By now the whole world knows about the murders of nine African Americans holding a Bible study class at the historic Emanuel Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17. It is one of the oldest African American congregations in the United States.
Dylann Roof, a 21-year old man, has been arrested for this hate crime. It appears he became a white supremacist in large part by reading racist literature from groups such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, posted on the Internet. Roof’s own “manifesto” contains material culled from such sources.
The Council started in the 1950s in Mississippi as the Citizens’ Councils of America (also known as White Citizens’ Councils), which was formed to fight against the integration of public schools following the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling banning segregation.
There were many other Southern groups battling against the elimination of “Jim Crow” laws during the civil rights era of the 1950s-60s, including a revived Ku Klux Klan.
The era also spawned George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, founded in 1959. In July 1963, the party’s publication, The Stormtrooper, was replaced with the newspaper White Power bearing the swastika in the center of the paper.
Rockwell, who was assassinated in 1967, was a major figure in the neo-Nazi movement in the United States, and his beliefs and writings have continued to be influential among white nationalists and neo-Nazis, including the white supremacist Louisiana politician David Duke.
A former national director of the Knights of Ku Klux Klan, Duke formed the National Association for the Advancement of White People in 1980.
The most horrendous crime perpetrated by white extremists — indeed, until 9/11 the worst case of domestic terrorism in the U.S. — was the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.
They killed 168 people and injured over 600. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a 16-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings.
They were inspired by The Turner Diaries, a 1978 book written by William Luther Pierce, founder of the white supremacist National Alliance. It depicts a violent revolution in the United States which leads to a “race war” against Jews, non-whites and gays. The book has been labeled a “bible of the racist right” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The book is also associated with two extremist groups, the Aryan Nations and The Order. The former, long headquartered in Hayden Lake, Idaho, was founded in 1974 by Richard Butler, who openly admired Adolf Hitler and longed for a whites-only homeland in the Pacific Northwest.
In his youth, Butler had been a member of one of the largest pro-Hitler organizations in the United States, William Dudley Pelley’s fascist Silver Legion of America, or Silver Shirts, active in the 1930s.
In its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, Klansmen and other white nationalists convened regularly at the Aryan Nations compound for its annual world congresses. In 2000, though, the group began to fall apart after losing a civil lawsuit that depleted the group’s finances. The death of founder Richard Butler, in 2004, further weakened the group, and it splintered into various factions.
Butler’s most infamous acolyte was probably Robert J. Mathews, founder of The Order. Its members, who often referred to the federal government as ZOG (the Zionist Occupied Government), murdered Denver talk radio host Alan Berg, who was Jewish, in 1984, and Butler himself died in a confrontation with the FBI later that year.
But white supremacists of various stripes remain active. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people in the U.S. have been killed by anti-government fanatics and other racist extremists than by radical Islamists: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to New America, a Washington research center.
So Dylann Roof is heir to a long tradition of extreme right-wing antisemitic and racist groups in America.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
