Confronting
the
Right
Across Generations: Spencer
Sunshine Interviews Walter
Reeves
(A commentary piece by Walter Reeves also appears in the
Fall 2013 issue of The Public Eye magazine.)
In 1990, when I was a teenager, I met and began working
with Walter Reeves and other members of Neighbors
Network—an anti-Klan, anti-Nazi group based in Atlanta, GA.
Reeves was its co-chair of education and outreach from 1989
until the group’s dissolution in 1996.
Against the background of the Reagan administration’s
coded, racist language, the late-1980s and early 1990s
were marked by a surge in Far Right organizing in the
United States. Across the South, and especially in Georgia,
the traditional distinctions between Nazis and various
independent Klans were eroding. In Forsyth County, which
long had a reputation as a “sundown county” where no
African-Americans had lived since 1912, a stone-throwing
mob disrupted and ended a march organized by civil-rights
activists in 1987. The following week, 10,000 civil rights
marchers were confronted by thousands of counter-protestors
in the same place. This counter-protest is considered the
largest pro-segregation rally in the country since the end
of the Civil Rights Movement.
Emboldened by the weak response from local governments,
Klan groups held frequent public events in Georgia. These
ranged from handing out flyers at shopping malls to holding
rallies with hundreds of Nazi skinheads. These groups
committed numerous assaults on queer folks, people of
color, immigrants, the homeless, and antiracist activists.
While these actions were generally condemned, they
nevertheless helped fuel more mainstream and “legitimate”
right-wing activism, such as the Cobb County Commission’s
1993 resolution that condemned “lifestyles advocated by the
gay community.”
Neighbors Network was formed to counter the activism and
spreading influence of the Far Right in Georgia. I learned
of the organization through its anti-Nazi flyers in
Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood. I and other
teenage punk rockers formed a small, antiracist youth group
focused on making antifascist propaganda in the metro
Atlanta punk scene. While we were formally independent of
Neighbors Network, we worked closely with Reeves and other
members.
After Neighbors Network folded in 1996, Reeves remained
active in antiwar politics and racial and economic justice
issues. He was the Georgia Green Party’s press secretary
during Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign, and he was
a founding member of the first Atlanta Indymedia
Collective. He participated in the anti-Iraq War movement
and the continuing attempts to close the School of the
Americas, as well as the 2004 antiglobalization actions at
the Group of Seven meeting at Sea Island, Georgia. Today,
he is a member of the International Brotherhood of
Teamsters and a militant unionist. He continues to write
and cartoon from a radical perspective, and he is working
on a memoir about the Neighbors Network.
A glossary is supplied below. Links are also provided for
Reeves’s publications, including “Hatred in Georgia” and
some of his recent writings.
—Spencer Sunshine, PRA associate fellow
I remember vividly the big books of pictures that Neighbors
Network took at Klan and Nazi rallies. When someone was
assaulted or threatened, you would show them the books and
attempt to identify the person. If the person who was
attacked wanted to press charges, you would help them
navigate the judicial system. If people were threatened at
their homes, the armed members of the group would stay with
them at night. There was an annual report that you
released, “Hatred in Georgia,” detailing racist organizing
and violence in Georgia. What else did Neighbors Network
do?
Our yearly report “Hatred in Georgia,” which tracked hate
crime and hate-group activity in the state, was extremely
useful in raising public awareness. It also served to
deprive the Klan and Nazis of one of their main strengths:
their anonymity. The more names that we attached to faces,
the fewer unknown faces were available. We found that this
sort of exposure had a dampening effect on the violence and
intimidation practiced by these groups.
We also worked with a host of civic and community groups
along with local and state organizations. These included
the NAACP, churches, synagogues, the Governor’s Human
Relations Commission, the Mexican Consulate, the [Georgia]
State Legislative Black Caucus, and the MLK Day March
Committee, among others. This work took us all over the
state as well as parts of Alabama, South Carolina, and
Tennessee. I even had the occasion to address Kiwanis and
Optimist Club meetings, if you can imagine that!
The goal of this work was to promote the development of
local centers of resistance to white supremacist and Nazi
activity in communities that had been targeted by such
groups. Usually the first step was to help determine just
who and what a particular community was up against.
Whenever we got word of Klan activity in a community, we
would contact local organizations to determine what their
level of awareness was and to share whatever information we
had with them.
