20th century
The Howell
Home Rule City Charter was adopted in 1955.
[8]
The
Ku Klux Klan first took hold in the area in the 1920s, and membership in Livingston County increased during the civil rights era.
[9]
Since the 1970s Howell has had a national reputation of being associated with the
Ku Klux Klan: White supremacist leader and Michigan
Grand Dragon 1971-1979
Robert E. Miles held KKK gatherings on his farm 12 miles north of the city in
Cohoctah Township with a Howell mailing address.
[10] Miles died in 1992, but the gatherings, including the burning of crosses, continued.
[9]
The Livingston Diversity Council, founded in response to a 1988
cross burning on the lawn of a black family,
[11] has been promoting diversity and inclusion in the county.
[12] While they are numerous in
Metro Detroit, as of 2011, Howell was not listed as an active home to any
hate group by the
Southern Poverty Law Center.
[13]
On October 22, 1994, less than a dozen Ku Klux Klansmen from outside Howell held a rally on the steps of the historic
Livingston County Courthouse. According to a reporter for the Livingston Post, the town may have been chosen because of its reputation for intolerance. The Rev. Ben Bohnsack, the pastor of the First United Methodist Church in nearby
Brighton, Michigan at the time, described the approaching rally as an "assault on the values" of the community. The day of the rally, the courthouse was put under the protection of 174 police officers from every law enforcement agency in the county. An 8-foot-tall chain-link fence was erected around the courthouse, with two additional sections raised on Grand River Avenue to contain protesters and observers. The fence was dismantled after the rally and on the following day, citizens assembled with brooms, mops and buckets for a symbolic cleansing of the courthouse steps.
[14]
21st century
The KKK reputation persisted into the 2000s, with events such as a public auction of KKK items scheduled for
Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday in January 2005,
[15] the 2010 suspension of a teacher who removed students for wearing a
Confederate flag and making antigay slurs,
[16] students' racist tweets toward a racially mixed team in 2014.
[17]
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on his Build Back Better agenda, Tuesday, October 5, 2021, at the Operating Engineers Training Facility in Howell, Michigan.
On October 5, 2021, President
Joe Bidenvisited Howell for a speech to build support for his
Build Back Better Plan.
[18]
On July 21, 2024, about a dozen masked white supremacists marched through downtown Howell, chanting "
Heil Hitler" and carrying signs with messages such as "White Lives Matter" and "End the War on White Children". They began their demonstration on the lawn of the Livingston County courthouse where in 1994 members of the community symbolically scrubbed the steps following a KKK rally. Several miles east of Howell at the Latson Road/I-96 overpass in
Genoa Township, Michigan pictures posted to a community Facebook group showed demonstrators hanging KKK and Nazi flags over the side of the overpass. One of the photos showed them with a
Donald Trump flag, while the Livingston Post uploaded a video made by a passerby in which one of the protestors is heard saying, "We love Hitler. We love Trump."
[19] On July 28, 2024, one week after the white supremacist march, at an anti-white supremacist counterprotest in downtown Howell residents cleansed the sidewalk to symbolically wash away the racism.
[20] On August 20, 2024, Donald Trump visited Howell for a campaign speech.
[21]