Feeling it alone can be devastating, but acting on it, especially in Illinois, can really cost you.
Two hate-filled people, Chad Hampton, 49, and his mother, Cheryl Hampton, 70, formerly of Carroll County, Illinois, found that out the hard way when they launched a private hate campaign against their Black next-door neighbor, Gregory Johnson, over several months in 2020 in Savanna, Illinois.
It was a very costly lesson, but they sure learned it.
“This behavior is shocking, racist and un-American.”
According to a civil lawsuit filed against the pair, they sprayed Johnson’s yard with weed killer, which destroyed a portion of his lawn, and cut a fence he had erected between their properties in half.
When that didn’t do the trick (they hoped to force him to move), they painted black swastikas on a garage facing Johnson’s house—followed by a Confederate flag in a window with the N-word written across it.
The pair then constructed a frightening effigy of a Black man with chains around him, and hung it from a noose over a tree in their yard, where Johnson couldn’t miss it.
Incredibly, Cheryl later claimed the effigy of a lynched Black man was a “Halloween decoration.”
Even more outrageous, after police removed the effigy as evidence, “Chad Hampton called the Savanna Police Department seeking to file an official complaint for damage to his property because the police had cut down the lynched effigy,” the Illinois attorney general’s lawsuit stated.
In 2018, the Illinois legislature amended the Illinois Hate Crime Act to allow the attorney general to file a civil lawsuit in cases that constitute a hate crime; Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s win is the first under the new amendment.
As a result, Carroll County Circuit Court Judge Jerry Kane ordered the Hamptons to each pay a civil penalty of $5,000 and damages of $45,000 to Johnson.
“This behavior is shocking, racist and un-American,” Raoul said in a press release. “I appreciate the judge’s order that shows such despicable behavior will not be tolerated in our state.”
“With dramatic increases in reported hate crimes,” he said, “I will continue to use all of the tools at my disposal to prosecute hate crimes and send the message that hate has no place in Illinois.”
There is little question that hate crimes are, indeed, on the rise in the state. A report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) noted that in 2023, Chicago police reported 326 hate crimes throughout the city, a 64 percent increase over the previous year.
More than half involved white supremacist propaganda.
Statewide, the number of hate crimes rose from 98 in 2021 to 347 in 2023, according to the FBI.
“We often think that Illinois is immune from this type of extremism, but that just isn’t the case,” David Goldenberg, ADL Midwest regional director, said. “When we see individuals being targeted because of their race, their religion, their nationality, their immigration status and fliers are being dropped on their homes and private property, that is when it crosses the line.”
Johnson commented, “I looked out of my new home at a Black-faced mannequin shackled and lynched on a tree branch, the N-word scrawled upon a window and swastikas.
“Our American flag was replaced with their Confederate flag. Have we not come any farther than this?
“This lawsuit is about tearing off the shackles that still restrain us to this day. It’s about never giving up on the mission of our United States Constitution. We, as a nation, are better than this.”
Jeff Doran, chief of the Savanna Police, said, “We were there every time they did something to [Johnson], they would call us and [officers] would take pictures of it all, the swastikas, the Confederate flag. It just kept escalating. I have never seen anything like it in almost 40 years in law enforcement.”
The lawsuit states, “The life-size effigy resembled Johnson by design. The head consisted of a mask intentionally painted black and a curly wig altered to resemble Johnson’s hair. The stuffed clothing used for the body resembled Johnson’s clothing. A noose made of rope hung the effigy by the neck from a tree a few feet from Johnson’s property. A large chain bound the effigy’s hands and torso.”
The lawsuit further states, “The Hamptons intentionally invoked the long, vicious legacy of lynched Black men in America to terrorize Johnson because he is a Black man.”
Even after Johnson called the police, Chad Hampton ran up a Confederate flag on his flagpole as the police looked on.
When police responded, Cheryl Hampton said that she did not want “n—rs living next to her.”
Hatred burns, and it burns deep, fooling those who harbor it into thinking they are better than individuals of a different race or religion.
Some allow that sickness to exist within them as a degenerative disease that harms only themselves.
That is, until they let it out and inflict pain and heartache on those they hate. Then, as the Hampton case shows, it becomes intolerable, and even illegal.
Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard knew this too well, as do members of the religion everywhere, who too often find themselves the targets of hatred simply because of their beliefs.
“Freedom for Man does not mean freedom to injure Man,” L. Ron Hubbard wrote.
Perhaps the haters should consider these wise words, and live by them.
