APPLETON, WI (WTAQ) – For the second time, leaders at an Appleton church say its “Black Lives Matter” banner has been stolen.
According to officials at the Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, the banner was attached to a sign outside their church at 2600 E. Philip Lane. It had been hanging there for almost 2 years.
“The recent deaths of African American men during police encounters in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and St. Paul, Minnesota, and the sniper killings of police officers in Dallas have increased the number of phone calls and conversations that the banner provokes,” Rev. Kathleen Rolenz, interim senior minister, said in a news release. “We hang the banner to invite those conversations, so that we can tell other white people what ‘Black Lives Matter’ means to the white people in this congregation.”
The apparent theft is “an act of ‘political vandalism’ and a ‘cowardly’ way to express a point of view,” the statement continues.
Rolenz says the congregation’s display of the banner “is consistent with support for the safe and constitutional policing that police chiefs everywhere endorse.”
The congregation plans to re-hang a new banner Friday afternoon. Members of the community are invited to attend the ceremony, meeting in the building at 5:30 p.m.
