PIPESTONE, MINN. – Thirteen years ago, Sara Priester moved back here with her 5-year-old daughter, Chloe Lear, hoping that she would come to love her mother's hometown.
But for Chloe, whose father is a black immigrant from Barbados and whose mother is white, that dream turned into a nightmare before high school homecoming festivities last fall, when a girl in her senior class painted a racial slur on her truck window.
The incident drove Chloe to transfer to another high school nearly 30 miles away. It also prompted the town's mayor, a self-described born-again Christian, to speak out and take action, and stimulated some serious soul-searching for many of the 4,150 residents of this predominantly white city 200 miles southwest of Minneapolis.
"The biggest issue that you find with anyone moving into a small town, they're going to come with a cultural background that they were raised in or lived in, and that cultural background probably is going to be different than what you find out in a small community," said Mayor Myron Koets, who in the days after the incident wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper saying the community cannot tolerate what happened to Chloe. "If you're a person of color, you really stand out."
Pipestone is known as a "place of peace, a place where all people are welcome," according to a film showing at the Pipestone National Monument on the north edge of town, where American Indians mine red quartzite to make pipes. And while many here say Pipestone is indeed a welcoming community, some say the signs of racism, both subtle and overt, abound.
"I've heard racial slurs I haven't heard in years here — 'nappy head,' 'jigaboo,' " said Laron "Ron" Tivis, who moved here from St. Paul nearly four years ago when he bought the town barbershop through an advertisement on Craigslist. Tivis says as the only black business owner in Pipestone County, he must brush off the slurs.
"If you're not born and raised here, you're an outsider," he said. "I'm not only an outsider, but also I'm a black person."
Tivis said he likes the quality of life in Pipestone and doesn't want to paint everyone as racist.