Individuals with covered heads and faces targeting, menacing, and inciting. Figures surrounding homes, schools and businesses, their identities hidden, and setting a cross on fire as parents silently hold their terrified children. Hidden faces committing a reign of terror against Black Americans without consequence.
This is our history. I grew up in New Orleans in the 1960s. And as a son of the Jim Crow South, I’ll never forget America’s painful past. Today, it is a history in danger of being repeated. Black Americans know the signs when we see them. And that’s why we are ringing the alarm. I look to the past to answer the call of the present, and I am gratified that Gov. Hochul is seeking strong, fair enhanced penalties for masked harassment.
The new hoods aren’t white and pointed. They are masks of all types; balaclavas, and scarves, wraps and shrouds of all kinds. No matter what form they take on, there’s one through-line, and it harkens directly back to the Ku Klux Klan: they hide the face, so that the wearer can act with impunity and without accountability.
We see it when Neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, today’s Klansmen and other radical, dangerous white supremacist groups have marched, faces obscured, and harass and inject fear into communities across the state, including Ballston, Saratoga Springs and Waterford. We also see it when protests stop being peaceful and participants hide their identities to engage in targeted brutality, threats, hate activity and worse. This may be a New York epidemic, but it’s very clear that these face coverings are not being worn for health reasons, when they’re used as vehicles of violence.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, it wasn’t always.
For well more than a century, New York and most other states had laws banning such acts. It was illegal to hide one’s identity and engage in certain behavior. Such measures helped send the Klan scuttling into the shadows since — unmasked — they couldn’t well engage in their reign of terror.
In New York, lawmakers rescinded the law in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The current masked harassment crisis is an unintended consequence of failing to put the law right back on the books when the virus’ most dire threat subsided. Now, it’s time. New York can break out of the grip of Klan tactics. We do not need to live with face coverings used to anonymously target in every aspect of life — at home, work, in transit.
The language backed by Hochul mirrors legislation introduced earlier this year that would reinstate the rescinded law prohibiting masked intimidation and bring it into the present. The concept is effective and strong; it’s fair and enforceable, and I am encouraged that district attorneys are taking it seriously. The bill specifically targets those that obscure their faces while participating in physical or verbal intimidation and violence. It also respects and protects everyone’s basic right to freedom of speech, and the right to exercise your voice peacefully.
Lawmakers will have to stay focused. Misinformation is a constant threat. This bill and the advocacy push around it that I have helped to lead is no exception. Some have incorrectly compared it to the anti-masking law passed in Nassau County last year that essentially legalized stop-and-frisk and called into doubt the right to protest.
The language proposed for the budget is not the same thing.
Simply wearing a mask and peacefully protesting is not a crime, nor should it be. Also, within the bill are protections specifically for New Yorkers wearing face coverings for health, work or religious purposes. The Nassau County bill was hastily passed for partisan political purposes. The language I support was crafted over a period of several months and has only one purpose, and that’s to ensure public safety — while protecting basic rights.
A recent poll found that 75% of all New Yorkers believe the state needs an anti-masking harassment law, across every demographic. That same poll showed 67% of Black voters in New York are worried they will be a victim of targeted harassment or a hate crime. That’s why I am off the sidelines alongside leaders from across the community to push for passage.
We need to ban masked harassment once again. I support the governor’s effort, because I remember our past, and I refuse to stand by silently and let history repeat itself.
Morial is the president and CEO of the National Urban League, and a former mayor of New Orleans.