This morning we'll meet victims of terrifying hate crimes.
Crimes against skin color and religion.
And find out what one group is doing to stop it.
Right here on Seattle Today.
Live from King Five, Cliff Lenz and Susan Michaels. Seattle Today.
Good morning.
Should be a fascinating show today. By the way, in our audience today is the minister from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, who not too long ago by a hate group had his church and his home harassed.
As a matter of fact, his home was bombed. You saw that in the news. We'll hear from him a little bit later on.
You know, the Northwest is not immune to these hate crimes that Susan just mentioned are based on terrible bigotry and bias with regard to race and ethnic origin and religion.
You've heard about groups like the skinheads. You hear about them in the context of Spokane, but no, we have them here in Seattle.
And we're going to talk about a so-called hate or political crime that occurred on Queen Anne Hill not too long ago.
Our panel today consists of three people. First of all, on Susan's left is Jean Legault.
She has that story about what happened to her in Queen Anne Hill. And we'll talk about that in a moment.
Next to them are two people who are very seriously concerned with what they call an epidemic that's occurring in this country.
They are with the Center for the Democratic Renewal, which is opening an office here in Seattle tomorrow.
The executive director, Eleonora Williams from Atlanta, is with us.
And the research director, Leonard Zeskin from Kansas City, has joined us to talk about these hate crimes.
Please welcome all three of them to Seattle.
Let's go back to March, Jean. You were working very enthusiastically for Jesse Jackson.
And you suspect that somebody saw you at a Jesse Jackson rally, and from that all kinds of very bad things began to happen to you. Tell us about it.
Well, I'm not sure whether it was at a rally or it was in the neighborhood that I live on Queen Anne.
I used to wear a Jesse Jackson 88 t-shirts every day.
And the first thing that I noticed, I was very shocked when I discovered that many people would make very ugly racist comments to me right on Queen Anne
about Jackson, not his politics, just his race.
When you're wearing the t-shirt, you'd be walking down the street. And what would they say to you?
I don't think I could repeat it on TV. I mean, very disgusting things in reference to his race and why he thought he could run for president.
What did these people look like? What did they sound like? What was their general demeanor?
Very angry, hateful. They were almost all young white males without exception.
But average folk you could find living right next door to you.
Yeah, just your average Joe sort of guy. That took me aback because I hadn't really been exposed to that before.
And then I started to receive threatening notes on my car. Interestingly enough, the first couple made no reference to anything, just we're sick of this blank,
why don't you move to another state where you belong.
You know, real hateful notes, but I didn't understand what they were referring to because to my knowledge I had no idea at this point.
And then you went to Olympia, to the state convention.
And I didn't take my car to Olympia. I got a ride with somebody else and I got home late Sunday night, came out Monday morning to go to work,
and there was my car covered in shit and...
Excrement.
Smeared over your car.
Right.
And somebody had spray painted nigger leather on both sides and cut the tires.
And my initial reaction to this was to just get it off my car. I was practically hysterical.
You didn't call the police first, didn't document it with a photograph at all, not until two days later when I realized that I should report it to the police.
Windows were broken?
Not that time.
At that time. Okay. So at the first incident you just got it off and went on with life.
Well, I did report it two days later after I was just completely hysterical initially.
And then two days later I reported the incident and got tires, some tires replaced.
At this point are you putting two and two together that this is a political thing?
I mean, are you saying to yourself, okay, they don't like who I'm for, they don't like who I stand for politically, they're harassing me by doing this to my car?
Or did you make the assumption this could be just a prank? A malicious prank?
I wouldn't say necessarily political because I don't think it was directed towards Jackson's political platform as much as his race and that, well, nigger-lupper.
What does that mean? The fact that a white person is supporting this black candidate for office.
But are you putting it together? Are you?
Well, at that point, yes, because what else could, you know, I mean, initially I didn't understand where it was coming from because I did not, I had a Mike Lowry bumper sticker on my car, but I didn't have a Jackson bumper sticker.
And actually I didn't think of the notes until much later. And then as I started getting more threatening notes with more specific references.
Yeah, and then somebody covered up your Mike Lowry sticker with a Slade Gordon sticker.
All over my car. I mean, it took me an hour to peel.
