Mike Workman is a political activist and regular candidate for office who says he initially wanted to address the school board about the homecoming float—a situation that sparked a large gathering of Trump-supporters along Highway 67 yesterday afternoon. In a phone call with Sapulpa Times on Tuesday morning, he said he didn’t attend because he’d received “credible death threats against myself and others,” and was advised by the FBI’s Hate Crime division not to attend for his own safety.
Officers from Kiefer, Mounds, and Beggs police departments, as well as Oklahoma Highway Patrol were at the gathering yesterday afternoon. Kiefer Police Chief O’Mara said that he had not heard anything from the FBI regarding such a threat.
Workman says he’s planning to attend the next meeting on November 6th, and that he’ll continue to pursue the school board until they make a public statement admitting that the incident was wrong. “They say that they’ve ‘handled it internally,’ but they didn’t say that it was wrong,” he said.
Workman believes that the Kiefer School Board should now be considering suspending without pay both the High School Principal and the Superintendent, “for failure to do their jobs.” He says that their inaction could have caused the loss of life. “You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater; you can be pro-Trump, anti-Hillary, whatever, but not in the homecoming parade. It’s a tax-payer supported event and clearly violates federal regulations.”
Sixty-nine-year-old Workman has run for the Legislature, the U.S. Senate and state labor commissioner, and is no stranger to conflict. In April of 2019, he was arrested and charged with violating a protective order against a political opponent. In 2017, the Tulsa County Democratic Party filed for a restraining order against him, alleging that he threatened and stalked party members.
