Michigan man charged with hate crimes for intimidating BLM advocates with nooses and threats
Kenneth Pilon, 62, allegedly made racist threats of lynchings and left nooses at multiple locations in Michigan in 2020
A series of hate crime charges have been filed against a Michigan man who the Department of Justice accuses of intimidating Black Lives Matter advocates with nooses, handwritten notes, and phone calls threatening racial violence.
Kenneth Pilon, 61, is facing six counts of violating a Title 18 statute that outlaws deliberately injuring, intimidating, or interfering with persons “by force or threat of force, because of that other person’s race, color, religion or national origin,” as reported by CBS News on Wednesday.
According to CBS News, the criminal complaint against Pilon alleges that on June 14, 2020, as protests against systemic racism surged following the murder of George Floyd, Pilon dialed nine different Starbucks locations in Michigan and demanded that staffers “tell all the employees wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts that the only good n** ***is a dead n*****.”Â
Two days prior, a backlash had forced Starbucks to reverse its ban on employees wearing Black Lives Matter paraphernalia while on the job. Starbucks then sent 250,000 company-sponsored BLM shirts to employees nationwide.
The Department of Justice accuses Pilon of telling a Starbucks employee over the phone that he planned to “go out and lynch me a n*****,” and of leaving four nooses with handwritten notes attached to them at parking lots in the area and one inside of a 7-Eleven over the next several weeks.
Per CBS News, the notes attached to the nooses stated: “An accessory to be worn with your ‘BLM’ t-shirt. Happy protesting!”
The specifics of the complaint focus on how Pilon “intimidated and attempted to intimidate citizens from participating lawfully in speech and peaceful assembly opposing the denial of Black people’s right to enjoy police protection and services free from brutality.”
The Department of Justice reports that the FBI is investigating this case. Timothy Turkelson is the assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan as the prosecutor on this case. Tara Allison is the trial attorney for the department’s Civil Rights Division.
In the past several years, nooses have been found in Washington, D.C. at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, at a Black sorority at American University, and in Texas at a high school campus.
The noose, a symbol that has been used in several hate crimes to express one’s racist beliefs, was used to murder African Americans during slavery, through Reconstruction, and into the era of the Jim Crow, as reported by theGrio.Â
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