Yeah, and you have no idea if this is a person, the same people doing this to you. You never saw anyone working, doing this to your car. You never tried to stake it out at all.
Well, we did finally. I finally, see what would happen is it's always very late at night.
And the problem is, you know, what are you going to do? Stay up all night.
And so I finally did get together a group of people who are willing to do two hour stakeouts.
And we were going to, you know, it all, maybe there was only one incident a week or once every couple weeks.
So it was hard, you know, what are you going to do? Wait up for two weeks all night every night.
You tried parking your car, you tried parking it farther and farther away.
So someone's really watching you because no matter where you put it, the car is subject to some kind of damage.
Yeah, I, you know, all the police could really tell me was to not park near where I lived.
How bad did the damage get?
Well, I don't have a car anymore.
What specifically was the price tag you would put on the damage or the damage?
Towards the end, it was over eight thousand dollars. Queen Anne News did an article about it and we had amassed, I lost my insurance, of course, because they know.
And after eight thousand, I stopped counting. And now, of course, the car is gone.
You know, we keep talking about your car here, but how did you feel about your own personal safety at this time?
I was very scared and very angry. And my initial reaction was to feel intimidated.
And I realized that would accomplish nothing. It made me only more ardent in the work I wanted to do to stop this from happening.
What else was happening in the neighborhood? Any other kind of damage, malicious writing on the...
I had talked to some other Jackson delegates. Now, I was the coordinator of the district, so I was the more prominent person.
And they hadn't really experienced anything, but various people had reported seeing swastikas spray painted on the walls, knew where I live, and a few other racist epithets around.
And I reported those to the police also. And there doesn't... I think it's more than one person, though, because some of these things really take more than one person.
All right, Jean, we're going to take a break and come back and continue with your story and also find out that yours is not an isolated incident,
and these incidents are not isolated to Queen Anne in the Seattle area.
We're going to talk with the two representatives from the Center for Democratic Renewal who are committed to fighting hate crimes of all origins
and, as a matter of fact, have found it necessary to open up a branch office right here in the Pacific Northwest as of next month, which is very, very sad in itself.
We're also opening up our phone lines right now. Do you feel that people you know, your neighbors, could possibly be bigots?
They hate us for who and what we are. Have you been victimized by them? We'd like to hear your story and have you join our conversation.
The number to call is 448-3096.
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Fighting hate crimes in the Northwest. And once again, we'd like to reintroduce to you Leonard Zeskin,
Research Director of the Center for Democratic Renewal, which is committed to fighting hate crimes of all kinds,
and Lenora Williams, Executive Director. Lenora, can you tell us why you find it necessary to open up an office
right here in the Pacific Northwest as of next month?
Well, I think a lot of people have the notion that this region is very peaceful, it's very beautiful.
All over the country, people come to the Northwest to lead an unpleasant life.
And so the idea that there could be hate crimes going on around here is very hard for some people to accept.
What's going on around here?
We've had a range of hate-inspired activities ranging from cross-burnings.
We had a cross-burning in Woodinville within the last year on the home of a black woman.
We've had shoot-in violence where there's what we call drive-by violence.
You drive by someone's home and shoot into it.
We've had a series of Klan literature showing up at union activities.
It's a very wide range of activities.
Let's talk about the range of people who are committing this. You mentioned the Klan.
We know we have a large population of Aryan Nation members in Idaho.
Just to rein this in a little bit, in the Puget Sound area, who is perpetrating this sort of thing?
Leonard, you're doing the research on this. What's your estimation?
Well, what we see is a lot of youthful involvement from skinhead Nazis in the region.
We're also seeing what we call Christian patriots, groups that on the surface appear to be nothing more than tax protest groups,
but really have an agenda of trying to create a white Christian republic,
drive black people out of the region, drive other people of color out, only make Christians citizens,
only allow people with property to vote.
There are groups up in Bellevue, for instance, Bellingham, all around ringing the Puget Sound region.
There are a number of Christian identity groups in the region who have a racist theology
that believes that Jews are children of the devil and people of color are mud people, pre-Adamic, crazy racist theology.
There's a church of that in Olympia.
There's a church of that in the Seattle area that meets every Sunday.
And those are not young people. They're middle-aged and older people also, and all across the economic spectrum.
Yeah, we usually think of white adult males as the perpetrators here.
