Above: Anti-klan demonstrators in Maryland
Photo © Jerome Friar, Impact Visuals

September, 1998 Labor Party Press

PITTSBURGH, PA

James Byrd Jr.’s family and friends gather at his wake. Byrd was murdered by three racists in Jasper, Texas, in June. ©Jana Birchum, Impact Visuals

Most Americans were revolted by the gruesome murder of James Byrd Jr., the Texan man who was chained to a pickup truck and dragged to death early on the morning of June 7.

Most, but evidently not all. Less than a week later a black teenager in Belleville, Illinois, was dragged alongside a sport utility vehicle driven by three white youths who yelled racial slurs in what appears to have been a copycat assault.

The apparently racially motivated murder of James Byrd and the similar assault just days later are grim reminders that hate crimes are on the increase in the U.S. The FBI received reports of nearly 9,000 hate crimes in 1996, a significant increase over the previous two years. More than half of the crimes documented in 1996 were committed by whites against blacks.

The rise in hate crimes is paralleled by increased activity by organized hate groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported a 20 percent increase in the number of hate groups last year, citing 474 nationwide. The rise in hate crimes has been linked to the growing influence wielded by hate groups through internet sites — which now number more than 300 — and white power rock music.

"The tentacles of the hate movement are reaching places where they’ve never been before," says Joe Roy, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. Adds Chris Freeman, director of research and public information for the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal (CDR), "We’re seeing a rise in hate groups across the board."

White supremacist organizations target angry working-class whites who have been downsized, disenfranchised and disillusioned by a big business-dominated economic and political system, and are ready to fight back. Playing on prejudice and fear, hate groups readily supply someone to blame — namely, African-Americans, Jews, gays, lesbians and immigrants.

The U.S. is plagued by a sometimes bewildering variety of hate groups. The Ku Klux Klan, the oldest and most notorious of U.S. hate groups, is divided into a number of factions, some of which have shown strong growth in recent years. And then there are the racist skinheads, who have been linked to dozens of murders and assaults. The National Association for the Advancement of White People, founded by David Duke in 1978, claims to have quadrupled last year. Some 100 neo-Nazi groups operate in the U.S., among them the West Virginia-based National Alliance. This group is led by William Pierce, author of the novel The Turner Diaries, which may have influenced plans for the Oklahoma City bombing. The Christian Identity movement has growing influence among both KKK members and neo-Nazis. Christian Identity teaches that Germanic peoples are the original lost tribes of Israel, that Jews are descendants of Satan and that non-whites are pre-Adamic, soulless creatures. Freeman of CDR notes that the Christian Identity movement is serving as a link among various racist right factions, and injecting its neo-Nazi philosophy into fundamentalist Christian churches.

Despite rivalries, conflicting ideologies and disagreements over tactics, all of these groups are united by their loathing of African-Americans and Jews.

Freeman points out that only five percent of hate crimes are directly attributable to individuals who can be identified as members of hate organizations. The remaining 95 percent are committed by people who have been exposed to the ideas spread by hate groups, as apparently occurred in the murder of James Byrd. One of the alleged perpetrators made a reference to The Turner Diaries, which graphically promotes racial warfare. Even worse, hate groups can – and do – influence mainstream political discussion.

Messages of hate can be found throughout Pennsylvania, where unions are joining forces with communities in a battle for the state’s soul. Although a state rich in labor history, Pennsylvania today ranks just 14th in union density nationwide — but fourth in hate group activity. White supremacist organizations targeted western Pennsylvania some 15 years ago as one of the two key areas nationwide for recruitment, says Ann Van Dyke of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission.

"If you chart the areas that have been hardest hit by the closing of steel mills and coal mines, and overlay a map of hate group activity, you discover it’s the same territory," says Van Dyke. "Where there are pockets of struggling economy, hate groups feed off the fear of the disenfranchised." And if economic insecurity provides a context for hate group recruitment, fear about changing demographics may supply a trigger. As minorities move into traditionally small, rural homogenous towns and neighborhoods, some people react with hostility.

White supremacists find fertile fields for spreading their message where community leaders fail to talk about the benefits of diversity or remain silent in the face of hate crimes or organized hate activity. "This is how it has happened before in human history, including in pre-Hitler Germany," Van Dyke says. "We can’t afford to ignore the triggering conditions."

