Blood and Politics (25 page)

At the beginning of the day, while civil rights paraders were still approaching the downtown square, these three thousand white counter-protesters waited, playing a seesaw game of push and shove with the National Guard and a tough squad of GBI agents. Rocks were thrown from the back of the crowd, and the agents charged in to make arrests. The crowd would then surge, taunting the troops and protecting the offenders, their spirits buoyed by the conflict. But the raucous tenor of the white protest quickly changed as the first group of brotherhood marchers began to arrive. “Well, there they are boys. There’s your future communist party,” somebody said clearly as the crowd began to quiet. As row after multiracial row filled the town, the white mob began to lose its bounce. They hadn’t expected so large a civil rights demonstration, and the number of white participants began to shake them up. They had expected a much smaller, virtually all-black march. “Goddam boys, we’ve lost this country,” one white-robed man said. “That’s it. We’ve lost this country.”
²⁸

As will become evident, David Duke drew an opposite conclusion from the same set of events.

Other events in the Southeast pointed at the complexity of white supremacist activities during this period. An amalgamation of groups paraded on January 17 through Pulaski, Tennessee, the town in which the post–Civil War Klan had first formed. Ceremonially lead by the Aryan Nations chief Robert Miles, the Pulaski parade was organized by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, now led by Thom Robb. From the same postwar boomer generation as David Duke, Robb had been born in Michigan and in the mid-1970s settled down near Harrison, Arkansas, just a few miles down the road from where James Ellison had established a church. While a member of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Robb still published his own periodical,
The Torch
, which ostensibly purveyed a version of Christian Identity theology. The tabloid combined national socialist ideas with Klan-crafted Americana. In one edition Robb wrote: “we endorse and seek the execution of all homosexuals.”
²⁹
In another he reiterated the common theme of white dispossession: “It is not our government that is working to promote homosexuality, race-mixing,
abortion and the destruction of our Christian faith—it is their government.”
³⁰
He had become the Knights’ national chaplain in 1980, the year David Duke resigned from the Klan. When Duke’s successor, Don Black, finally went to prison in 1982, Robb pledged undying fealty to his incarcerated leader.
³¹
Shortly thereafter, however, Robb proceeded Brutus style to undermine Black’s leadership and win effective control (if not the highest title) of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Following the language used by Robert Miles, Robb had maintained that his Knights group was a Fifth Era Klan. Like much else said by Robb, it was a hollow claim. Instead of creating a secretive night-riding paramilitary, as Miles had envisioned the Fifth Era, Robb had only adopted its symbols, such as emblazoning his propaganda with the numeric code designating clandestinity. Nevertheless, Robb’s Knights became a visible force in white supremacist circles, and it continued public rallies, paraded through town squares, and burned wooden crosses. This event in Tennessee showcased his Klan’s strength in the Southeast in the same way as a July congress in Idaho displayed Aryan Nations’ strength in the Northwest. One hundred Kluxers walked two or three abreast before retiring to a nighttime cross burning at a nearby farm on the Saturday before the King holiday, the same day as the first brotherhood march had been stopped with rocks and bottles in Georgia.

A completely different Klan faction marched in a similar fashion that same weekend in Summerville, South Carolina.

A fourth rally also occurred on Sunday, January 18, in Raleigh, North Carolina. In previous years North Carolina events had been organized by a group called the Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan that had then changed its name to the White Patriot Party.
³²
The hybrid organization grafted uniformed paramilitarism and Naziesque ideology onto its roots as a white-robed Klan group. This troop had grown geometrically during the mid-1980s, and its annual mid-January parade through the state capital routinely drew several hundred men and several dozen women. They carried Confederate flags, wore camouflage fatigues, and marched in tight military-style columns behind a banner declaring their “love” for Robert Mathews’s Order or hatred of the “Zionist” government. The White Patriot Party considered itself the militia of an emerging Carolina Republic for Aryans, one of the many mininationalisms dancing around in movement heads at the time.
³³
At its height this organization had more than one thousand members, most of them in North Carolina. Party leaders recruited active-duty marines, obtained heavy weapons, including LAW rockets (light antitank weapons), and concocted a detailed military plot for seizing power.
³⁴
The Raleigh event in 1987 was smaller than past anti-King rallies in North Carolina, as an
ideologically focused troop of eighty-five political soldiers carried on the tradition under the name Southern National Front.
³⁵
But it was no less significant.

