portland imc - 2007.10.06 - “Hammerskin Nation” Neo-Nazi Gathering Location Revealed

More background info

08.Oct.2007 04:31

Anti-fascist organizing in Portland 1988-1993

pdf version of 2004 Little Beirut Article

https://tern.riseup.net/sm/src/download.php?startMessage=1&passed_id=20418&mailbox=INBOX&ent_id=2&passed_ent_id=0

text version:

[this was taken from Little Beirut Winter-Spring 2004 issue, Little Beirut
was an anti-capitalist / anti-authoritarian newspaper in Portland the
original format is attatched as a pdf. the article is cut and pasted
below. Forward to other folks to have a read.]

Portland History in Review: A Hundred Little Hitlers
Elinor Langer, Metropolitan Books, 2003

At the end of a recent forum in Portland on Elinor Langer's important new
book on the rise of neo-fascist groups in the U.S., A Hundred Little
Hitlers, someone in the audience rose and asked an embarrassing question.

The panel, which was assembled by the Oregon Council on Humanities, was
full of heavy hitters. Four white guys, including the president of Reed
College and an editor of the Oregonian, a historian and somebody whose
title I've forgotten, were suited up and ready to take on questions of
evil and racism. Langer and Kathleen Sadaat, a respected African-American
community activist, were also present.

At the end of the presentation, it was obvious that the audience wanted
more than the meandering abstractions that were offered up. One woman went
to the front of the stage and talked movingly about the recent attack on
her husband in downtown Portland. His attackers mistook him for an Arab
man before they put him in the hospital. One of the first shouted
questions (the organizers of the event evidently did not plan on
participation - there were no microphones in the audience), was the
embarrassing one: "What do you do when you discover that there are nazi
skinheads in your community?"

As is usually the case at such events, the answer did not come from the
panel.

Let us imagine instead that the auditorium was filled with the people who
spent a good amount of their waking hours a little over a dozen years ago
trying to drive nazi skinheads out of Portland. The lecture hall could not
have contained the hundreds, indeed thousands of people who were part of
that effort. But before we question
the audience, let's acknowledge a debt.

II
Those of us who hate neo-fascists and neofascism owe Elinor Langer a debt
of thanks.

The first, belated, thanks are for the publication of her magazine-length
article on nazi boneheads in a special edition of The Nation in 1990. From
1988 through roughly 1993, Portland, Oregon was a center, if not the
center, of racist skinhead organizing in the United States. It was
difficult for those outside of the city - just as it is for people in
Portland now - to conceive just how many boneheads there were and why they
were such a threat to the nascent
gay and lesbian community, the progressive and radical community, the
communities of color and the punk scene that were all part of Portland.

Thirteen-year-old kids would go to all ages shows at the Satryicon and
come away muttering, "Maybe this punk rock is not for me," when crews of
shaved-head, Doc Marten'd people would clear out the mosh pits. There were
daytime attacks on people of color in Pioneer Courthouse Square and
'hippies' along Hawthorne Avenue by small gangs of nazi punks. Weekend
beer bashes with scores of boneheads were a common event, with physical
attacks and racist graffiti sprees a common aftermath. Here is the police
report on what they removed from one carload of boneheads (who were out
hunting for a group of us): .45 caliber pistol, .357 Magnum revolver, 12-
gauge pump shotgun, .22 caliber rifle. Spare clips for all. 3 knives, one
baseball bat. That car had four nazi punks.

Langer captured the potential threat of that emerging movement and
subculture in the special issue of The Nation. It was used by the
Coalition for Human Dignity (which she correctly identifies as the main
grass-roots organization opposing the neo-fascists in Portland) both as an
educational tool and as a means of raising funds. Kids who knew they hated
the local gang of white youths, who were usually just bullies learning to
do racist graffiti, learned about the
long and inglorious history of fascism. Older antiracists who were
familiar with the Klan and similar organizations learned that the new face
of fascism would not be caught dead or alive in a pointy-headed sheet.

The second thanks are for her new book. One Hundred Little Hitlers is not
written as an organizing manual. But merely (!) telling the truth is
always revolutionary. Again and again, Langer digs up the story from the
participants and lets them tell what actually happened.

