Sikh community saves Fourth of July fireworks display that needed $10,000

The American Sikh community has been trying to raise awareness about their religion with a PR campaign

A Sikh community saved the Fourth of July fireworks celebration for a city in California (Mark Makela/Getty Images)

A local Sikh community in California’s Central Valley has saved the local Fourth of July fireworks display for their city.

The group chipped in $10,000 after the fireworks display was cancelled due to financial concerns, ensuring that the spectacular event — which doubles as a benefit for a children’s charity — could continue. The display is put on by the city of Visalia, a locale with 120,000 residents.

“Visalia considers this to be very generous and helpful. We appreciate their show of patriotic support, as one of our newer groups of American citizens,” Warren Gubler, the mayor of the city, told NBC News.

The kind donation is a part of a larger campaign across the country to raise awareness amongst Americans around the Sikh religion. That effort, launched this year, includes $1 million in television advertising that shows Sikh families engaging in American activities like playing football, talking about their love for “Game of Thrones”, and telling people that “Sikh values are American values.”

Sikhs are members of the world’s fifth largest religious group, and are often mistaken for being Muslim because they wear turbans. The religious group originates in India.

There are about a half a million Sikhs living in the United States, and their mistaken Muslim identity has led them to be discriminated against in the years since the September 11 attacks that pulled the country into multiple wars in the Middle East.

So, the Sikh community is pushing back, even if religions don’t frequently hire PR representation to mould their public image.

“Sikhs have been in this area over 100 years. We’ve been in the world wars, the industrial revolution, the agricultural revolution,” Bill Singh Nijjer, a Sikh activist in Fresno, told NBC. “We haven’t done any outreach. That is probably the reason we were targeted and misidentified.”

They seem to face un uphill climb to achieve recognition in the US. Almost 60 percent of Americans say that they know nothing at all about Sikhs, a dangerous lack of understanding that has led them to be targeted across the country.