Racism In The 80s

While the covert racism of Ronald Reagan and dogwhistle 'Law and Order' conservatives is well documented, there was a rampant culture of dominative white supremacy in the 1980s.

In 1979, Vietnamese refugees in the Galveston Bay Area of Texas were taking up shrimp boating in large numbers, as well as being employed by local crab factories. A rise in overall fishing meant a reduced catch, and more imports meant low profits. Whites in the area were predictably pissed and started harassing the Vietnamese and being racist. In August, a fist fight broke out between whites and Vietnamese that culminated in the self defense shooting death of a white crabber. The crabber’s father told a local paper, “As long as there’s one [slur] left in a fishing town in this Gulf Coast, there’s going to be trouble. There’s going to be war.” Vietnamese boats were set on fire from 1979 to 1981, and a crab plant that hired many Vietnamese refugees was bombed. Hearing about the struggles of their disenfranchised white brethren, the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan descended upon the area to further agitate the issue.

On Valentine’s Day, 1981, white fishermen held a rally with support from the Grand Wizard of the Texas KKK, Louis Beam. In addition to leading the Klan, Beam was a Vietnam veteran, author of 1983’s Essays of A Klansman, and leader of the Texas Emergency Reserve, an armed militia whose members also showed up in Galveston. Beam told the roughly 350 assembled white fishermen that he would give the Texas government until May 15, the start of shrimping season, to get rid of the Vietnamese who were stealing white jobs. Killing time until the deadline (at which time the government did not comply), the racists burned an effigy and held a fish fry, symbolically continuing the klan tradition of killing or terrorizing and eating while doing so. The Vietnamese fishermen and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a suit against Beams’ branch of the KKK, which led to a judicial order disbanding the group and shutting down his five training camps.

While the Vietnamese won the right to stay and shrimp on Galveston’s shores, the aspects of Beam’s racist spectacle— white victimhood and populist sentiment— would continue to impact the far right and broader, more moderate politics on the American landscape. Beam would pop up for attempted terrorist plots and participation in the Aryan Nations for the rest of the decade. In 1984 he also started the Aryan Liberty Net, a pre-internet computer network linking Idaho, Texas, North Carolina and Chicago. On the network he emphasized leaderless resistance, or lone wolf crimes.

These groups and people like Beam were becoming increasingly paramilitary in nature. In 1981, several KKK and white supremacist group members developed Operation Red Dog, a highly convoluted plot to overthrow the government of Dominica, a Caribbean island. Dominica had suffered through a bad hurricane that year, and much of the population was poor and unhoused.  For two years the white supremacists stockpiled weapons and recruiting mercenaries, thinking they could waltz in and install former Barbados revolutionary Patrick John into power. What did Patrick John believe he had to gain from this group of white supremacists? Drug and sex trafficking revenue, and maybe some legitimate tourism or logging. On the morning of April 27th in New Orleans, as the group of ten men set to take sail with their weapons and racist flags, they were arrested. The media called the failed invasion the Bayou of Pigs. Patrick John was shipped off to Barbados and jailed for treason. Meanwhile, all of the American wannabe mercenaries, including Don Black, were sentenced to federal prison for 3 years for violating the neutrality act. While inside, Don Black took computer programming classes that would help him start hate website Stormfront years later. 

The KKK, Don Black’s original bread and butter, was no longer the frightening, powerful entity it was earlier in the 20th century, but it was rebranding itself and splintering into more perniciously dangerous factions. At the start of the decade, official dues-paying membership was at least 12,000 strong. Branches in states like the aforementioned Texas set up paramilitary training camps, offered to assist the INS in patrolling the US/Mexico border for undocumented people, held rallies nationwide, and some members even won party nominations in California and Michigan. An undercover journalist, J.W. Thompson, completed a months-long exposé in which he found that the Klan privately enjoyed financial support from prominent individuals in local communities.

