White Supremacist Events Coincide With Hitler's Birth Week

by: Oren Segal

April 25, 2016

Marking the anniversary week of Adolf Hitler’s April 20^th birthday, several neo-Nazi and Klan groups held collaborative events over the weekend of April 23. Four such events were held within approximately 150 miles of one another in north Alabama and central Georgia.  

• The United Klans of America (UKA) hosted a private event in Alabama which included a cross burning and several Klan weddings.  The event was open to all members of the Black and Silver alliance which consists of the UKA, the Sadistic Souls (an Illinois-based faction of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations), James Logsdon’s small faction of the Creativity Movement, and Missouri and Tennessee members of the Right-Wing Resistance (a neo-Nazi group that originated in New Zealand.)

• The neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) hosted a rally at the Law Enforcement Center in Rome, Georgia. Approximately 100 people from various white supremacist groups attended the event, including the North Carolina-based Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the Texas Rebel Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.  Other attendees included Arthur Jones (a long-time Illinois neo-Nazis and Holocaust denier), Ted Dunn (leader of the SS Action group), and Eric Meadows, who has been linked to the neo-Confederate League of the South. The hateful rhetoric of rally speakers, who intermittently shouted “white power” and “Sieg Heil,” was largely drowned out by counter protesters. Two counter protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct.

• Approximately two dozen people participated in a white power event at Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park. The poorly attended event, organized by white supremacist John Michael Estes and Klansman Greg Calhoun, was intended to protest leg­is­la­tion that would allow changes to exist­ing Con­fed­er­ate dis­plays and mon­u­ments, as well as a plan by the Stone Moun­tain Memo­r­ial Asso­ci­a­tion to install a mon­u­ment in Martin Luther King’s honor.  The small group held confederate flags and a banner that read “Diversity = White Genocide.” Several counter-protesters threw rocks and fireworks at police, and set a barricade on fire. At least eight counter-protesters were a
  
  rrested and charged with violating Georgia’s mask law, and one was arrested for allegedly throwing smoke bombs at police.

• On the evening of April 23, ralliers from both the Rome and Stone Mountain events attended a private after-party near Temple, Georgia. The event included white power music and the burning of both a cross and a swastika.

These collaborative events demonstrate the willingness of some Klan groups to practice a Nazified version of Klan ideology and to form symbiotic relationships with neo-Nazi groups.  With both the neo-Nazi movement and Klan movement in decline joint events can help mask the small numbers that individual white supremacist groups are able to generate.