Apartheid. USA 1988

[p. 183]

March 6, 1988:

Three white law-enforcement officers, Bill Horton (58), James Hyden (34) and Police Chief Thomas Ladner of Hemphill, Texas, have been charged with murder in the case of the death of black Louisiana truck-driver, Loyal Garner (34). A Smith County inquest jury last month had already ruled the death a homicide. Two brothers, Johnnie and Alton Maxie, both black, and arrested together with Mr Garner on a charge of drunken driving, testified that Mr Garner was beaten in his cell after asking to make a telephone call to his wife. (See the full report, January 5, 1988). They each spent 30 minutes with the grand jury panel. They were involved in a serious traffic accident while returning home from their grand jury appearance. Sergeant James Hudgens of Louisiana State Police said the brothers' station-wagon ran off the road on a curve near Many, Louisiana. Johnnie Maxie was in critical condition at Schumpert Medical Center in Shreveport, Louisiana. Alton Maxie was treated for minor injuries and released.^228.

‘A century ago, Federal Judge Isaac C Parker presided over trials in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and sent 79 men to the gallows in an attempt to bring law and order to the frontier,’ reported Katherine Bishop in the Times. ‘Today, a portrait of the legendary ‘Hanging Judge’ looks down upon 14 white supremacists on trial in the United States District Court, charged with conspiring to overthrow the Government by force or to murder its officials, including a Federal Judge.’

The organizational affiliations of the defendants in the Fort Smith trial include some of the most militant groups on the far right. Some defendants have been members and leaders of various factions of the Ku Klux Klan while others are anti-tax radicals from the Posse Comitatus. Richard G Butler, the leader of a neo-Nazi group called Aryan Nations, sits at a table with five former members of a violent off-

228. The New York Times, from a report by the Associated Press

[p. 184]

shoot of his group called The Order, or Brüder Schweigen, which means Silent Brotherhood. Some of the defendants were involved in paramilitary training at an encampment in north-eastern Arkansas known as the Convenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord. Its affiliate, the Church of Zarepath-Horeb, teaches what is known as Identity doctrine, the religious persuasion of most of the defendants. According to this fringe fundamentalism, Jews are the offspring of Satan while blacks and other minorities are ‘mud people.’ Whites, of course, are believed to be God's chosen ones. The defendants deny that they are racists and believe that others are inherently inferior. Rather, they say, they are ‘racialists’, who simply want white people to remain separate and pure. Though several of the defendants have already been convicted on armed robberies, murders and bombings committed as part of a far-fetched scheme to establish an Aryan Nation in the Pacific North-West, they have argued here to the all-white jury that they did not want to overthrow the Government, but simply to secede from it. That is not necessarily a dirty word where a statue dedicated to ‘our Confederate deed’ stands across the street from the Courthouse.

Speeches and pamphlets calling for war and the shedding of blood were simply political rhetoric protected by the Constitution, the defendants said. They also denied that they conspired to murder anybody. The trial is expected to last at least three months. It has been estimated that some 20 000 people belong to white supremacist groups in the United States, where perhaps ten times that many are sympathizers. Two members of the Order who are on trial here were convicted on a Federal civil rights charge for killing the Denver talk show host Alan Berg, an outspoken critic of the extreme right, because he was Jewish. Throughout American History, anti-Semitism and white supremacy have taken root in rural areas.

‘What's in the mid of the American South,’ asked John Herbers in the Times. ‘Those who moved away at the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960's find the

[p. 185]

changes startling on return. An overt politics of race has given way to a politics of gain, and huge metropolitan areas have brought unprecedented prosperity to many.’

Some long-term trends have made the region more like the rest of the nation. The percentage of blacks has steadily declined, because of both post-war migration to economic opportunities in northern cities and the influx of whites from other regions, who are moving south in increasing numbers. Personal incomes, while still lagging, have moved steadily closer to the national average. The enfranchisement of blacks has moderated politics. The big landowners who once ran the governments and powerful committees in Congress have been replaced by metropolitan moderates. Yet there are threads that tie the new south to the old. The conservative values imposed on the population by a now almost extinct agrarian elite persist in the hearts and minds of most whites, both the poor and the rich.

The central cities of the South, like those of the rest of the nation, are filled with poor, jobless blacks. But the South has an additional inequity. Its old agricultural ‘black belt’, named for the color of its rich soil, is a land of the idle poor, white as much as black, displaced from the farms by machines. Dip into it anywhere from Eastern Texas to the Virginia tide-water and you find the same conditions. Meanwhile, masses of unemployed blacks are no longer migrating to Northern cities because conditions there are equally abysmal for them.

John Herbers also explains the rise of the Republican Party in the South. ‘It began growing after the Barry Goldwater defeat of 1964, when rustic insurgents took it over from blacks and the upper middle class. It is now said to be dominated by those of established wealth. This development gives credence to the observation a few years ago by the novelist Walker Percy, that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr did more to liberate Southern whites than blacks. When whites realized that desegregation had never been a real threat and that they still controlled the econ-

[p. 186]

omy, they could end their obsession with race and pursue other interests.^229.

229. The New York Times, from a report (one-page) by John Herbers