At the dawn of the 80s, the Klan was also aggressively pursuing white children between the ages of 10-17 through the Klan Youth Corps. Children were estimated to make up 10% of Klan numbers. Leaders were changing their tactics of engaging children, with one telling a newspaper, ''Now we make the meetings fun -they're 90 percent play, 10 percent business. We see the Youth Corps as an alternative to the Boy Scouts. And the children recruit each other. In schools with racial problems, a Klansman will go to the school grounds and pass out literature.’' Pamphlets asked, “Have you ‘had it’ with blacks following you home to beat you up… or ‘holding your lunch money for you? Are you really uptight because white girls have to submit to being molested by crowds of grinning black thugs?” These clearly capitalized on familiar racist tropes, but with a teenage spin. Interested youth were directed to mail atleast $6 to headquarters with their application. The National Education Association warned about Klan recruitment of children at it’s 1981 convention and put money into training, informing, and assisting teachers. Some states school districts became directly involved. Reported one paper after a rise in racist harassment,“To combat a rising tide of racial incidents and increasing efforts by the Ku Klux Klan to reach out to youngsters, New Jersey schoolchildren will be studying the Klan's history and tactics this year.”

While the Klan continued it’s growth tactics in an increasingly diverse America, other groups of white supremacists were refining their arguments and justifications in new groups who had more mainstream appeal because they didn’t evoke images of backwater rednecks. Former KKK leader David Duke left the Klan in 1979 to start the National Association For The Advancement of White People, which was presented as a more palatable form of white supremacist politics. So much so, it was referred to as “the klan without robes.” Playing up the white man’s status as perpetual victim at the hands of intrusive foreigners and no-good-blacks, the NAAWP published newspapers throughout the decade to an annual audience of roughly 18,000. The newspaper published articles about “the black population bomb” and was otherwise blatantly racist and anti-Semitic. David Duke himself would briefly fall out of the mainstream spotlight for the majority of the decade, until he randomly popped up in 1989 and entered a special runoff election for the Louisiana House as a republican.

Duke claimed to be a changed man, no longer identifying with his past nazism and racism, despite the 1980s news editorials. Duke’s opponent, republican John Treen, had support from George Bush and Ronald Reagan, but he was also in favor of higher property taxes, a fact Duke exploited. It also helped matters that Duke expressed many of the racist fears that white Louisianans and republicans in general worried about. Reported one paper, “Republican leaders who endorsed Mr. Treen said they shared many of Mr. Duke's views on affirmative action, crime and taxes, but said his election would send the wrong signal.” Another paper interviewed Louisianans and noted an interesting and telling exchange between two friends. When both were asked of their support of Duke, one said, ’’I don't like John Treen, and I don't like niggers.’' [The other] winced at the racial slur and said he did not see Mr. Duke's campaign as being anti-black. Duke won with 50.7% of the vote, and immediately turned his attention to bigger pastures.

David Duke was hated by several of his cohorts, like Tom Metzger, who claimed that while in the KKK, Duke slept with other Klan’s members wives, saying, "His flagrant womanizing was an embarrassment to the movement.” In the 70s and early 80s, other white supremacists weren’t comfortable with Duke’s adoration of Hitler and the Third Reich, claiming that as patriotic Americans (some with World War II veteran family members) that Duke was “nothing but a nazi.” When Duke left the KKK in 1979 he claimed it was because the group was too violent, but “high-ranking KKK members reported that he fell out of favor because of his links to nazism.” As the 80s wore on, more far-right Americans would lean into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. A core component of this was the rise of computer networks, the precursors to chatrooms, forums, blogs, and social media sites. Aryan Nations, White Aryan Resistance, and other hate groups had computer networks by 1985, and that year the New York Times reported that such sites were keeping enemy databases. It was also on these sites that a variety of new perspectives were introduced to lonely, miseducated, and/or outright hateful souls. Remarked an American Defense League report on computer hate networks, “It does offer extremists a trendy way to spread hate propaganda, [but] there is little to suggest that this represents a great leap forward in the spread of anti-Semitic and racist propaganda.” That skepticism today seems laughable.

In newspapers like David Dukes and in computer networks, white supremacists were bring exposed to a new and quickly formalizing holocaust denial movement. The 1976 book, The Hoax of The 20th Century: The Case Against The Presumed Extermination of European Jewry made a quiet splash in right wing extremist circles when it was published by Arthur Butz, an electrical engineering professor at Northwestern University. In 1979 the Institute For Historical Review was founded by a group of anti-semites, and they started publishing the Journal of Historical Review in 1980. The IHR obtained the mailing list of the legitimate scholarly Organization of American Historians and mailed out its journal to the 12,000 members. The OAS said it was duped into giving the quack institute the mailing list. In addition to calling Anne Frank’s diary a hoax and posing the popular denialist theory that any dead jewish people were regular prisoner of war of starvation victims, not targets of genocide, the journal promised a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove jews were systemically gassed at Auschwitz. A Holocaust survivor and historical preservationist named Mel Mermelstein offered proof, and the IHR refused to pay.  Mermelstein launched a lawsuit seeking 17 million dollars in damages. Eventually a ruling judge would compel IHR to pay Mermelstein $50,000 and issue an apology letter, also ruling the Holocaust as an indisputable historic fact.

