May 4, 2002
“Truck firebombed at poultry company
Undetonated incendiary devices recovered from under two other trucks”

BLOOMINGTON, IN – An early-morning explosion that damaged a truck at a wholesale poultry plant was deliberate, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms said Friday.
– www.hoosiertimes.com

here’s a link to a mailing list posting of the article, and here’s a link to the article in the context of the original publication.

Tip o hat to Spencer Sundell.

UPDATE: the lead story on May 10, 2002 involves the long overdue arrest of an individual on murder charges in Martinsville, the town halfway between Bton and Indy, to which, since the murder, 33 years ago, the stink of the Klan has clung.

While it’s time to resolve this matter, I have to point out that received wisdom had it, when I was a sprat, that Martinsville was the source of all evil in Indiana, and that the Klan had sprung from there, reborn, in the wake of D. W. Griffith’s monstrous 1920’s triumph, “Birth of a Nation”.

In fact, what was going on there was my homestate scapegoating a small city. Martinsville had a rep as the worst place Indiana to be black or Jewish in when I was growing up. Maybe that ‘s true. But it was no piece of cake in Bloomington either, and the whole state elected a Klan government in the 20’s.