This [outreach] was useful because people seldom had more
than a superficial knowledge of the specific group or
individuals they were confronting. Naturally, they tended
to view their problem as a purely local one. In fact, the
agitation in their communities was part of an overall
pattern of activity with larger goals. Once they understood
the Klan’s larger strategy, as well as being able to
identify the individuals and organizations involved, it
enabled them to recognize the need for active counterorganizing and to develop an effective strategy.
Further, our involvement as an organization from outside
the community insured that the situation faced by local
residents would receive wider public attention. This
strengthened resistance by reducing the community’s
isolation and increased public pressure on officials and
business and community leaders to take action, whereas
without such public scrutiny they might have preferred to
look the other way. When we began our work, the general
attitude among such folk was along the lines of “Ignore
them and they will go away.” Our role was, in part, to make
the case that this attitude was utterly mistaken.
The forms such resistance took varied according to local
circumstances. We took it as a given that only those living
in a particular community could determine what was
appropriate and effective in their locality. This took a
good deal of close cooperation and coordination on our part
and required a significant investment of time and energy.
The most important long term tactic was educating people to
the presence and activity of hate groups and the threat
they posed. When people in a community decided on a course
of action, our role was to share expertise and resources to
support their efforts.
This approach contrasted sharply with that of other outside
groups who might roll into a town on the day of a Klan
rally, engage in a raucous confrontation before the media
cameras, and then leave the local residents to deal with
the aftermath on their own.
We also engaged in what we described as recovering people
from hate groups. That is, supporting and defending people
who had decided to break from such groups. This took a
number of different forms. Sometimes we were contacted by
parents who had discovered their children’s involvement and
were looking for information and resources. On other
occasions, we were approached directly by people who were
trying to find a way out on their own.
It’s important to note that the research and monitoring
work that we did was crucial in supporting our community
work. Very often it was left to us to identify to the
locals, the organizations, and individuals that had
targeted their communities. It wasn’t readily apparent to
many of them that their local problems were part of a
larger, statewide and interstate pattern of agitation and
organization.
In retrospect, I encountered you during a significant
revival of the KKK/neo-Nazi movement in the United States,
in one of its strongholds. Of course, I didn’t realize that
I was stuck in this fulcrum at an unfortunate time. What
was your opinion of what was going on, and how did you all
see what you were engaged in? Some activists thought that
antifascism was in opposition to a growing national
fascism, and that these groups were the Republican Party’s
“brownshirts” in a rather literal way.
I don’t doubt that in specific instances there may have
been tacit alliances between particular Republicans and
certain fascist elements, in fact I have direct knowledge
of one local case, but the notion that these amounted to
any sort of organizational command and control shows a lack
of comprehension for the character of the white supremacist
and Nazi movements. I think that such an analysis has more
to do with pre-existing political fixations than reality.
The political advantages of this position are plain, in
that it allowed one to lump all elements of the Right
together under the label of fascist and tie that tin can to
the GOP’s tail. Unfortunately this distorts the unique
character of fascism as a social and political phenomenon.
This, in my opinion, was a fundamental and tragic error.
Two key elements of fascism are its mass base and its
disregard for standards of bourgeois legality. Any
political entity possessing these two attributes possesses
all it needs to pursue an autonomous, radical, and even
revolutionary course.
The failure of the left to appreciate this reality led to
fatal miscalculations when it confronted the development of
National Socialism. It treated the radical and
revolutionary pretensions of the Nazis as play acting
designed to confuse the working class and saw Hitler as
nothing more than a paid stooge. Consequently, they failed
to understand the actual threat posed by Hitler’s
appointment as Chancellor, imagining that he would be used
up and easily deposed of as so many bourgeois politicians
before him. Hence the grotesque slogan of “After Hitler,
Thälmann!”
Of course this excludes other arguably fascist but distinct
forces, such as those under the heading of the Religious
Right or the “patriot” movement. These clearly developed
into a reserve constituency for the Republicans, and the
GOP has acted to shield them in moments of crisis, such as
the Oklahoma City bombing. They are distinct from avowedly
white supremacist and Nazi elements but tap into the same
social forces that have historically fed such groups. This
means that while they are distinct politically and
organizationally, they possess an organic linkage by virtue
of drawing on the same social base. This organic
relationship produces a far more complex and contradictory
reality than is allowed for by mechanistic theoretical
conceptions.
As a practical matter, this means that while there are many
opportunities for convergence among fascists and quasifascist elements, there are also many opportunities for
conflict and therefore many opportunities for leveraging
such conflicts, if one has the wit to see them.
