Call it White Supremacists Gone Wild. After last Thursday's successful march in support of the Jena 6, some Whites drove around nearby Alexandria with twin nooses dangling from the back of a pickup truck. Even worse, one Website, www.overthrow.com, published the names, addresses and telephone numbers of the Jena 6 families, including the name of a juvenile previously unidentified.
The neo-Nazi site proclaimed: "Six niggers are on trial in Jena, Louisiana. Five are currently out awaiting trial. Get in touch, and let them know justice is coming. Their addresses and phone numbers are…" According to the Roanoke (Va.) Times, the site had earlier urged followers to "Lynch the Jena 6."
Jesse Jackson has urged the federal government to become involved. "These groups, heavily armed, are dangerous and pose a great threat," Jackson said in a statement issued Sunday. "…We need federal intervention. I have called the White House today to express the seriousness of this threat."
Jackson, founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, also urged presidential candidates to speak out in support of the Jena 6.
The overthrow.com site is operated by Bill White, who describes himself as the commander of the American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP). He also runs answp.com. In one of his latest rants, White refers to African-Americans as having "ape brains" and added, "Our ancestors didn't kill every raping, murdering, robbing Indian in this country to have their descendents face a bunch of raping, murdering and robbing niggers – and its [sic] time the niggers learned that."
This is not the first time White's Website has been in the news.
In June, Leonard Pitts, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Miami Herald, wrote a column about Black-on-White crime that led to death threats. Overthrow.com posted his address, his home address, his home telephone number and his wife's name.
The FBI has announced that it is conducting an inquiry into the Internet threats against Pitts and the Jena 6, but given its record in recent years, I have no confidence that they will yield anything significant. At press time, the overthrow.com site was being revamped. However, the Southern Poverty Law Center (www.Splcenter.org) in Montgomery, Ala., which has a unit that monitors hate groups, quoted information from the site when it was fully functional.
Another White supremacist site is vanguardnewsnetwork.com, operated by Alex Linder. Postings on VNN's site were especially virulent.
"The best crowd control for such a situation would be a squad of men armed with full automatics and preferably a machine gun as well," is how one person put it on the Web forum hosted by VNN. Another person declared: "I'm not really that angry at the nogs (a recent variation on the n-word) — they are just soldiers in an undeclared race war. But any white that's in that support rally I would like to … have them machine-gunned."
Leading up to the march, a third posting said: "I think a group of White men with AK rifles loaded with high capacity magazines should close in on the troop of howler monkeys from all sides and compress them into a tight group, and then White men in the buildings on both sides of the shitskinned hominids shall throw Molotov cocktails from above to cleanse the nigs by fire." It was signed "NS Cat."
Robert Moore, the leader of another racist site, www.stormfront.org, said prior to the march: "If they DO start rioting and looting and burning and raze the town to the ground, White Pride Construction will be there the next day to help them rebuild."
The Southern Poverty Law Center, in one report, observed: "In fact, Moore's company, started in 2005, has done a great deal of post-Katrina rebuilding on the Gulf Coast — a truly remarkable thing, given that its name includes a widely known racist slogan."
In a democracy, little can be done to ban the rantings of racist idiots. But knowing about them gives us time to prepare if they try to carry out their threats.
George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach.
