Trigger warning: Description of a KKK encounter involving a firearm and racial intimidation.
Circa 1998... I was driving back home to North Carolina from Tennessee late one night, on a quiet back road through Sanford, NC, with my girlfriend at the time in the passenger seat.
A pickup truck comes up fast behind us, high beams blazing, swerving erratically like they were trying to push us off the road. I slow down to let them pass. As we pull side by side, I roll down my window, yell something angry (use your imagination), and give them the “unpleasant finger”… a classic road rage moment. (Clearly, I didn’t know there was a time and a place... and that was neither. Classic younger me then vs. me now.)
Then their window drops. The interior light hits the individual wearing a full KKK hood (the pointed one with eye holes), pointing a double-barrel shotgun right at us.
My heart stopped. I slammed the brakes, let them speed off into the dark, and we just sat there shaking. One of the scariest, most surreal moments of my life. This wasn't some movie scene…it was real, in the late '90s, in central North Carolina.
Racism didn't vanish with the Civil Rights era. It just went quieter in some places... until it didn't.
Has anyone else had encounters like this back then? Or stories from family? Sharing because we can't forget how close that hate still was…and sometimes still is.
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