 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." The Jena 6 are African-American youth implicated in
beating a White student during a school brawl nearly a year ago at Jena
High School. Only one of the alleged attackers, Mychal Bell, remains in
custody. 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. Other White supremacist
sites reprinted the information and one gave directions to his house
with a satellite map of the neighborhood. 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. A similar
high-profile investigation into Emmett Till’s murder was conducted by
the department, only to end in no arrests or indictments. 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, promising future violence and
calling for lynching African-Americans. Another White supremacist
site is vanguardnewsnetwork.com, operated by Alex Linder. Postings on
VNN’s site were especially virulent in the days leading up to last
Thursday’s march through downtown Jena, La. “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.
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Jena 6: Too Early to Celebrate
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