The NAACP has called for the Lawrence County Republican Party's chairman to resign from his position on the county's school board.
The chairman of the Lawrence County Republican Party – a local Alabama GOP group – is facing pressure from the NAACP to resign from his role on the county’s school board after Ku Klux Klan imagery appeared on the organization’s Facebook page.
“We feel that Mr. Shanon Terry [the group’s chairman]’s credibility as a School Board Representative has been tainted and we can no longer trust his decision making to benefit our children in the Lawrence County School System,” the Lawrence County NAACP President J.E. Turnbore said in a statement demanding Terry’s resignation.
Terry, however, rejected the public calls to step down. “I will not be resigning from my elected office on the Lawrence County School Board,” he said in a statement Thursday to WHNT. “The voters of District Four elected me to represent them and I am proud of the accomplishments of this administration over the past six years.”
On Sunday evening, the Lawrence County Republican Party shared a post on Facebook announcing the instatement of a new chairman of the organization, Terry.
The post featured the Republican National Committee elephant logo, but unlike the traditional logo, the figures of three hooded Klansmen appeared in the white spaces between the elephant’s legs.
The image was taken down shortly after and replaced with a different picture, but not before going viral, with social media users quick to point out the KKK imagery.
Terry, who admitted to posting the original photo himself, explained in a new Facebook post the following day that the KKK imagery was shared by mistake and rejected any association between the beliefs of Lawrence County Republican Party and the KKK.
“I would like to offer a deep and sincere apology for a picture that temporarily appeared on this page last night,” he wrote. “A google [sp] search of a GOP elephant was used and later found to have hidden images that do not represent the views of beliefs of the Lawrence County Republican Party.”
He later said in a statement to WHNT that the image was shared while “rushing to post a thank you not to the outgoing chairman” and that he does not “support or agree with any hate group agenda and certainly would not try to further their cause.”
The satirical image was originally created for a 2020 Mother Jones article focusing on then-President Donald Trump and his followers, titled, “The Republican Party Is Racist and Soulless. Just Ask This Veteran GOP Strategist.”
The picture’s illustrator Woody Harrington reshared the image on Instagram, explaining that the intention was to depict “hate, bigotry and racism.” Harrington also claimed his illustration was used in the Lawrence County Republican Party’s Facebook post “without permission or credit.”
The Lawrence County Republican Party’s Facebook group was deleted on Thursday evening.
Terry has not responded to Inside Edition Digital’s request for comment.