Nevertheless, the Raleigh march was dwarfed by events the night of January 17 in Shelby, North Carolina, where five men were shot in the back of the head as they lay facedown in an adult bookstore. Three died immediately, as the perpetrators set the shop on fire. Two managed to survive. The complete story of the Shelby bookstore murders remains unknown, forever shrouded by fear and bigotry. The bookstore, which was known for catering to gay men, had been a local target in a statewide “antiporn” drive by the U.S. attorney, and few would leap to the defense of its habitués. Local police and press speculated at first that the assassination-style murders were drug- or organized crime– related, ignoring evidence to the contrary. The father of one of the victims claimed his son was only at the bookstore as a Christian witness against pornography.
³⁶

Months after the killings, a reporter for
The Fayetteville Observer
developed a source that claimed that known white supremacists believed the bookstore victims were gay and shot them to “avenge Yahweh on homosexuals.”
³⁷

Eventually two men associated with the White Patriot Party were indicted for the murders and arson, and one of them went to trial more than two years after the crimes. The prosecutor relied heavily on testimony by White Patriot defectors and turncoats to make his case. He missed real opportunities to turn defense testimony to the prosecution’s advantage. And the criminal case collapsed completely as the defense team accused one of the turncoat witnesses of being the crime’s actual perpetrator. Essentially one faction of the White Patriot Party accused the other of murder, leading to a situation in which the jury could not determine who was actually guilty. The prosecution’s ineptness was compounded by deep social conflicts about homosexuality, which were an unstated influence upon the all-white jury, according to Mab Segrest, who monitored the trial daily for a civil rights group and later wrote about the case in her book
Memoir of a Race Traitor
.
³⁸
In the end, one former White Patriot Party warrior was found not guilty. The other never went to trial. Nobody was ever convicted for these heinous crimes in North Carolina.
³⁹

The bookstore murders were one moment in a seeming eternity of violence aimed at gay men and lesbians. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force documented 2,042 incidents of antigay violence in 1985. Reports doubled in 1986, and the task force documented 4,946 incidents, including 80 homicides.
⁴⁰
Of course, homophobia is not the sole
province of white supremacists, and only a small percentage of crimes motivated by antigay bigotry were perpetrated by members of organized groups. During that period, laws against “sodomy” remained on the books in many states, and the basic civil rights of gays and lesbians often remain unprotected. Society stayed at odds with itself over everything gay and lesbian, from military service to officially sanctioned marriages. For many religious fundamentalists, homosexuality is a biblical abomination, and they say so regularly from their pulpits and on their television ministries. The repetition of noxious remarks about gays and lesbians often goes without public censure. Discrimination and violence have naturally followed, including constant campaigning against the so-called Homosexual Agenda by the Christian conservative wing of the Republican Party.

For members of the White Patriot Party, such as those indicted but not convicted in the Shelby murders, homophobia was a salient part of their total ideology.
⁴¹
Like the cultists at the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord compound and the warriors at Aryan Nations, the White Patriot Party adhered to the tenets of Christian Identity. For these Identity believers, homosexuality is a sin, much like interracial marriage.
⁴²
Within this framework, an individual committing murder to prevent interracial sex or stop homosexuality is regarded as morally upright. Similarly, a mob like that in Forsyth County is believed to be justified when throwing rocks and bottles to preserve white enclaves from racial integration. (By racist reasoning, integration leads to mixed matings in any case.)

