Twenty years after the Redneck Shop opened its doors, Andrew Heckler’s film about the events in Laurens finally went into production. Burden was shot on location in Jackson, Georgia, a rural community forty miles southeast of Atlanta, over five weeks in October and November 2016. A stand-in for the Redneck Shop was erected in an abandoned storefront just east of Jackson’s courthouse square. The building was then outfitted with a replica of the Echo’s metal marquee, and filled with T-shirts and bumper stickers and racist trinkets—near carbon copies of the merchandise John Howard hawked for more than a decade. In advance of filming, the county issued a press release to alert residents to parking and street closures in the area, and to offer the following warning: “The set dressing…will include placement of some Confederate flags in various scenes. We are asking that [people] take no offense and understand that while this is based on a true story, it is only a movie and is in no way a reflection of the spirit of our community today.”
County officials needn’t have worried. One night, not long after the marquee was nailed into place, Heckler received an urgent call from his production designer, Stephanie Hass. “You need to come down here,” she said. “There are people inside to get into the store. They think it’s real. They’re…shopping.”
Indeed, for the next several weeks, producers and production assistants fielded questions from yet more locals who were anything but offended.
When do you guys open?
This store is just what we needed!
This is the greatest thing to come to Jackson in a long time.
The fall of 2016 turned out to be an especially fraught time to film a movie about combatting racial prejudice. Upticks in hate crimes had been widely reported, as had eruptions of violence at rallies across the nation. Presidential elections aren’t exactly notable for their civility; mudslinging and smear tactics are as old as politics themselves. But as scores of journalists and historians pointed out, much of the increasingly inflammatory and divisive language utilized on the campaign trail—the depiction of a nation in peril, besieged by immigrants, the “America First” sloganeering—bore an eerie resemblance to 1920s-era Klan rhetoric.
Something was brewing, and it was palpable on set.
Dexter Darden, a young African American actor cast in the role of Reverend Kennedy’s son, has since spoken publicly about the night a car full of white men slowed to a stop as he was preparing to film a scene. One of the men hopped out, waved a Confederate flag in Darden’s face, and said: “You don’t fucking belong here. Go home.”
“That’s when I realized it was real,” Darden later told audiences at the Sundance Film Festival. “Because of the election, people became bold and outright and outspoken. We were trying to make a movie about peace and love, and all we were receiving was hate.”
The violence and volatility did not abate after Americans went to the polls. According to a report compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, nearly 900 “hate incidents” took place across the United States in the ten days immediately following the election. The months to come would bring the announcement of a ban on travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries, the assertion that a federal judge could not fairly preside over a case owing to his Mexican heritage, the declaration that a private citizen with the temerity to protest police brutality was merely a “son of a bitch,” and myriad claims that the country was being “stolen” and overrun by “animals” (i.e., immigrants). Yet the sight of neo-Nazis and Klansmen marching through the streets of Charlottesville in the summer of 2017 still seemed to catch the nation by surprise. The overwhelming response to the spectacle of young white men chanting “You will not replace us” and assembling beneath Nazi and Confederate flags was one of disbelief. How can this really be happening? Within hours, the hashtag #ThisIsNotUs began trending on Twitter.
Racially motivated violence, however, has plagued every generation since the country’s founding; meanwhile, race has successfully been made into a wedge issue in every presidential election. What happened in Charlottesville is not new, and it recalls the question Reverend Kennedy asked reporters when they first descended on Laurens two decades ago: “America would love to put all the blame on the Ku Klux Klan. But what allows this atmosphere that allows the Klan to become bold?”
John Howard died in September 2017 after a long illness. In accordance with his wishes, there was no memorial service. His obituary mentioned nothing about his decades-long association with the Klan and described him as the “last surviving member of his immediate family.” (Despite his three children, ten grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren.) The tenor of the obit seemed to signal the end of something. Debbie Campbell, owner of the newly renovated Capitol Theatre and Café, recently explained to the Charleston Post and Courier that “blacks and whites are mixing more these days than ever before.”
Less than four months after Howard’s death, however, the Laurens School District 55 Board of Trustees announced a bond referendum that would have raised $109 million for improvements to educational facilities across the county and funded the construction of a new high school. The announcement generated immediate pushback, and within weeks the vote had split along racial lines. Reverend Kennedy—a vocal proponent of the measure and outspoken supporter of the district’s African American superintendent, Dr. Stephen Peters—spoke about Laurens’s “racist history” and “lack of progress” at a local meeting of the NAACP. It did not go over well.
“I thought it was bull crap,” Dianne Belsom, founder of the Laurens County Tea Party, later told reporters. “Instead of celebrating the gains we’ve made, he’s just a race-baiter stuck in the past.” Kennedy endured an enormous wave of criticism for his particular style of activism (which included protesting outside Belsom’s home with a bullhorn). Equally as active, however, was the “Vote No” contingent. Sharon Barnes, owner of a picture frame shop on the square, offered a prize to the first person who delivered one hundred signatures of Laurens residents in opposition to the referendum—four signed prints of Confederate officers J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
By the time it was over—the referendum was struck down by a margin of 54 percent—many residents had called for the resignation of the entire school board. Superintendent Peters admitted that he felt unsafe in Laurens and took an abrupt leave of absence for “family reasons.” As for the reverend, social media lit up with posts describing him as a “racist,” a “racial pot stirrer,” and a “trouble-maker” who was guilty of “preaching hate.” Countless residents suggested they vote “to remove him from Laurens County.” Just about everyone agreed that Kennedy should stop seeking attention and let the past stay in the past.
Reverend Kennedy still owns the deed to the Echo theater. He still hopes to open his long-prayed-for multicultural center, or perhaps turn the building into an auxiliary facility for his Baptist church. More recently he’s floated the idea of creating a memorial for the victims of lynching—but money is tight. In the meantime, the residents of Laurens have grown used to reporters milling around, so they’re a little more guarded, a little more wary. Most have tired of talking about the Redneck Shop. After all, the Echo is empty now, just another faded storefront on the courthouse square, a relic from some darker time they’d just as soon forget.