In 1989, a holocaust denier named Jean Claude Pressac published an objective and extensive 564-page study of Auschwitz, concluding that the Germans had acted to systemically exterminate Jewish people.  Even as more historical scholarship offering proof emerged and the Holocaust memorial museum was approved and built in D.C. in the 1980s, Holocaust denial continued, and actually grew in the decade alongside conspiracy theories of a zionist-occupied American government.  Many young white nazis adopted the look of skinheads, a subculture that originated in London and was an expression of alternative values, but not racism. Non-racist skinheads, especially black and latino ones, were pissed to be mixed up with the racist ones. Said The Washington Post, “Symbols are important: hairstyle, tattoos, leather and chains, Doc Martens boots, makeup. In the Northeast, white shoelaces indicate a white-power skin; yellow laces denote Asian bashers; pink laces, gay bashers; black shoelaces, however, mean that the wearer is antiracist.” Media reports didn’t often make the distinction between white power skinheads and non-racist ones. 

In 1983, Thomas Metzger, a former KKK grand wizard who you recall referred to David Duke as too much of a nazi, established White Aryan Resistance. His anti-Semitic views were mounting. In 1985, Metzger alleged that the Nation of Islam invited him to attend a rally at which Louis Farrakhan was speaking. The Nation of Islam did not confirm this, but Metzger and other members of WAR did attend. Metzger would tell the press that he believed that blacks and whites had the same enemy: jews, elaborating: 'We see similarities in the principles that Louis Farrakhan is talking about: the exploitation of working people by an elitist group in Washington and by corporations and by the people who are their sponsors and masters.’’ Metzger bragged about dropping $100 in the Nation of Islam coffers, to which an NOI spokesman remarked, ’'I don`t think that when you give $100 you form an alliance.’ That same spokesman did however acknowledge that Metzger had given information about potential threats of violence from Jewish groups like the Jewish Defense League.

Metzger started a public access TV show named Race and Reason from San Diego. By 1988 it was bringing in over $100,000 a year.  It was sponsored in various cities by men like one Corvalis, Oregon resident who sent Hitler-themed birthday cards to Jewish residents. Metzger was tapping into a hateful contingent of White America, unsatisfied with mainstream news. He said, ''Three years ago when cable was getting off the ground, I realized that public access channels were perfect for views like mine that were having trouble getting expressed.’’ These views included the Northwest Territorial Imperative, a belief that white Americans should leave multicultural areas for the Pacific Northwest, which had long been hostile to minorities. According to white supremacist Robert E Miles, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming had 493,782 square miles and less than 10 million total people, making it appealing to whites like himself. As documented by Kathleen Belew in Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, Miles preached that the racial revolution would be fought “not with guns, not with violence, but with love for each other. We will flood the Northwest with white babies and white children so there is no question who this land belongs to. We are going to outbreed each other.” With thoughts like these ,its no wonder white supremacists were so often entangled with the anti-abortion violence we addressed during the last episode.

Other white leaders to endorse forms of the Northwest Imperative, in which specific sections of the country were carved out specifically for whites, included David Duke and Thomas Metzger. Others, inspired by The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel about a white supremacist revolution, nuclear war, and race war, proposed resettlements in California.  The 1986 Aryan Nations Congress, attended by over 4,000 racists in Idaho, was dedicated to promoting the Northwest Territorial Imperative. One of the assembly’s squabbles was over the display of nazi and klan regalia. Recalled one white supremacist who likely thought of himself as one of the good ones, ’'We have to reach beyond the run-of-the-mill jerk who's happy just to vote conservative every four years. But dressing up in sheets and yelling 'Heil Hitler' is just stupid, it just turns people off.’’ Fellow delegates heartily disagreed with this same speaker when he claimed that white jews should be allowed into the Northwest Haven.

