Ashley Frailey didn’t notice anything amiss Wednesday with the first few displays during the annual Halloween parade in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania – Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, dance groups, the high school marching band. Even when she saw a Donald Trump-themed float, she figured it was a straightforward campaign ad.
Then, Frailey looked closer: She saw that someone dressed as Vice President Kamala Harris was shackled and being dragged behind a vehicle led by a person wearing a Trump mask.
“I was shocked and took out my phone to record a video,” Frailey told The Washington Post.
That video aired on TV stations and circulated on the internet. In the 48 hours since Frailey recorded it, officials in Mount Pleasant apologized for a Halloween parade float in which a slow-moving Kawasaki farm truck, carrying what appeared to be a sniper rifle and the person in a Trump mask, slowly moved through the annual parade in Mount Pleasant, a community of about 4,200 about 25 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. People wearing Secret Service agent costumes walked with the vehicle while someone dressed as Harris walked with their hands bound by rope or a chain to the back of the truck.
“Y’all are disgusting” Frailey, 37, told them in one video before directing her comments to the person in the Harris costume. “I can’t believe you agreed to do this.”
Frailey and other critics said that pretending to shackle and drag a Black woman behind a vehicle evoked America’s shameful slavery and Jim Crow-era lynchings.
“The depiction of Kamala Harris tied to the back of the vehicle and being marched down Main Street seemed very symbolic of the violence and racism against people of color in our country’s history,” said Frailey, who lives in Mount Pleasant and attended the parade with her husband and daughter.
On Thursday, the Mount Pleasant Volunteer Fire Department, which sponsored the parade, said it sincerely apologized for the display, adding that “we do not share in the values represented by those participants, and we understand how it may have hurt or offended members of our community.”
Borough officials, in a statement released Friday, called it an understatement to say that the float was “appalling.”
Harris’s campaign did not immediately respond Friday to a request for comment.
After a clip of the parade spread online, people contacted NAACP’s Pittsburgh chapter by phone and email, Daylon Davis, the chapter’s president told The Washington Post. He said that after speaking with borough officials, they plan to meet after Election Day about the incident.
In a statement released Thursday, Davis called the parade display “a harmful symbol that evokes a painful history of violence, oppression, and racism that Black and Brown communities have long endured here in America.”
The Mount Pleasant fire department has sponsored the parade for more than 70 years and, and since it had never had a problem with the displays in the parades, officials said it found no need to create a process to vet them.
“All participants are welcome to show up and line on the street and then move in an orderly fashion down the parade route,” borough leaders wrote in their statement. “It’s important to know that this is a small, tight-knit community and many members have reached out to voice concerns about the appropriateness of this display.”
Using racist imagery to evoke America’s deeply painful past of slavery and the Jim Crow era crossed a line, Davis said.
“Black and Brown people of color have always been portrayed as less than their other White counterparts,” Davis told The Post, adding, “This is a real blowing point in America.”
“The darker nature of our society,” he said, “needs to be tamed.”
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Jintak Han contributed to this report.