These similarities between the Forsyth riot and the Shelby bookstore murders should not obscure the differences. Even if both events occurred on the same day in the same region of the country and the perpetrators shared a common set of ideological preconceptions, they were separated by more than just the differing targets (multiracial marchers versus gay men) or the level of violence employed (felonious assault versus homicide). Shelby was presumably the work of a small band of hardened ideologues, much like those Order members who murdered talk radio host Alan Berg. (Remember no one was ever convicted under state law for murder in the Berg case because no murder charges had been brought.) Forsyth County, on the other hand, was a mass action by hundreds of ordinary white people.

Klan groups had spent the last ten years cultivating the small towns and villages of north Georgia. Almost every resident had driven by a Klan “roadblock” at one street intersection or another, where white-robed
crusaders distributed propaganda while collecting money in buckets. Saturday afternoon parades through small town squares and nighttime cross burnings were also commonplace, particularly during the summer months. Dropping a dollar bill in a bucket or picking up a piece of racist propaganda did not mean that you had joined the Klan. But the constant presence of public activity tended to normalize these groups. In this fashion, Klan groups influenced social standards without ever being elected to office or lobbying public policy makers. Turning ordinary nonaffiliated white youths into a racist, violence-prone mob thus took little more than a presumptive threat and a fake front leaflet from the Klan.

The differences between vanguardists, like those who had presumably pulled the trigger at the Shelby bookstore, and mainstreamers were most stark at this moment. Robert Mathews had started his small guerrilla army because he reasoned that most white people were “cowardly, sheepish, degenerates.” Now David Duke argued the opposite: that white people actually agreed with the movement on gut issues. Even if most whites didn’t have a “scientific” understanding of race, Duke surmised, they were against affirmative action, integrated neighborhoods, school busing, and immigration. They simply needed a “voice” to say in public what they really thought in private.
⁴³
He wanted to be that voice but had difficulty over the next year finding an organizational platform tall enough to enable him to be heard. His first stop was a Populist Party meeting.

March 7, 1987.
“I’ve been active for fifteen years,” David Duke told a hotel room of Populist Party activists meeting outside Pittsburgh. “This was the largest pro-white demonstration I’ve ever seen,” he said of the three thousand white counterprotesters the day he had been arrested. Duke thought more than just a large demonstration had occurred. “I believe that Forsyth County was the genesis of an entirely new movement.” Duke had long exhibited a sixth sense for fresh chances to stir the white protest pot, and he regarded the Forsyth events as an omen of greater events to come. “There are going to be tremendous opportunities to take this country back . . . for the founding majority,” he said. “Forsyth County was a tremendous victory.”
¹

On these points, Duke proved correct. An insurgency was definitely in the offing. But he had picked an odd venue to announce this latest bit of tea leaf reading. While the Populist Party’s founders presumed it would become the vehicle to build a voting bloc, at that moment it was obviously ill prepared to capitalize on any kind of spontaneous mass development. Similarly, Liberty Lobby and
The Spotlight
did not even recognize that something out of the ordinary had occurred in Forsyth County. The tabloid waited until the week of the March meeting to mention it. When
The Spotlight
did finally report on the white counter-protest, it was only to excoriate the supposed “communist” presence at the civil rights march and the arrest of Duke.
²
Not a word about an “entirely new movement.” While David Duke was geared up to lead, the Populist Party was not yet ready for him.

After the 1984 election year, the party had been troubled by financial and organizational wrangling. A rapid succession of national chairmen had followed Mississippian Bob Weems’s short tenure, adding instability
to the money troubles. The alliance between Willis Carto and William Shearer had disintegrated into a faction fight over party funds. Carto claimed that the Populist Party owed Liberty Lobby $289,326.19 for expenses incurred during the party’s formation and abortive presidential campaign.
³
Shearer, who controlled the party’s nominal national office, didn’t want to pay Carto’s bill. He claimed that Liberty Lobby’s expenses were not the Populist Party’s concern.