More broadly, our work was always informed by the danger of
convergence between the larger “conservative” movement and
overt fascism and the necessity of frustrating any such
trend where it was detected, particularly since it was
apparent that white supremacists were constantly on the
hunt for opportunities of recasting themselves as movement
conservatives. This is worth noting as we attempt to
analyze and understand contemporary phenomenon on the right
such as the Tea Party.
What did you think when you met our group of mostly punk
teenagers, who were 14 to 18? I remember you saying that
you, and one of the other group members, understood punks
in a way that was not understandable to others—even though
they must have been familiar with hippy counterculture. In
my own political work over the last 20 years, I rarely work
with younger teenagers; usually folks are at least 19 or
20. What did you think about this intergenerational work?
The 1960s counterculture was a largely utopian phenomenon.
Although it became somewhat politicized as events
progressed, it was at heart an anti-political impulse.
Rather than organizing collectively to directly challenge
the established order, the counterculture placed its
emphasis on cultural transformation via personal
transcendence. To understand how this idea could take hold,
you have to appreciate the state of U.S. culture coming out
of the 1950s, something not easily done if you didn’t
experience it directly. Latter day propaganda (Happy Days,
Grease, etc.) has obscured the reality behind a haze of
nostalgia for “a simpler time.” While it was a time of
unprecedented economic prosperity, it was also a period of
social and political regimentation previously unknown in
peace time—what is euphemistically referred to as
“conformism” or, as in a popular characterization, “the
silent generation.” When it came to suppressing personal,
cultural, or political dissent domestically, the Cold War
was a hot war.
The longer and more assiduously the free impulses of a
society are suppressed, the more intense and chaotic the
eventual explosion is likely to be. However, the
countercultural rebellion was unique in that it had no real
economic component. There was a notion abroad that the
problem of material scarcity had finally been solved and
that all that remained to be accomplished was the full
liberation of individual and collective consciousness. This
produced what might be described as a politics of
transcendence. The belief that ecstatic experience,
shattering all existing repressive social standards and
institutions, would usher in a new age.
The punk rebellion was something very different. It
developed when the failure of the politics of transcendence
and the falsity of the assumption of the end of material
scarcity had become apparent. While it was an expression of
youth culture, it was far less naive, far more
confrontational and overtly political than the
counterculture had ever been. Both myself and David saw
this as a positive development.
I was both impressed and encouraged when we hooked up with
you guys. Having grown up in the late Jim Crow South, I
know something about being a young dissenter in a hostile
environment. At one point in high school I was known as
“Walter the Anarchist.” It wasn’t meant as a compliment.
Regrettably, your experience in terms of your political
work is typical. One of the great failures, in my opinion,
of the U.S. Left is its near total disconnect with youth.
Odd that folks supposedly all about a better future would
so neglect the coming generation.
What was your own political background, and that of the
other members? You told me you were a Yippie and involved
in the Center for Democratic Renewal (CDR), and that you
always identified as a Marxist—why? And why were the punks
closer to you (versus the anarcho-syndicalist in the
group), but later became closer to anarchism?
Over the entire span of its activity, the Neighbors Network
had members whose political views ranged from anarchosyndicalist to card-carrying Republicans. The politics
among the founding five members were naturally less
diverse, ranging from Left-liberal to radical.
For myself, I grew up during the heyday of the Civil Rights
revolution, SDS, and countercultural radicalism. I was
twelve in 1968 but had been a confirmed anti-racist since
the age of eight. The murders of Goodman, Schwerner, and
Chaney had a profound effect on me, as had my earlier
realization that the majority of my classmates and friends
had lost most or all of their European relatives during the
Nazi genocide. For a boy raised in a sprawling extended
family populated with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and
cousins, such knowledge cut close to the bone.
By age seven it was being increasingly borne in on me that
I was living in a society whose racism rivaled that of the
Nazis, with a tolerance for violence, murder, and terror to
match. I can actually recall the moment when this
realization crystallized for me.
We were living in a small town at the time and my parents
had taken us to the Dairy Queen. While they were ordering
at the front window I slipped around the side and there it
was. A small window with a cramped counter and a sign above
bearing the single word “Colored.” But that wasn’t all.
Flies buzzed above the remains of a spilled drink on the
counter top and above the trash can immediately next to it
which was overflowing with wrappers, cups, and related
refuse. It looked as though it hadn’t been emptied in a
week. The contrast with the tidiness of the window where my
parents were being served made the intended message clear.