But what happened last June of 88 right here in the Seattle area?
A young girl was abducted by five female skinheads. And what happened to her?
And she was abducted and dragged up to Canada.
Left for dead.
Left for dead. And one of the things that we've seen as a big change in the last couple of years
is the increasing involvement of women in the white supremacist movement.
And that's an issue that a lot of people don't know about either.
So we're concerned about that.
Let me introduce you to Father Bill Wasmith, who is a Catholic priest who organized against an
Aryan resistance conference that was organized in the eastern part of Washington?
No, I was in Coeur d'Alene. And I was chair of the Cootin County Task Force on Human Relations in Coeur d'Alene
until earlier this spring. And we organized a human rights celebration in the summer of 86,
the same time that the Aryans held their Congress in Hayden Lake, just a few miles north.
You had representatives from five different states join you?
Right. We had about a thousand people there. We had statements from 200 different cities and counties
saying they supported diversity and they supported equality, those kinds of things.
And were you threatened along the way as you were organizing this?
I got a few minor threats, nothing all that terribly serious.
But what happened with that celebration is we finally got the message,
and we got the message through that indeed northern Idaho, the whole northwest,
was not going just to sit back and watch this kind of movement take place,
that we were going to actively oppose it, that we were going to actively promote diversity,
we were going to actively celebrate that and enjoy it.
And we got that message through to the country because the media was there in large numbers.
We also got the message through to the Aryans evidently because that's when they started
preaching more and more against the community, against the task force,
and against me as leader of the task force.
And then what happened to your house?
In September of 86, September 15th, late in the evening,
a bomb went off outside my back door and blew the backside of my house out.
Shot shrapnel everywhere, dropped at your feet practically?
Well, one piece did reflect it off the ceiling. The kitchen was full of holes and blew the back door in.
And they caught those people because they set off a couple more bombs downtown a couple weeks later.
They caught them and as a matter of fact, just in the last couple of weeks,
they have pleaded guilty to that crime as well as to some others in our being currently sentenced.
How does this make you feel? You obviously don't give up hope.
I mean, you want to work to defeat this. And what do you feel is the best way to do it?
Oh, I think northern Idaho has established one of the very good ways of doing it already.
The presence of the Aryans there has decidedly decreased. Part of that is by law enforcement efforts.
A large part of it is due to the communities just simply organizing and saying no to that sort of thing,
saying we are going to celebrate diversity. We're going to be supportive of our minority people.
We're going to be the kind of community that is American.
But it doesn't go away. This is a problem. It just moves away to another community, doesn't it?
That's why we've expanded beyond that. And as a result of that human rights celebration in the summer of 86,
we now have a northwest coalition against malicious harassment.
And we've united the human rights groups and businesses and churches in that coalition
to focus more energy on the whole northwest.
So wherever problems start surfacing in the northwest, the Center for Democratic Renewal can do some things.
Other human rights groups do things. And the coalition as well can focus a lot of energy on any specific problem area.
Mr. Susskind?
One of the things I want to point out is that these kinds of activities happen in every region of the country.
It does just move around. We have it in North Georgia today, southeast Nebraska tomorrow,
southern California the next day. This is a national problem, the kinds of things that Jeanne experienced.
Only one out of every three people that experience them actually ever report the crimes.
And most of those victims are victims of serial crimes the way she was.
And until we have legislation at the federal level, we won't even have an accurate picture of what's actually going on.
There's a bill, the Hate Crime Statistics Act, that would mandate the Justice Department to collect statistics on these kinds of crimes.
But until we have that bill, we will not know really what's going on locally or nationally.
It becomes a very difficult proposition to track and to network and to research these without that statistics bill going forward,
because then you really can keep tabs on what's happening in terms of the epidemic.
When Jeanne's crime hits the police blotter, it hits it as a vandalism or an arson, or something across burning in somebody's front yard is an arson.
I see. And not what it really ought to be labeled.
Exactly.
Here's a telephone call for you. Good morning, you're on the air.
Hi, I'm a black woman and I'm married to a Jewish man.
And I was telling, I have had instances where I have been called a nigger and my baby has at Northgate.
We were at Northgate and this lady, my baby's 18 months old, and we went into the mall.
And my baby went up to the little baby.
