Hanging Carr Effigies Offend NAACP

A front-yard display of the Carr brothers hanged in effigy has been removed after some Wichitans found it racially offensive.

For several days, two dummies — each with a dark face and a noose around its neck — hung from trees in the front yard of a west Wichita house.

A sign beneath the dummies, with arrows pointing to them, said “Carr Bros,” referring to the two Dodge City siblings found guilty Monday of capital murder in a Wichita killing spree. The Carrs are black and their victims were white, but prosecutors say robbery — not race — was the motive.

The Rev. Gill Ford, the NAACP regional director in Denver, said he heard about the display from the local NAACP branch. To many African-Americans, he said, a noose is especially repugnant, “It’s going to be like the swastika to somebody who’s been in a concentration camp.

“My hope is that the community of Wichita as a whole would condemn those kinds of actions,” Ford said.

Michael Watley, a 35-year-old black carpet layer, said he found the display to be a very public and racially offensive symbol — a jarring reminder of prejudice and lynchings in the nation’s past.

“I know there is some prejudice here,” Watley said, “but I didn’t think it was to that level.”

The resident who put up the display, who would not give his name, said he took the dummies and the sign down late Monday night after he was told that the display upset some people.

He said he didn’t intend the display to be offensive and that he put it up as a statement of outrage over the brutality of the killings. People driving by and seeing the display gave him the thumbs-up sign, he said.

But Watley sees the Carrs and their crimes this way: “They’re individuals, and it doesn’t matter about skin color. What they did, they did on their own.”

A Wichita radio station, KDGS-FM 93.9, received nearly 100 phone calls and more than 50 e-mails from listeners who heard about the display and found it offensive, said station program director Greg Williams.

Reach Tim Potter at 268-6684 or tpotter@wichitaeagle.com.

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