I think that’s when I first began to understand that
history isn’t the past but something that you are living
through.
When I entered my teens I began to seek out ways to connect
with the youth radicalization that was rattling the United
States at the time. I was an avid reader of the Great
Speckled Bird as well as other underground papers from
around the country. I also read Jerry Rubin’s Do It! and
Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It! and Steal
This Book.
Such stuff was pretty intoxicating for an adolescent given
the temper of the times. Coming on the heels of the civilrights revolution, the Chicago Riots in 1968 and the
ensuing trial of the Chicago Seven for conspiracy, the mass
mobilizations against the Vietnam War, the assassinations
of King and Kennedy, Woodstock, the Urban rebellions, the
Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and Kent State
created an atmosphere wherein anything seemed possible. In
my second year at Grady High School, months of agitation by
the Challenge Corps climaxed in a mass sit-in against the
Vietnam War and ROTC on campus. The cops were called in to
break it up and a crack-down on political activists ensued.
In the following three years, I participated in a lot of
demonstrations. I kept reading the radical press and at one
point attempted to supply the basis for a city-wide high
school underground press syndicate via my access to the
print shop at the school I was then attending. Around this
time an “organizer” for Zippie, the grouping that succeeded
Yippie, came to town and I functioned for a while as the
printer and graphic designer/artist for their leaflets,
posters, and news sheet. It was this work that made me a
peripheral person of interest in an FBI investigation into
Zippie during Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign.
It was beginning to become apparent that the radical
impulses of the counterculture were petering out. Like many
others, I was trying to figure out what would come next.
None of the existing Leninist-style organizations that had
absorbed what was left of the 1960s radicalization struck
me as anything more than dinosaurs. In the end I
volunteered for the staff of the Great Speckled Bird for
what amounted to my apprenticeship in radical journalism.
At this time I formed one of those relationships that
profoundly affect one’s personal development. I became
close friends with a local Marxist playwright and poet who
introduced me to a broader appreciation and vision of Marx
than that contained by the arid formulas of Leninism. I
began reading books that he suggested and educating myself
in a way I had not done before. The experience re-energized
and re-focused me. I began to take up organizational and
cultural work in a big way.
I enrolled at Georgia State University and joined the staff
of the school paper, where I openly espoused radical
perspectives on cultural, social, and political matters. I
participated in the mass mobilization in the wake of the
Greensboro Massacre where we marched under a declaration of
martial law to protest the killing of members and
supporters of the Communist Workers Party by the Klan and
Nazis. I became heavily involved in the Atlanta Committee
Against Registration for the Draft, a coalition
encompassing right libertarians, liberals, Quakers,
Maoists, Trotskyists, anarchists and others. I fell in with
the anarchist caucus. I also helped organize a regional
gathering of university students in an attempt to form a
Southern student activist network.
All of this was interrupted when it became necessary for me
to move to South Florida to help my father with his ailing
business. It proved to be another turning point. In South
Florida I was confronted by the realization that Atlanta,
by comparison, was a progressive oasis. There, both the
Klan and groups such as Omega 7 and Alpha 66 operated with
impunity. The public discourse was ruled by reactionaries
and structural racism was blatant and unapologetic. I
realized that things were going to get harder, not easier.
The left was going to have to be tougher, shrewder, and
more creative in order to resist right-wing reaction.
What did Neighbors Network achieve? How did it fail? What
would you have done differently? Why did the group fold?
You and the other younger folks around us may not have been
aware of it but at the time when we were working with the
GLBT community around the antigay resolution in Cobb
County, attacks on gay and lesbian folks were not
automatically included under the heading of hate crimes.
Early hate crimes legislation simply ignored gays and
lesbians. To my knowledge we were one of the first, if not
the first, organization of our kind to take the position
that gay-bashing was a hate crime. The report we produced
for the Cobb Citizens Coalition, “The Shadow of Hatred:
Hate Group Activity in Cobb County, Georgia,” made explicit
the connection between hate group activity and violence
against the GLBT community. It also clarified how actions
such as the Cobb Commission’s “community values,” anti-gay
and lesbian resolution, created a climate in which the
propaganda of such groups could flourish.
I don’t want to exaggerate the impact of our work in Cobb
County but it’s my opinion that our intervention there
helped change the national conversation about hate-crimes
from one that excluded gays and lesbians to what it is
today. I consider this to have been one of the Neighbors
Network’s major contributions.