And the lady goes, don't mess with that nigger. He's a nigger, just leave him alone.
And my baby's 18 months old and he has no way of knowing what that was.
And I was pretty aghast by that. And that was the first time. But then when I went out to my car...
Ma'am, hang on one second. How did you react to that? Didn't you...
I was very angry.
Did you express that to this person?
I told what I said to her. I said it's too bad that people are as ignorant as you are in this world.
You know, I remember in the 60s, I was in the 60s and I remember all the things that we went through in Martin Luther King.
But you know, I still like it's repeating itself. And you know...
That's as far as the confrontation went then.
Well, because I felt like I didn't want to be as low as she was. I could have reacted. But what's the point? That's ignorance.
And then you went out to the parking lot?
That was a time later I was there and there were four guys in the car with their guns.
And they showed them to me. They had swastikas. And I did report because I was tired of it.
I pretty much had it with this. And my baby was in the car again. And also my daughter.
And I drove around the parking lot and I found a police officer and I told him. But he didn't do much.
You know, he said I'll go check into it. But that was his father. They had, I mean, guns. I mean big ones.
They showed them to me. They made a point of showing them to me. You know.
And what did they say to you in the process of showing you these weapons?
They were just looking at me, showing me the gun and laughing and saying, hey nigger.
And my daughter was scared. My baby was in the car again. So there was not much I could do to react.
Well let's find out if there's something that you could have done or now can do or if it comes up in the future, will be able to do.
What do you tell this lady, Leonard and Lenore?
Well I think her experience is very common. In fact, Jeannie's experience is unique in that Jeannie went to the police.
At least two days after her incident. What happens over and over again is two things.
We don't report the incidents and we reflect on all that we've been through in the last 20 years and we say we're tired.
Why bother? And this is exactly the wrong response.
She has to share the information with her neighbors, with people she trusts.
She has to go to the media. She has to keep pressuring the local law enforcement to take it up.
Well in terms of law enforcement, did you get a license plate number?
I put down everything. I took down what was said on the car. I mean I wrote down everything.
Well now you go to the police, you've got a license plate number.
These guys could be carrying weapons for which they have no permits.
Right, exactly.
And the police ought to be investigating this and to the best of your knowledge they haven't.
I saw him drive around. I'm not sure if he went there or not.
I know that when we were leaving out the parking lot we saw another police car pulling in fast. So I don't know.
Well they may have responded appropriately. But Leonard?
One of the things that we would urge people to do is call the Center for Democratic Renewals office in Seattle
because we want to be a resource for people like this caller who needs some help.
We would urge them to both report the incident to the police, but also what we found is what we call the Neighbor to Neighbor Network
in areas around the country. This has worked and we think it will work here in this region.
Where people build networks of support in their local community so that if they need to be able to say
I don't want to go down and process this with the police myself or I don't want to process this with the Justice Department
or whoever is going to handle the thing myself, they have a group that can support them.
And we also think that it's important to contact and build support among the neighbors
because often this vandalism, etc. follows them home and they have to be able to defend their home.
Okay, she'll be able to look your number up when you open up the Center in the phone book?
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, there's one more thing, ma'am, we might suggest to you if you're ever in a large shopping mall like Northgate
and this happens, and as a matter of fact you should go back and do this again,
report it to the Northgate Merchants Association, the last thing in the world they want to have happening
at this kind of thing at a major shopping mall like that.
You talk about discouraging business in the future. Will you do that?
They will.
Okay, thank you for calling us in Seattle today. We'll have more of hate crimes right after this.
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Hate crimes in the Northwest, we hear they are indeed occurring around here. And Chris, you've got some stories you want to tell us too. You're from the Rainier Beach area.
Yes, in the past, since 1983 of January, I was in a sort of a friendship, quote, roommate situation.
Where I had to abruptly leave because of an individual pressuring me to seek his religion, so to speak.
Also pressuring.
It got to the point where he was threatening me with bodily harm, threatening my family with bodily harm, blowing up homes.
We can see this as an isolated incident where this guy is just really out there. But you've noticed in your own neighborhood that things have changed in the last 20 years.
Yes, they have. I was raised in the projects where I was raised around all types of individuals, nationalities, different backgrounds.
