There’s an uproar this week in the sleepy, all-but dead village of Linden in rural western Alabama, where the owner of the weekly newspaper published an editorial recommending that the Ku Klux Klan ride again into Washington, D.C. and resort to its brand of hate-filled violence to restore political and social order.

Why is this pertinent to Butler County? Only because it coincided with an incident at Slippery Rock University, the anonymous defacing of a Black History Month poster on campus.

Like Linden, the Slippery Rock incident might have gone unnoticed, but campus officials refused to go that route. Instead, they shone a bright light on the little evil lurking in shadow, determined to expose it.

That’s essentially what happened also in Alabama, where the newspaper has fallen into such obscurity that it had fewer than 3,000 readers three years ago, fewer now. The editorial, titled “Klan needs to ride again,” might have gone unnoticed if two alert college journalism students hadn’t snooped it out and reported it on the Internet. Regional and state newspapers immediately picked up the story, and it soon went nationwide.

In both cases, young people called out evil before the eyes of the world.

See something, say something.

Linden is the heart of what was once Chickasaw and Choctaw Indian land. More than a century ago, the ancestors of the publisher who wrote last week’s Klan editorial forced the tribes to move away to Oklahoma — but not before a curious thing happened.

The Chickasaws and Choctaws, by tradition, were a vengeful people. Historian Richard Green wrote: “In the Chickasaws’ world, for as long as anyone could remember, the clan was obligated to seek retaliation for the death of a member. This duty was carried out with religious fervor and symbolism because it was a spiritual necessity. They believed that the soul of the deceased person could not rest until his or her death had been avenged.”

But French, Spanish and British missionaries persuaded the tribes to give up the vengeful nature. Green wrote: “After a century of contact with Europeans and Americans, Chickasaws had learned that not all Christians were bad, but compared to Indians they were certainly inconsistent. The French and later Spanish missionaries preached about turning the other cheek, but the Chickasaw rarely observed the colonists doing so.”

It is ugly enough to point out an almost-unnoticed editorial in an obscure newspaper from a dying community in rural Alabama, and compare it with a defaced Black History Month Poster on the most vibrant campus of Pennsylvania’s state system. But walk the comparison just one step further — to the spiritual wake of the Civil War and formation of the Ku Klux Klan, which coincided with the Alabama tribes’ Great Removal (from the late 1830s to the 1890s).

It might be perceived that the once-dominant race of Linden preached tolerance and brotherhood, and demonstrated something else — something that resurfaced last week. Such injustice and hate can produce only bitter fruit — if any fruit at all.

Let’s be careful not to invite such a drought on our own territory. Hatred and violence are always weapons of self-defeat.