In general, I think that the Neighbors Network was a potent
factor in making Georgia an inhospitable environment for
open white supremacist organizing. When we began, the
climate in Georgia was such that supremacists were able to
organize large public rallies with impunity. On January 17,
1987, a Klan-organized mob of hundreds violently attacked
civil rights marchers in Cumming, Georgia, driving off both
the marchers and their GBI escort. The event drew
international press attention and a week later, on January
24, when 10,000 civil rights marchers descended on Cumming
to protest the attack, the Klan and its supporters
mobilized thousands to counter protest. This fact went
largely unreported at the time. I’m aware of it because I
spent that day undercover in the Klan crowd.
I witnessed numerous instances of provocation by the proKlan crowd, including rock throwing, and I was nearly
clubbed when the cops responded. I saw David Duke being led
away in handcuffs after having whipped up the crowd with an
impromptu speech that completely blocked one of the streets
adjacent to the town square. I witnessed former Governor
and segregationist hero Lester Maddox glad-handing the
crowds in a show of support—another fact that received no
attention in the press at the time. Additionally, Nazi
skinheads were making regular forays into the Atlanta youth
scene, attacking and intimidating at will targeted events
and individuals. In short, the supremacists were on a high.
By the time Neighbors Network closed up shop, Klan groups
in Georgia had been reduced to rare events on private
property, coaxing participants by assuring that they could
wear their hoods legally and keep their identities hidden
from prying eyes. The major figures among the Nazi skins
were either lying low, had left the state, or were serving
time.
I’m not suggesting that the Neighbors Network alone was
responsible for this turn of fortune. We entered the field
at a time when the strategic situation was highly
favorable. The Klan’s violence had exposed the state to
scrutiny and criticism both nationally and internationally.
In so doing they had incited the opposition of powerful
business and political interests. The emergence of a
younger, Nazified faction that glorified the example of the
Brüder Schweigen (The Order) garnered the enmity of
federal, state, and local police. Our work opened up
another front against them. We attacked them at their base
by providing a resource for those in the community who
would otherwise have been intimidated or terrorized into
silence. This, in turn, enabled us to strip away the veil
of anonymity that allowed them to operate without fear of
consequences.
I don’t really see the Neighbors Network as having failed.
There are two essential reasons for why we folded. First,
we were starved for resources. That wasn’t so much a
failure on our part as it was the result of hostility by
interests that saw us as competition. The second was
exhaustion and grew naturally out of the first. Towards the
end we lost several key people due to attrition who
couldn’t be easily replaced.
Further, the success in defeating the overtly fascist surge
in the state had fundamentally changed the terrain of the
struggle. The fascist impulse was seeking out new channels
and new forms for which our previous tactics were illsuited. For the Neighbors Network to have continued as an
effective force it would have required a complete revamping
and reorientation. I would have preferred that outcome but
the material and human resources simply weren’t there.
Today anarchists, or at least a prominent faction of them,
would denounce your actions up and down: the practice of
sharing information on the far right with the police,
encouraging folks to go to them if they were threatened or
assaulted, and working with the Southern Poverty Law
Center; was this a tension then?
Purists could and did denounce us at the time. Frankly, I
wasn’t too concerned about such criticism. Would the
critics refuse to call the fire department if their house
were on fire? How about if it were their neighbor’s house?
Do they disdain the use of flush toilets? After all, the
sewers are operated by the State. Or is it only
collaboration when a police agency is involved? Is the
individual who calls the police to report a mugging, a
theft, an assault or a rape guilty of collaboration?
To be blunt, my own view was that we were engaged in lowintensity warfare with fascism in its most virulent,
Nazified form. In such circumstances my only consideration
in the choice of weapons was their efficacy. That I was
combating Nazis politically rather than shooting them on
sight was simply a concession to civilized behavior. I was
far more interested in effectively gutting the enemy than
in winning any plaudits for political correctness. This was
the perspective I argued for within Neighbors Network and
it informed the policies we eventually pursued.
I don’t mean to dismiss legitimate concerns about dealing
with police agencies out of hand. There are very real
dangers involved in this, not least of which being attempts
by the cops to co-opt you for their own purposes. Such
attempts were made but they were resisted.