And we've got along perfectly. But now as I'm grown as an adult, I see how you can't even speak to someone usually without them giving you an upper lip.
It's really getting terrible out here.
And you know, Leonard, I've heard that you've made a link to even the fact that some very credible conservatives like the Jerry Falwells and the Pat Robertsons are able to help the breeding of all of this kind of thought.
What we think is happening is that there's a national climate that's allowed bigotry and violence to emerge in a way that we didn't think was going to happen.
And I think that the experience of many people is that we dealt with the issue of racism and prejudice 20 years ago, and it shouldn't be on the national agenda now.
And in fact, it is on the national agenda because there is a silence about these race crimes.
Okay, now are you saying that the name Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwells, how are they, if at all, responsible for fostering or aiding this national climate?
As far as to implicate them in that regard?
No, no, we haven't done that.
What we've done is a study of what's called, calls itself the Christian Identity Movement, which is a racist theology.
And that doesn't involve the Pat Robertsons and the Jerry Falwells.
What it does involve, though, is people who are organizing churches, just like any other churches in metropolitan areas, that are preaching racism as standard fare.
People don't wear white robes, they don't wear Aryan nations uniforms, but they are just as hateful.
What's your best guess as to how they preach it?
Does someone stand up on a Sunday morning and give a sermon where he says, you know, don't love, instead of love thy neighbor, just love some of your neighbors?
I mean, how do you?
Yes, yes. What they do is they say, they quote the Bible. They use the Bible.
That's the most dangerous aspect of this at all, is that they hunt around the scripture and pull out a few quotes that they can use.
They say the Constitution is a racist document.
And they're very sophisticated and they do not begin to beat new members over the head with this racist ideology from the very beginning.
They say they're just having normal Bible study.
And then along down the road, and we've received letters from people in these congregations, people who are terrified, who can no longer speak to their community members because they've challenged the racist components of this ideology.
Okay. Telephone call for you. Good morning. You're on the air.
Yes. I'm a student in Garfield High School and I'm sick today and I live in the Medrano area.
And I was wondering why are you not talking about like black to white racism and hate towards that?
Because I mean, I've had friends who've walked home and I've been, me myself, been walking home with black friends and a big gang of black students or just people living in the area will come up and molest me while they just let my friend just go by.
Yeah. We know that it goes both ways. It's happened at a few high schools in the greater Seattle area.
Well, I'm not saying it's a high school because I feel safe at Garfield, but I'm saying on my way walking home, I mean, we've had stuff spray paint on our wall, like just like white this or white that or this or that.
Like things written on our card, just like little things like little tags and stuff like that. And a lot of them are a little derogatory, but not anything is severe.
Okay. Hang on a second. The Center for Democratic Renewal is aware that this is not just a one sided black.
What we see is a polarization going on in the society in which the walls of distrust and fear have gone up and it results in a lot of intergroup conflict of this kind.
I think the difference that we see is that there are between 15 and 20,000 hardcore white supremacists in this country who are organizing a movement and that that movement is infecting a much larger grouping of people.
And so that seems to be the generator of a lot of distrust. And once that's in the water, all the water is polluted.
Right.
And so for everybody in the society to be able to participate freely, we've got to deal with it at its causal level.
Are you afraid to associate with your black friends and walk home now?
Well, no. I even got out with black girls and I like them and I have some really good friends on the wrestling team and different things like that. And no, it's just like when I walk by myself, I'm going to walk on the main street when I want to go home.
I mean, I'm just looked at as a white and I don't dress like a slob or anything like that so I look rather like nicely dressed sort of. So I mean, I look like a target.
Well, get better.
Alright. Thank you.
And we appreciate your phone call today from from your house and and we're sorry you've had to go through this situation.
Alright. Thank you.
Appreciate your phone call and we'll come back with more of what's happening with hate crimes here, specifically in Northwest and elsewhere.
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This is Omari Tahir and we'd like to just give you some background.
Omari was targeted by the Order of White Supremacist Movement, which plans terrorist attacks to empower them.
Their leader, Robert Matthews, as you may very well recall, I believe it was back in December of 1984,
was killed by two FBI agents who stormed his cabin on Whidbey Island.
And you were on their blacklist, right?
Yes, well several years ago the Nazis and the Klan attacked a demonstration in North Carolina.
