Column: What a fight over a noose says about the coming clash of red and blue California

Mike Saunders thought the fight was over.

For almost a year, he’d made it his mission to persuade the city of Placerville — perched in the remote Sierra foothills, not far from Lake Tahoe — to change its official logo from a noose swinging from a tree.

The noose, he’d explained again and again with uncanny patience, is a symbol of hate and violence toward people of color. In Placerville, or as the locals call it, “Old Hangtown,” let’s just say the majority of those who were hanged during the vigilante justice era of the Gold Rush weren’t white.

And yet, many in this overwhelmingly white and conservative city resisted, arguing that the noose was merely a cultural and historical symbol, and had nothing to do with racism. Meanwhile, Saunders, who is Black and liberal, was hit with a barrage of racist taunts and threats.

When I interviewed him last summer, Saunders expected that his campaign against the noose would succeed — eventually. And in mid-April, he was proved right when the Placerville City Council voted unanimously to change the logo.

“Noose down!” he texted me at the time.

What Saunders didn’t expect was that, two weeks later, the same City Council would vote unanimously for a resolution to allow the city’s nickname, “Old Hangtown,” to continue to be used on signs, like the massive one that greets drivers along Highway 50.

Mayor Dennis Thomas said the resolution was necessary to head off a “slippery slope that it’s part of this whole grand scheme of taking down everything historical in the city.”

Then again, this is Placerville, where a mannequin that many locals affectionately call “George” still hangs from a noose on the side of a downtown building.

The sequence of events has left Saunders trying to make sense of it all.

Beyond the obvious racism involved in celebrating extrajudicial hangings, he has come to believe what happened is also a reflection of a deep-seated — if irrational — fear that has taken root in Placerville and in other pockets of red California that they are about to be taken over by blue California. paranoia over a supposed invasion of liberals, that has only grown during the pandemic as remote work has become more prevalent and some have moved inland to escape increasingly high housing costs in coastal cities or settle in to a new way of life in rural resort cities. …