In the mountain valleys surrounding Pittsburgh, robed Klansmen have appeared outside high schools, in town squares, on court house steps. Cross-burnings take place not far from where UMWA organizer Fannie Sellins was murdered by sheriff’s deputies in 1919. Just months before the AFL-CIO national convention came to town, the American Knights of the KKK and the Hitler Free Corps jointly staged a rally outside the Allegheny County Courthouse. UE’s Bob Clark, interim co-chair of the Labor Party, was among the labor, community and religious leaders who addressed a counter-rally several blocks away. Some 2,000 area residents – including a Labor Party contingent – attended the rally.

Today’s KKK offers itself to working-class neighborhoods as an opponent of crime, or sometimes as a defender of the environment. During the UPS strike, KKK flyers turned up near a Teamsters picketline in Greensburg, east of Pittsburgh.

The KKK came to Pennsylvania’s Butler County to exploit local opposition to a home for juvenile offenders, some of them African-Americans from Pittsburgh. Part of the opposition to the youth home is clearly based on racism. But Ed Grystar, president of the Butler County AFL-CIO and a member of the Labor Party Interim National Council, also notes that "Butler lacks good-paying jobs, and that’s what brought the Klan. People are uneasy, as they are throughout western Pennsylvania, about what’s in store for their families." In discussions with Butler County AFL-CIO delegates, Grystar compared the KKK’s appeals to the anti-immigrant rhetoric of local steel bosses during the strikes of 1909 and 1919. "It’s so obvious in our history, and it’s coming back, the same issues that were used to divide workers in the past."

Under Grystar’s leadership, the Butler AFL-CIO quickly responded to the call from the Pennsylvania Network of Unity Coalitions (PNUC) to become involved in organizing a community-wide response to a Klan rally at the county courthouse. Labor Party member Eric Vierthaler, a professor at Slippery Rock University, represented the Butler AFL-CIO at unity coalition meetings and spoke at the rally.

In community after community, neighbors — LP and union members among them — are organizing to create an atmosphere that repels racial hatred, often drawing upon working-class experience and traditions.

In the village of Yukon, population 800, neighbors organized sufficient community pressure to evict a KKK faction from what the haters hoped would be a permanent headquarters on a quiet residential street. Many in the small community were united by the memories of how their immigrant parents and grandparents battled the Klan for the right to organize the United Mine Workers.

Today’s UMWA played a conspicuous role in organizing the people of Ebensburg in Cambria County to oppose a KKK rally on the steps of that county courthouse. Merchants and county employees festooned their windows with the coalition’s green ribbons and heart-theme posters, causing a KKK official to comment, "This isn’t a very friendly place, is it?" Despite a snowstorm, some 200 people gathered in an Ebensburg middle school for remarks by clergy and Dan Kane, international representative for District Two, UMWA.

Somerset County has also been targeted by the KKK. Situated between two mountain ridges, Somerset County has relied for years on farming, logging and coal mining. But today farming is under threat and many timber mills and mines have closed.

"People who used to make $10 an hour are now making $4.50 an hour flipping hamburgers or stocking shelves at Wal-Mart," says Sam Wisor, a rank-and-file Teamster member who loads trucks with baked goods in Somerset. "What happened to our industrial base? We were sold out."

Two cross-burnings last summer alerted Wisor and wife Christine Wisor that these conditions had helped turn some of their neighbors into haters. Harassment of patrons of a local gay bar galvanized the couple into action.

"The hate was so extreme I felt my rights violated, my freedom to have the friends I choose, my freedom not to be intimidated or bullied by a few self-serving, self-righteous hatemongers," says Wisor. Hatred, he says, violates the basic principle of unity on which unions are based.

The Wisors contacted the Pennsylvania Network of Unity Coalitions, which assisted them in creating a new organization called the Network of Neighbors United. Wisor says the group is not about confrontation. "The hatemongers seem to invite confrontation," he says. "But our motto is, peace and unity in our community."

Violent confrontation is no solution to white supremacist activity, says PNUC Coordinator Mia Giunta. Instead, she argues the best response is grassroots organizing that enforces a community ethic of respect for tolerance and rejection of hatred. Giunta invites Labor Party chapters in Pennsylvania to become part of the PNUC. "This is one struggle the labor movement cannot turn its back on," she says. "Hate groups are taking labor’s own arguments about jobs and the quality of life and twisting them around to meet their purposes. They target trailer parks, where people are working two and three jobs to survive, and other places where people should instead be hearing the Labor Party message."

CDR’s Freeman observes that the KKK and other white supremacist groups hate unions because they build solidarity around class issues, bringing together working people regardless of ethnic or religious background.

What makes hate groups hate us is also our greatest source of strength: working-class unity.

—Peter Gilmore

Top of Page • September, '98 Labor Party Press