The District Chronicles

Issue date: 6/21/09 Section: Politics

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On Wednesday evening June 10, I was supposed to have attended the preview of a play by Janet Cohen, an African-American writer and wife of Jewish former Secretary of the Army, Steve Cohen at the Holocaust Museum.

But that day it was attacked by James von Brunn, long-time avowed White racist. At the entrance to the Museum, von Brunn shot and killed Stephen Johns, a beloved African-American security guard who had worked there for six years.

This was a supreme irony because Janet's play, Anne and Emmett was about introducing more Americans to the lives of Anne Frank and Emmett Till, two Jewish and African-American icons of the human rights movement whose lives have been used to repudiate racist violence.

Needless to say, the preview was cancelled and I awoke the next day to find the American media cutting the foundation of American racism out of the story by emphasizing that von Brunn was a "lone wolf."

But was he really? We make two points. So-called "lone wolves" are part of a larger official community which gives them substantial legitimacy and two, when that legitimacy falters they are most likely to show their violent fangs.

With the upsurge of the conservative movement, racist violence and hate speech became staples used to mobilize people, not necessarily into racist groups, but also into campaigns and voters for elected officials.

When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, not only did he open his campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where civil rights martyrs Schwerner Goodman and Chaney were killed by the Klan, but Klan members took off their sheets and staged "Vote for Ronald Reagan" rallies at events on the campaign trail.

And even though Reagan mildly repudiated their support, the new road to the legitimacy of the radical right had been forged.

In the 1990s, as one publication put it, "a feeling of rage is building across the country," an expression of which became the militias that were forming in many states, ostensibly to protect citizens from all sorts of government conspiracies.

Many of these had ties to racist, neo-Nazi and Aryan supremacy movements and most militia members were also card carrying members of the National Rifle Association which gave them political protection. So serious was this movement regarded, that in return for grassroots assistance, some members of Congress included them in campaign operations and gave them access to government resources.

Continued...

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