Neighbors Network archive, Emory University, Atlanta, GA
The collection was donated with the proviso that it be made
available for research to any interested individual:
http://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/neighborsnet
work1009/series3/subseries3.1/
Neighbors Network online reports, including “Hatred in
Georgia”
http://radicalarchives.org/2013/01/16/neighbors-network-pub
lications/
Walter Reeves’s selected writings
“The First Step Against Hate”
“The Company They Keep: Examining the Tanton Network’s
White Nationalist Ties via Georgia”
“The Nature of the Beast: My Sean Hannity Adventure”
Walter Reeves’s blog
http://wbreevesrite.blogspot.com
Glossary
Alpha
66:
A
Florida-based
paramilitary
group
of
anticommunist Cuban exiles that conducted bombings and
assassinations of other Miami-based Cuban exiles and, with
the CIA’s support, launched armed raids on Cuba.
Brüder Schweigen (The Order): Mid-1980s armed Far Right
group that sought to establish a White state in the Pacific
Northwest, engaged in a series of robberies and bombings,
and assassinated Jewish talk-show host Alan Berg.
Center for Democratic Renewal (CDR): National Left-liberal
group that was active in the 1980s and early 1990s in
monitoring and organizing against the Far Right.
Christian Reconstructionism: Protestant right-wing movement
that seeks to make the United States a theocracy.
Cobb County antigay resolution: Cobb County is a
predominately white, right-wing county in the Atlanta
suburbs. On Aug. 10, 1993, the Cobb County Commission
approved—by a 3-1 vote, with one commissioner absent—a
resolution condemning the “gay lifestyle.” The handiwork of
Commissioner Gordon Wysong, the resolution stated that
“lifestyles advocated by the gay community” are
incompatible with community standards, and that Cobb County
would not fund “activities which seek to contravene these
existing community standards.”
Duke, David: Media-savvy founder of the Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan. Duke was elected to the Louisiana House of
Representatives as a Republican in 1990. He subsequently
lost his bid for U.S. Congress.
Forsyth County, Georgia: Following the lynching of a black
man accused of rape and the subsequent public hanging of
two Black men convicted of the same crime in 1912, nearly
the entire Black community in Forsyth County was driven out
by a campaign of threats and intimidation. At the time of
the 1987 Brotherhood marches, the county sheriff said he
did not know of any Black residents in the county.
Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI): Georgia’s version of
the FBI, responsible for monitoring Far Left and Far Right
groups and enforcing civil-rights laws.
Goodman, Schwerner. and Chaney: Three Northern civil rights
activists who were murdered in Mississippi by Klansmen
while taking part in the Freedom Summer in 1964. The movie
Mississippi Burning is based on their story.
Great
Speckled
Bird:
Left-wing,
Atlanta-based,
countercultural underground newspaper published from 1968
to 1974.
Greensboro Massacre: In 1979, a “Death to the Klan” march
in Greensboro, NC, was organized by the Communist Workers
Party. Klansmen and Nazis attacked it, killing five people.
No one was convicted of the killings, though they were
recorded by television crews and the attackers’ group was
infiltrated by the FBI.
Jim Crow: The name given for the South’s legal system of
racial segregation, instituted after Reconstruction in the
1870s and dismantled in the 1950s and 1960s.
Ku Klux Klan (KKK): A central, national Klan organization
has not existed since 1947. Instead, the idea of the KKK
exists as a style and type of politics that Far Right
organizers can use in forming their own groups.
Oklahoma City bombing: The April 1995 bombing of the Alfred
P. Murrah Federal Building killed 168 people. The bombers
had ties to the militia movement and the Far Right.
Omega 7: A clandestine, armed group of anti-Communist Cuban
exiles that has been accused of bombings, assassinations,
and plane highjackings.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS): The largest
antiwar student group in the 1960s, with a membership in
the hundreds of thousands. It splintered into many groups,
including the Weather Underground, after 1969.
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC): This Alabama-based
group founded in the early 1970s monitors the Far Right but
also has an “anti-extremist” stance and collects
information on the Far Left. It has close ties to federal
authorities and law enforcement and is best known for a
series of civil suits that bankrupted various Klan and Nazi
organizations in the 1980s.
Thälmann, Ernst: Chairman of the German Communist Party
(KPD) when Hitler rose to power in 1933. Beforehand the KPD
had refused to ally with the Social Democrats (who were
condemned as “social fascists”)—allowing the Nazis to take
power.
Yippie: The Youth International Party was a left-wing,
countercultural grouping started by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry
Rubin in the late 1960s. They were different from other
Left groups because of their commitment to the hippie
counterculture, political pranks, and openly pro-drug
stance.
Zippie: The Zeitgeist International Party was a younger
offshoot of the Yippies and a play on the name.