Judd Blevins, a city commissioner in Enid, Oklahoma, marched in the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally. Now he faces a recall vote.
The photo of Judd Blevins was unmistakable.
In it, Blevins, bearded and heavyset, held a tiki torch on the University of Virginia campus, on the eve of Unite the Right, a 2017 coming-together of the nation’s neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups.
Connie Vickers had found the photo online along with others showing Blevins marching alongside an angry mob — a crowd of men recorded throughout the night spitting and shouting “Jews will not replace us!” Vickers had it enlarged at a local print and copy shop. On a January night in 2023, she and Nancy Presnall, best friends, retirees and rare Democrats in a deeply red Oklahoma county, brought it to a sparsely attended forum where Blevins, a candidate running to represent Ward 1 on Enid’s six-seat City Council, was making his case.
They had hoped to get a question in while Blevins was on stage, but settled for confronting him after.
Do you mean weren’t allowed by law, or do you mean that it would be dangerous of them to be out after dark?
Yes
These guys thankfully filled in the info, but the signs on the roads into the town I grew up in said they would hang them if found after dark, but in more racist wording. They didn’t come down until 1978 in my town.