They killed five people and they were found not guilty.
And so that kind of set the climate that, you know, it's open season on people that protest against racism in the society.
And then you wrote a letter to the editor locally.
Yeah, there was an article in the newspaper about Thomas Jefferson, humanitarian award.
And I wrote a letter to the editor pointing out Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner and it was hard to be a slave owner and humanitarian.
And so consequently I received this death threat letter from the organization called Commando.
Commando, let's say it's letters too, as in plural.
Just to paraphrase one, and it's signed by a guy giving you his address too.
I mean it starts with, first greatest mistake made by the white man is bringing in filthy niggers.
And it ends by saying you could pack up your bags and get the blank out of my country.
Another one that is not signed pretty much says the same thing and says death to you trash.
It's interesting because I did pack up my bags and I went to Africa and Asia and Europe.
And I found out that the same thing was existing there and I wanted to respond to some of the things that the panel has said.
And I don't know where they've been, but nothing has changed since we were out in the street in the 60s fighting against white institutionalized racism.
And from my perception from traveling internationally is that as long as you have an administration like the Reagan administration that's got blacks unemployed, no education,
which is a lot of justification for why some of these white males feel that blacks are inferior.
Displaced factory workers, farm workers are looking for a scapegoat. One of the reasons why we're seeing a resurgence of this. Don't you agree, Leonard?
We think that there's certainly economic correlates to this, but it's not the only reason.
I think we have to understand that prejudice and bigotry is accepted at minuscule levels, at the form of racist jokes.
And that the most logical extension of that winds up being these violent attacks.
Yeah. In California, for example, a man was, he saw a group of Hispanic children, took his car and tried to run them all over because he,
and he told police later on that they're taking all our jobs. I mean, you really, you really have to take a close look at the economic causes of this too.
You say it's only a correlate, but it really does represent a certain important grave statistic in this whole picture.
We found, we found, we did a study called They Don't All Wear Sheets over six years of bigoted violence.
And we found that we knew about one incident every day of every year as they occurred.
And many of them were where people moved into previously all white neighborhoods where they were integrating a neighborhood.
Some of it was like the incident you described where the murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit
because people thought he was Japanese and wanted to attack him for Japanese automobiles.
So we have the scapegoating of people in the farm belt as farmers lose their homes.
Very brief time left. There needs to be a clarification here as to the role of the police department in this.
And that clarification in terms of how they should respond needs to be made vis-a-vis whether or not this is a malicious prank or this is a, in fact, a hate crime.
How do you call the attention to the police department in your community and get them to focus on the hate aspect of this?
Well, there's legislation in the state of Washington on malicious harassment that allows the police to catalog and investigate crimes of this nature.
And so if you call, one of the things that people need to be aware of is that there is this law. They need to call the police attention to it.
There's a King County law, the malicious...
It's actually, I think it's a state law. It's a Washington state law.
State law, okay.
So it covers the whole state and it allows the police to investigate these crimes as malicious harassment.
And if that occurs, then you get higher levels of penalties, an investigation of motives, and those kinds of things that would allow us to establish what actually happened.
Final comment, Lenore?
Well, I think that those laws are very important and they're a step forward, but they're only useful as long as a community demands their enforcement.
And I think that that's the opportunity that the state of Washington has.
If we've got neighborhood block watch for crimes of burglary, there certainly ought to be that equivalent for these sorts of crimes, too.
Exactly.
All right. Our thanks to Jean Legault. We hope you get a car soon, Jean, and get your automobile insurance back to replace that car that was just totally trashed for the reasons we've been discussing.
And also our thanks to Lenore Williams and also Leonard Zeskin, who will be here for the opening of the Center for Democratic Renewal here in Seattle.
And if you would like to report any of the sorts of things that have occurred to you that you've been hearing about on this show, the kinds of crimes that have been occurring, you can call a phone number in Atlanta that is the National CDR office.
First of all, call us to find out what that phone number is. Call our Seattle Today office. We'll give that to you.
They'd like to hear from you. They want to keep tabs on these kinds of crimes.
Thank you again for joining us. Thank you.
And in just a moment on an entirely different thing, completely different thing, we're going to talk about how to replace that hair that may be leaving you all too quickly.
Back right after this.