Hathaway, agreed to sell a calf to their neighbors, Chris and Tina Rhodes. However, the sale was never finalized, and Cummins and Rhodes got into an argument that escalated into a fight, after which Chris Rhodes posted pictures of his injuries from the fight and called Cummins a cow thief.
Then, Rhodes’ nephew Josh began to harass the Cummins family with racist taunts and threats. “N****r, you ain’t nothing to me. You’re a menace to society. A (expletive) parasite,” Josh can heard yelling in a recording the Cummins made of the threats. Later, he wrote on Facebook, “Kick rocks, n****r. It’s a small town… punk… U ain’t (expletive)… it far from squashed.”
But because Rhodes had told the mostly-white community that the Cummins were thieves, the harassment did not stop simply with the Rhodes family.
“I think it got serious when I had people come to the gate, identify themselves as white supremacists and then tell me that my family was marked and they were going to bury my children,” explained Cummins.
Although police have placed a restraining order on Rhodes’ nephew, they have been slow to respond to the threats, because they say it is hard to identify who is making them.
