Nationalist Blog by micetrap.net

Justices Decline to Hear Case of 1964 KKK Killings

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand the 2007 conviction of a former Ku Klux Klan member who was found guilty of kidnapping and slaying two black teens 45 years ago. The 5th Circuit wanted the high court to decide if too much time had passed between the crime and James Ford Seale’s arrest.
Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia objected to the Supreme Court’s decision, arguing the case “presents us with a pure question of law that may well determine the outcome of a number of cases of ugly racial violence from the 1960s.”
Seale was arrested and convicted in 2007 after the May 1964 killings of Charles Moore and Henry Dee.
The two 19-year-olds were abducted, tied to trees and whipped before they were latched to engine blocks and thrown into the Mississippi River.
The 5th Circuit overturned Seale’s conviction in 2008 because the statute of limitations had expired. But the full circuit was deadlocked, and the original ruling stood.
The case goes back to the 5th Circuit.

Skinhead movement no longer what it once was, group says

The skinhead movement, which began in England in the early 1980s, began moving into the Dallas area in the mid-1980s, according to a national group that monitors such groups.

By the late 1980s, authorities had become so concerned about attacks by one group, the Confederate Hammerskins, on African-Americans, gays and lesbians, and synagogues that they investigated and prosecuted 17 Hammerskin leaders in 1990, said Mark Briskman, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.

Convinced that sending the 17 leaders to federal prison had delivered a knockout blow to the Hammerskins, Briskman was stunned barely a year later when three teenagers with ties to the Hammerskins killed an Arlington black man.

“I was hoping and anticipating that we’d see a dramatic change after the 1990 trial,” he said. “Then the Arlington incident comes along a year later. I obviously had real concerns that maybe [the convictions] had not had a major impact at all.”

The judge in Christopher Brosky’s 1993 trial for Donald Thomas’ murder limited the evidence jurors heard about Brosky’s ties to the Hammerskins.

However, after the jury sentenced Brosky to probation, community outrage led to a second trial. In part because the charges were different, the judge allowed evidence about the skinhead group and Brosky’s — and his two co-defendants’ — ties to it. Brosky was sentenced to 40 years in prison for engaging in organized criminal activity.

Thomas’ killing was the last organized, racially motivated crime linked to the Confederate Hammerskins, Briskman said.

Although Hammerskin Nation, the umbrella group that includes the Dallas group, still has a Web site, it hasn’t been updated since 2002, and messages sent to the e-mail address were not returned.

Several publications by the Anti-Defamation League and other civil-rights groups still list the Confederate Hammerskins as an active group.

One member brutally assaulted a man in a bar fight recently, but the victim was white, and the attack was not orchestrated by the group, Briskman said.

“Our impression is that they don’t exist in an organized format,” Briskman said. “It took a few more years for the 1990 prosecution to fully filter down to everybody in the movement.

“The Arlington incident may have been their last hurrah.”

That’s not to say that there are no more white supremacist groups or that the groups won’t flourish again, Briskman said.

Three men convicted of killing James Byrd Jr. in Jasper by slashing his throat, beating him, dragging him behind a truck, then decapitating him weren’t skinheads, but they had ties to the Ku Klux Klan, Briskman said. They had also been in prison, where many inmates are members of the Aryan Brotherhood, he said.

Internet chatter has indicated increases in what he terms right-wing domestic terrorism since the election of the first U.S. black president. But that has not been accompanied by a noticeable increase in hate crimes, he said.

“We have not seen a return to the heyday of the 1980s and 1990s,” he said.

Skinhead hate group movement petering out

FORT WORTH, Texas, Nov. 1 (UPI) — The skinhead movement is waning, a hate watchdog group’s spokesman said, adding the election of the first black U.S. president has not increased hate crimes.

Mark Briskman, director of the Anti-Defamation League in the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, region, said that although Internet activity shows an increase in what he called right-wing domestic terrorism since Barack Obama was elected the U.S. president, the event has not engendered a noticeable rise in hate crimes, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported Saturday.

Briskman said although 17 convictions for hate crimes by the area’s skinhead group, the Confederate Hammerskins, in 1990 did not prevent skinheads from killing a black man a year later, the 1993 conviction may have signaled their last hurrah.

Judge denies marriage license to interracial Louisiana couple

BY JACQUIE HENDERSON
HOUSTON—The refusal of a judge to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple in Hammond, Louisiana, has outraged many.

Beth Humphrey, a 30-year-old Hammond resident who works for a marketing company, called Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, October 6 about getting a marriage license.

Humphrey is white. The man she planned to marry, 32-year-old welder Terence McKay, is Black.

The justice’s wife asked if the couple was interracial and told her that Bardwell would not sign the license if they were.

“We are used to the closet racism, but we’re not going to tolerate that overt racism from an elected official,” Humphrey told CNN.

“I don’t do interracial marriages because I don’t want to put children in a situation they didn’t bring on themselves,” Bardwell told the press.

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” he told AP, adding that he had “piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

“I simply can’t believe he can do that. That’s blatant discrimination,” Humphrey told the Hammond Star Tribune. Humphrey and McKay got a certificate signed October 9 by another justice and married. “This doesn’t take care of the problem,” Humphrey told CNN. Bardwell has “been in his position for 34 years. So, it doesn’t take care of the problems that we have to deal with on a daily basis.”

The couple has support from many in Hammond as indicated by letters in the papers. David Hyde, a 51-year-old musician in Hammond, told the Militant, “We need to organize some protests of this outrage.”

In 1908 Louisiana officials adopted statutes declaring that “concubinage between the Caucasian or white race and any person of the Negro or black race” is a felony subject to imprisonment from one month to one year, with or without hard labor.

In 1921 the state prohibited “Negro and white families” from living in the same dwelling place and in 1932 added that “no person or corporation shall rent an apartment house or other like structure to a person who is not of the same race as the other occupants.”

That same year the state prohibited “Negroes and Indians” from marrying each other. In 1952 the state prohibited marriage between whites and “persons of color,” stiffening the penalty to up to $1,000 and/or five years imprisonment. The Louisiana statutes were voided by the 1967 Supreme Court verdict in the case Loving v. Virginia.

In 1958 Richard Loving, a bricklayer who was white, and Mildred Jeter, Black and Native American, married in Washington, D.C., because interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia, where they lived.

A few weeks after they returned home they were arrested for violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. This law forbade those interracial couples that marry out of state from returning as husband and wife. They were sentenced to one year in jail. They received suspended sentences after agreeing not to return to Virginia together for 25 years.

In 1963, as mobilizations led by Black working people against segregation reached a high point, the Lovings decided to fight the reactionary law. They filed a lawsuit that slowly made its way through the courts. The state courts held that Virginia had legitimate purposes “to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,” and to prevent “the corruption of blood.”

In a 1967 ruling the Supreme Court overturned all the previous decisions upholding the ban. The court said, “The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

At the time 16 states banned marriage between people of different races. South Carolina’s constitutional ban wasn’t removed until 1998 and Alabama’s only in 2000.