What results is a history that many people don't like: Tom Metzger, who
rightfully occupies center stage in her book, may have been convicted in
trial and Ken Mieske, who killed Mulegeta Seraw, may be rotting in OSP,
but white supremacy and the neo-fascist movement were untouched by the
legal machinations.
Langer makes her points time and again: The boneheads didn't come from
Germany or even southern California. They were not stupid or cowardly. The
arrests and trial in Portland, which she correctly views as more akin to a
morality play, did nothing to slow them as a political movement.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and Morris Dees, who have pimped off the
death of Mulugeta Seraw for fifteen years, should feel a little shamed by
Langer's work. The neo-liberal political establishment of Portland, which
was working overtime to portray Portland as a safe place for Asian capital
and visitors, has to be uncomfortable with the evidence she amasses to
show that a deep-seated racist past, not a few California agitators, were
behind the continuing
attacks on people of color in Portland.

III
Another book remains to be written. So let us return to the audience and
ask them for the history of how the neo-nazis were driven out of Portland.

Let's start at the beginning, right after Mulugeta Seraw's death in 1988.

The first rally to protest the death of Seraw was called by African
students in Portland a few days later, in spite of opposition by the
police and neo-liberal politicians (and some progressive groups).

When hundreds of people showed up, the governor of Oregon, Neil
Goldschmidt, asked to speak. The rally organizers, who did not even know
who he was, allowed him to talk. So began a continuing effort to coopt the
grass-roots movement against neo-fascists, while attacking those who
carried out militant actions.

The Coalition for Human Dignity initially met in the same chambers used by
the Portland City Council. The community activists and college kids who
composed its members spent much of 1989 vacillating between calling
rallies, attempting to get city and union resolutions passed and taking
direct action.

The decision was finally made to attack the boneheads where they lived,
worked and played. While the Oregonian and neo-liberal politicians made
speeches against "hate", the remaining members of CHD, along with the new
groups Anti-Racist Action and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice decided
to destroy the fascist groups in town. This meant that they were to be
confronted when they appeared publicly but, more importantly, they would
be attacked in
ways that they were not prepared for.

ARA, SHARP and members of the punk music community, including members of
CHD, began to drive the boneheads out of the clubs and the culture. Bands
that had huge local followings, such as Poison Idea or Sweaty Nipples,
stopped concerts to speak against boneheads and vowed not to play if they
congregated at their shows. Some bands changed their names, such as
Wehrmacht or took on confrontational anti-racist names, such as
Crackerbash.

Security at most of the clubs began refusing to let open boneheads into
the clubs - which led to tense scenes such as the 1991 Fugazi show at Pine
Street Theater when a hundred boneheads, male and female, showed up and
threatened to burn it down if they were not let in. They didn't get in.
Individual ARA or SHARP members would confront boneheads outside of clubs,
as when a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese punk girl in ARA blasted four
boneheads in the face with Mace. Punk poster artists who had made Portland
famous turned their talents to anti-fascist art.

We ousted the nazis from their jobs. When reliable reports would emerge
about boneheads who were leading attacks at clubs, members of the CHD
would do research. If he had a job at the Olive Garden, 50- 100 activists
from CHD, ARA, SHARP, the Lesbian Community Project, Black United Front,
ACT-UP and other organizations would show up unexpectedly at his
workplace. Flyers featuring his photo and a description of his attacks and
his organizational
beliefs would go into the hands of his co-workers and anyone going to eat.

We would meet with the manager of the business, let them know what was
going to happen, notify the local media and wait for the inevitable.

It may have been a shit job, but in every case where we placed a picket,
the bonehead lost the shit job, usually that day and usually because his
co-workers refused to work while he was there.

We evicted them from our communities. The inner and outer Southeast were
pockmarked with known bonehead houses. After the Coalition for Human
Dignity became known for going after the boneheads (and, it should be
noted, CHD had a phone number, unlike SHARP or ARA. One of the measures we
used to gauge success was how many death threats were made to it on a
weekly basis) a number of the neighborhood associations began contacting
us, rather than the police.

Most boneheads rented. Dozens lost their crash pads when a picket line
composed of anti-racist activists and neighborhood residents showed up at
their front door, while a few CHD members and neighborhood association
people met with their landlords. Since nazi punks had a predilection for
loud parties, spraypainting on their walls and threatening their
neighbors, most landlords were happy to move them out.

