On the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when Jewish-owned businesses and homes in Nazi Germany were attacked, reports of racist threats and Nazi-related graffiti have come in from all across the U.S.
The morning after the election, residents of the small town of Wellsville, New York found that a local softball dugout had been defaced with a swastika and the words “Make America White Again.” Police were notified, but the police chief decided that there was no need to investigate the crime. A group of local citizens painted over the graffiti in the afternoon. "There's enough bad going on in the world,” Skip Carter, one of the volunteers painting over the slogan, told a local reporter.
At Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, a black baby doll was found hung by a noose in a dorm elevator on election night. “We will hold responsible whoever perpetuated this despicable act that goes against everything for which Canisius College stands,” college president John Hurley wrote in a letter to students and faculty. “I cannot condemn this act strongly enough. This cannot and will not be tolerated.”
Upstate New York is not the only place to see graffiti identifying Trump with the Nazis after the election. In Philadelphia, swastikas were spray-painted on the windows of an abandoned storefront along with the words “Sieg Heil” and Trump's name. It is unknown whether the graffiti was left by a Trump supporter or a protestor, but police are looking for the culprit all the same. On the University of New Mexico campus, over a dozen locations were tagged with graffiti referencing Trump, fascism, and Nazis.
