LAURENS, S.C. – Not many years ago in this small, rural South Carolina town stood The Redneck Shop – a racist emporium and Ku Klux Klan museum housed in an old theater, where white supremacist neo-Nazis gave heil-Hitler salutes and flaunted swastikas and Rebel flags.
That building, once the property of the Klan, now belongs to a black preacher and committed foe of racism who fought the group for more than 20 years.
Now the Rev. David Kennedy plans to transform it into a shrine of reconciliation.
How Kennedy, whose great-great-uncle was lynched in the community, got ownership of the old Echo Theater building from an ex-Klansman is the subject of a movie that could end up raising funds for that transformation.
Right now in its current form, the building symbolizes hatred, Kennedy said. “But we hope we can turn it into a building of love.”