Some supremacists did move to the Pacific Northwest by the end of the 1980s, including Louis Beam, who moved to the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, and one Randy Weaver, who moved to Idaho with his family and began planning for the end of the world near a location called Ruby Ridge. Many of the supremacists most interested in the northwest territory were also enamored with ideas of the end of days and/or a distrust in the federal government, believed to be infiltrated by jews. They were always armed, had overlapping membership in various hate groups, and they were usually Christian Identity extremists. Christian Identity is an extremist interpretation of Christianity that believes only white people are the actual descendants of the Israelites in the Bible, and that non-whites should be systematically exterminated or enslaved. 

In 1984, a Jewish radio host named Alan Berg in Denver Colorado who challenged Christian identity and white supremacist ideals, was assassinated by the Christian Identity Group The Order. The Order, founded in 1983 by Robert Jay Matthews in Metaline Washington, was partly inspired by The Turner Diaries and wanted a revolution against the American government, which it saw as being under Jewish control, or “Zionist Occupied Government.” The group funded its activities with armored car heists, which netted them $4.1 million dollars-- only 10% of which was ever recovered by law enforcement. By the time of Alan Berg's murder, the group met its downfall when trying to pass off shitty counterfeits, bringing on RICO charges. Only two of the four guilty Order members who killed Alan Burg were convicted of the crime of violating his civil rights, but none for murder. Meanwhile, the Jewish Defense League, a fringe far-right group that had been around since 1968, continued its terrorist activities in the 80s.

From 1980-1985 there were 18 terrorist attacks by Jews on soviet diplomats, Arab Americans, and neo-nazis, and 15 were members of the Jewish Defense League, a small group of zionists who desired to “protect jews from antisemitism by whatever means necessary.” For example, in 1981 eight JDL members beat up nazi Harold Covington with steel pipes, to which he would say later on TV, “all Jews should be gassed.” But what constituted anti-Semitism? Disagreeing with Israel’s so-called right to exist, or identifying with Palestinians,  counted. The JDL  was denounced by mainstream Jewish organizations, but the violence directed at Arab-Americans exacerbated already fragile discourse surrounding the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the foul treatment of its citizens. The 1985 bombing murder of Alex Odeh, a Palestinian activist, led to failed criminal convictions of group members and negative press, and the fleeing group would largely be under the radar before resurfacing randomly in 1990s hip hop. Alex Odeh’s killers would wind up in Israel, safe and sound.

The random 1988 murder of an Ethiopian man named Mulugeta Seraw in Oregon by three WAR-affiliated members bankrupted the group. It was the type of “leaderless resistance”, aka terrorism, that white supremacists like Louis Beam were calling for. Two of the three murderers would be released. Tom Metzger, who called the killing a “civic duty,” was ordered to pay 12.5 million to the family of Mulugeta Seraw.  Unsurprisingly, his family only got a cheap house and a few thousand dollars in 1990, while Metzger rode out the 80s operating WAR clandestinely and still promoting his views. In 1989 he held what he called Aryan Woodstock. A judge ruled that the event couldn’t have music without a warrant, which went un-granted. Said one article: “A concert billed as an “Aryan Woodstock” for skinheads and white supremacists turned out to be 'boring and uncomfortable' because of rain, a lack of food and a court-ordered ban on music. About 100 people representing half a dozen white supremacist groups gathered Saturday at a private ranch about 40 miles north of San Francisco, but were far outnumbered by about 400 protesters and 500 police officers.

Morale hit bottom when police refused to let the daughter of white supremacist Tom Metzger return with $100 worth of pizzas.” So basically, they were sitting out there hungry, wet, and bored. To close out the decade of mounting hatred on the radical right, William L. Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, published Hunter. The book’s main character, a serial killer of interracial couples, was based on Joseph Paul Franklin, a Klan member and nazi drifter who was arrested in 1980 and linked to over 20 killings, many of the victims being black men, black boys, and white women. Wrote Pierce of the serial killer Franklin, almost lovingly,  “he saw his duty as a white man and did what a responsible son of his race must do.”  Shortly before Aryan Woodstock and the release of  Hunter, John Metzger, Tom’s son, appeared on an episode of Geraldo, which would go down in infamy and come to symbolize the lows of the American Media Diet.

Did you enjoy this essay on racism in the 1980s? There's more to the story! Check out the full episode below.