We defended our community. A number of individuals who had been attacked
by nazi thugs told the Coalition that the police blew off their requests
for protection. These ranged from an elderly woman who had sheltered kids
hiding from nazi punks to members of SHARP whose apartment was attacked.
Armed volunteers slept overnight, sometimes for weeks-long stretches, at
houses that neo-nazi gangs had attacked.

From those volunteers, many of which went on to train in martial arts,
there also emerged a group of people who carried out defensive strikes on
the houses and vehicles of boneheads who had attacked people.

Bob Heick, who had moved to Portland from the Bay Area with the stated
delusion of launching the American Front as the 'foremost U.S. neo-nazi
organization', asked for police protection from unknown individuals. He
complained to the media that he could not sleep safely in his home after
it was hit three times. These attacks were not always coordinated or well
thought out. Members of SHARP were jailed and imprisoned for attacks in
which boneheads were severely injured and/or killed.

The political attack against the neo-nazis occurred despite a COINTELPRO
operation against the anti-racist activists, with the FBI and Portland
police meeting regularly (a dozen years before the current Portland Joint
Terrorism Task Force).

As Langer notes in her book, the centerpiece of a "Dignity and Diversity"
week before the trial of the Metzgers in October, 1990, was a march and
rally in Portland. 5,000 people marched from the site of Seraw's murder to
a rally near Portland State University, where John Trudell, Hitting Birth
and other acts performed.

What Langer does not note is that Portland police made repeated attempts
to stop or disrupt the organizing, which was a joint effort by the Lesbian
Community Project, ARA, SHARP, CHD and over 30 other community groups.
Besides getting PSU to pull the park permit which had already been granted
and threatening to revoke the parade permit, the police planted stories in
the local media about car bombs along the parade route.

Organizers stated that the march and rally would occur as scheduled,
permits or no permits.

The event went forward, though surrounded by massive police presence. When
local politicians counted heads and showed up to go to the front of the
event, they were escorted back. None were allowed to speak at the rally.

Drawing heavily from the FBI and police sources, the Oregonian at one
point ran 13 straight stories about SHARP, calling them a 'gang' without
ever interviewing a member. One such planted story declared that the
police had broken up a Laurelhurst park neo-fascist rally on Hitler's
birthday, when in fact it had been an anti-racist picnic with a contingent
of Asian and Native American folks present.

Local TV media were no better. At another critical point, after the murder
of a bonehead, Bomber Dave, TV stations broadcast interviews with both the
police and local neo-nazis that blamed SHARP. It was eventually revealed
that two women and two men from his own bonehead crew had kicked him to
death.

IV
Why is it important to know this history?

Here is a headline: "Racist gang leader sentenced to 3 years in hate crime
series."

Those sentences were not written in 1989 or 1992. That was the Oregonian
on December 9,2003. A November Tribune headline noted that a neo-fascist
group attacked a Black man and someone that they thought was a SHARP
member. An Indy Media Portland post asks what to do about nazi punks at
shows.

The boneheads are still here, albeit in smaller and less public
formations. No neo-fascist group has dared to call a public gathering in
or near Portland in a decade.

But the conditions that led to the emergence of the Boot Boys and East
Side White Pride (two local bonehead groups) and WAR (Metzger's national
organization) still exist. If anything, as Langer points out, those who
consider themselves part of such a movement would number in the hundreds
of thousands, not the ten thousand that was estimated in 1990.

It is important to remember that those who drove the boneheads out of
Portland were, for the most part, young people in their late teens and
early twenties.

It is important to understand that it was the decision to destroy the
groups and to do so regardless of what the cops, the media and the city
were doing, rather than any one tactic or event that gained the successes
that occurred.

It is crucial to realize that both the nazis and the state have learned
from what happened here and are unlikely to repeat their mistakes again.

I have not used the names of any of the people who were crucial to the
destruction of neo-nazi groups in Portland. While they are scattered from
Brazil to Boston, some of them still have their names posted on
neo-fascist bulletin boards. Let me honor only one: Kirk Douglas, Native
American, out gay man, anti-nazi activist. Died of AIDS in 1990.

M.Treloar is a white guy who will live to see the
destruction of whiteness.

regions

topic pages

genres

actions

resources

global imc
network:

“Hammerskin Nation” Neo-Nazi Gathering Location Revealed