Not in Our Town - United States

This project uses various kinds of media and materials to sustain and build the momentum of the action messages presented in a television broadcast. Specifically, the project is based on a public television special that aired in December 1995. The 30-minute-long "Not in our Town" chronicled the experience of citizens in Billings, Montana, USA who joined together to resist bigotry in their town. The broadcast was supported by a year-long organising campaign that created partnerships between national organisations such as People for the American Way, the NAACP, and the American Federation of Teachers, combined with state and local groups of all types, which culminated in hundreds of community screenings during "Not in Our Town Week."

Organisers explain that, although the mainstream news media played an important role in publicity, the NIOT campaign took advantage of emerging technologies such as email and the Internet to build the campaign infrastructure - and to enable further grassroots community discussion about and action against prejudice. The Institute for Alternative Journalism became a full partner in the campaign, using email alerts to enlist its members throughout the country in initiating and sponsoring civic events. Once the full NIOT website was launched, Not in Our Town campaigns were initiated based on the action materials available for download there. The NIOT videos, curriculum guides, and organising kit are designed to provide a model for a broad, community-wide response to hate activity. The interactive site encourages people to "Share your thoughts about the community responses to hate crimes you've seen or experienced, learn more about the resources available for encouraging dialogue and tolerance, and connect with people around the country who increasingly say, 'Not In Our Town.'" A section of that site describes the broad NIOT campaign strategy:

• Public screenings: Human rights groups, religious and civic organisations, schools, and labour unions have hosted public screenings of NIOT. In many communities, a panel discussion or town hall meeting follows the screening.
• Public proclamation: Citizens are urged to enlist the Mayor to draft a NIOT proclamation - and then to seek the support of community leaders such as the Chief of Police, Attorney General, religious and business leaders, and prominent members of the community. Then, members of the general public, including students, will be invited to sign on.
• Education: NIOT videos have been in classrooms across the country to promote discussion among young people about racism and intolerance; printed discussion guides are available.
• Online: The NIOT logo can be placed on websites to provide a link to the campaign web page, where updated campaign information can be found.

Communities around the country have drawn on the broadcast, screenings, and companion materials and activities to organise themselves to speak out against intolerance. Here are a few examples: When Aryan Nations began a recruitment drive in Grant's Pass, Oregon, residents designed their own logo, which they printed on bumper stickers and posters: "We Stand Together for a Hate Free Community." Two employees of the Ohio Department of Human Services were moved to counter the annual Klan cross-burning on the lawn of the capitol across the street from their workplace with a statewide "Not in Our Agency" campaign. Bloomington, Illinois posted a "Not in Our Town" road sign at the town's entrance and issued "Not In Our Town" buttons to their police force; 1,000 residents signed a pledge against intolerance. To highlight these kinds of actions in particular communities, a follow-up documentary - "Not in Our Town II" - was televised in 1996.

In 2003, Working Group producers brought the NIOT story back to its birthplace in Montana by following resistance efforts on the part of Kalispell, Montana. In April 2002, a cache of arms belonging to a newly-formed militia, "Project 7", was uncovered along with a hit list targeting not only local public service and law enforcement employees, but also their spouses and children. According to organisers, Project 7's plan had been to use the massacre to incite full-scale war between militia forces and the United States government. This latest hour-long special documents community response to this situation.

In the words of the original broadcast's producers, undergirding all of these activities is a "process where 'community dialogue' and 'collective action' work together to produce social change in a community that improves the health and welfare of all of its members". The idea is that receiving information is inextricable from dialogue, affiliation, and action - organisers claim that this approach represents "a radical challenge to the individualising passivity commonly associated with the television medium". They say that, by turning to media to tell their story, and in having their mediated story broadcast back to them, media becomes constitutive of individual and collective identity. Specifically, according to one analyst:

• NIOT emphasises the necessity of community response to every incident of hate violence, regardless of law enforcement remedies available. NIOT takes the town out of a reactive mode and provides a systematic, institutionalised structure for an ongoing effort to eradicate violence.
• NIOT foregrounds the importance of "ordinary citizens" in the effort - the notion that extending a hand and being neighbourly is simply "ordinary" (not heroic) is repeatedly stressed in the series.
• NIOT shows that the obstacle of inertia can be overcome by the power of being called on to do good.
• NIOT stresses the role of elected officials and community leaders in being "visibly identified with the struggle against hate and [in] helping to give ordinary citizens permission and ways to reach out."

Development Issues
Conflict.

By 2002, there were more than 10,000 participant names in the NIOT database, ranging from individual citizen-activists to statewide human rights networks to the thirteen million-member AFL-CIO.

According to organisers, the growth of hate groups in Montana was set against a context of change: the replacement of the resource economy with tourism and vacation-homeownership; corresponding job loss; and broader socio-cultural changes such as civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism. In Billings, the state's largest city with 84,000 residents, hate crimes escalated in the early 1990s. In 1993, Klan literature made an appearance, followed by the desecration of a Jewish cemetery, swastika graffiti painted on the house of a Native American resident, and racist skinhead harassment of an African American church. Finally, that winter, a chunk of concrete was thrown through the window of a child who had placed a menorah there in celebration of Hanukkah.