Racist Violence on the Rise in Southern California:

Anti-Racist Action Gathering Scheduled for Martin Luther King weekend

by Michael Novick

There has been a recent upsurge in racist, sexist and homophobic violence in southern California, paralleling a national increase in such incidents. In response to the need for renewed vigilance, the Anti-Racist Action (ARA) network is growing in this area as well.

In San Pedro, CA, a member of the "Hammer-Skins," a group of nazi boneheads who have adopted the skinhead lifestyle as a means of racist organizing and intimidation, was arrested at San Pedro High School, charged with a knifing attack on a Christian student. The HammerSkins are affiliated with an international network of racists including the Confederate HammerSkins (whose Dallas, TX members were arrested for a planned poison gas attack on a synagogue) and the Western and Northern HammerSkins (the last based in Canada). The San Pedro group apparently includes some members of the school football team, who have been using a "jock" identity as a cover for some of their racist attacks, as they have tried to intimidate anti-racist young people at the school, including one student who had transferred in from Idaho, where he was involved in demonstrations against the Aryan Nations.

There have been a string of attacks in Orange County, particularly the city of Cypress. In the most recent incident, two teenagers yelling racist slurs were arrested in December after they attacked a Latino teen and his white friend outside a pizza parlor. One suspect, John Comley, 19, of Buena Park, is a member of an Orange County white supremacist gang, police said. In a series of previous incidents, gang members with shaved heads and swastika tattoos hammered a Latino man in the head with a beer bottle and stabbed two of his friends outside a pool hall in August. Shortly after, vandals spray-painted swastikas and a white supremacist slogan on a nearby Korean congregation's church. At Cypress College in late November, stickers with white supremacy slogans were placed on fliers for a Latino student group.

In the South Coast Community College District in Orange County, there have been a series of heated meetings since a college trustee attempted to bring a person associated with the anti-Semitic "Spotlight" newspaper to speak to a special seminar on the campus regarding the Kennedy assassination. (The author theorizes that the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, was responsible for the killing.) Local erstwhile nazi party member and militia spokesman Joe Fields and some of his followers have been showing up at school board meetings to portray themselves as 'victims' of a violation of free speech rights. Fields has been very active in anti-immigrant organizing, particularly via an outfit called "American Spring at the Mexican Border," which has brought nazi boneheads to the border several times. A number of nazi-skins turned out in L.A. last summer also for the anti-immigrant "Voice of Citizens Together" annual Westwood anti-Mexican rally.

The nazis found strange bedfellows at the rally-Irv Rubin and his racist Jewish Defense League also turned up to engage in some immigrant-bashing politics on the 4th of July.

That same Fourth of July weekend in Las Vegas, two anti-racist skinheads, one Black and one white, were gunned down execution style in a nazi ambush. Lin "Spit" Newborn and Dan Shersty, members of Anti-Racist Action Las Vegas and the Unity Skins, were set up and found shot to death in the desert outside Vegas in an area frequented by right wing militias for shooting practice. Las Vegas police finally arrested one member of a local nazi skinhead grouping that had been physically attacking anti-racists and Black people in Vegas. He in turn has given up a number of names of his cohorts, some of whom are still being sought by police in connection with the killings. His arraignment is expected some time in January.

In response to a wave of similar incidents across the country, including the truck-lynching and beheading of a Black man in Jasper Texas, the murder and virtual crucifixion of a gay man in Wyoming, and a campaign of public rallies and clandestine crime by the Klan and the Aryan Nations around the midwest, the Anti-Racist Action (ARA) network has been growing around the U.S. and Canada, and spreading elsewhere in the Americas.

ARA has more than 120 affiliates and chapters in about 40 states and 8 Canadian provinces, and is growing rapidly, organizing particularly among high school students and other young people. There are ARA chapters locally in L.A., San Pedro, Inglewood, Ventura, Riverside/San Bernardino, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and San Diego. A chapter is in the process of formation in the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area. The group will be holding its second annual regional gathering at Koo's Cafe, 1505 N. Main St. in Santa Ana on Saturday, January 16 from 11:00 -7:00 PM (followed by a music show at the cafe starting at 8:00 PM.) Last year's gathering drew over 130 people, and revived the San Diego chapter as well as getting the Inland Empire group off the ground.