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[Detroit Suburb Protests Spread of Racist Leaflets]

Detroit Suburb Protests Spread of Racist Leaflets

Chicago Tribune
February 10, 1992

Harper Woods, MI -- A North Carolina-based white supremacist group with strongholds in three Michigan cities targeted this Detroit suburb with racist leaflets, sparking an outcry Saturday from residents. Dozens of tabloid-size newspapers titled "Racial Loyalty" were left after dark late last week on the driveways of homes in several neighborhoods by local members of "Church of the Creator."  The newspaper called itself the "spearhead of the white racial holy war."

City Manager James Leidlein said Harper Woods police received several complaints about the leaflets, which listed a Wayne telephone number and post office boxes in Warren and Sterling Heights. But police could do little more than arrest the distributors on littering charges, he said.  No arrests had been made Saturday.

[Teen Linked to Milwaukee Supremacists]

Teen Linked to Milwaukee Supremacists

Chicago Tribune
March 25, 1993
By Andrew Martin and David Silverman

During the months before he allegedly bombed a Zion roller rink last summer, Randall Scott Anderson traveled to Milwaukee on several occasions to meet with representatives of a white supremacist group based there, police said Wednesday.

A clearer picture of Anderson's neo-Nazi contacts also began to emerge as a federal magistrate refused a pretrial request by Anderson's attorney for a psychological evaluation of the teen.

Anderson, 19, was charged on Sunday with the June 14, 1992, bombing of the Park Roller Rink in Zion-a weekend gathering place for black teens and church groups.

Police say that during the months preceding the attack, Anderson corresponded with several white supremacist groups, including the Milwaukee-based Church of the Creator .

Formerly based in Otto, N.C., the Church of the Creator was founded by 72-year-old Ben Klassen , a retired real estate developer and former Florida legislator. Klassen moved the church to Milwaukee last March, and it has been active in Wisconsin and the Chicago area distributing racist literature, police said.

Copies of the group's newsletter, "Racial Loyalty," were found among Anderson's possessions in his parents' Winthrop Harbor home during a weekend search by police.

The church is composed of white supremacists and goes by the belief that "you are the creator of your own church. You can create your own beliefs," said Lake County Sheriff's Lt. Chester Iwan.

Police believe Anderson met with group members several times, Iwan said, but he would not elaborate on those contacts. Federal authorities investigating the case said Anderson attended several church meetings and parties sponsored by the hate group's members.

Anderson also has been linked by correspondence to Thomas Metzger, leader of the San Diego-based White Aryan Resistance and neo-Nazi groups in Hayden Lake, Idaho, officials said.

But those ties were not discussed during the pretrial hearing in U.S District Court in Chicago, in which Magistrate W. Thomas Rosemond Jr. denied a request for Anderson to be examined by a court-appointed psychiatrist.

Anderson sat passively, dressed in a blue prison jumpsuit, as Rosemond said he would deny the request based on events at a hearing Sunday in which the youth had acted as his attorney.

"Mr. Anderson clearly understood those proceedings, as shown in his request to be placed in protective custody so that he would not have to share his cell with an African American," Rosemond said.

Deputy U.S. Atty. Patrick Murray then outlined Anderson's role in the bombing during direct examination of FBI Special Agent Judith Coughenour, who led the government's investigation.

Coughenour described how with a group of five or six friends Anderson had constructed a pipe bomb filled with matches and black powder, and how sometime after midnight on June 14 Anderson and one of the friends drove to the Park, where they spray-painted a racist message on a back wall of the building before lighting the bomb and throwing it through a front window.

No one was injured in the attack, which damaged a concession area inside the rink and destroyed several video games.

The hearing, however, did little to shed light on how Anderson, a youth described by teachers at Zion-Benton High School as "brilliant," became involved with white supremacist groups.

Rosemond ordered Anderson to be held while a grand jury reviews the case. Anderson's attorney, James Reilley, did not request bond for the teen, and Anderson was returned to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he has been held since Sunday.

[Supremacist Paper Angers S.L. Neighborhood]

Supremacist Paper Angers S.L. Neighborhood

Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah)
March 11, 1992
By Amanda Ballif

Stephanie Hamilton was enraged when a white supremacist publication called Racial Loyalty was circulated in her Salt Lake City neighborhood.

"I don't want [Racial Loyalty] anywhere near my kids," said Mrs. Hamilton.

Mrs. Hamilton, who is half Schaghticoke Indian, said her anger was kindled by the newspaper's reference to American Indians as "red niggers" and "mudds."

The paper brought back feelings of disgust from years ago when she was a high-school sophomore in Connecticut. The bus she was riding was attacked by whites who threw metal objects through the windows and injured her best friend.

"I am more scared than angry," said Karen Wood, a neighbor who fears it will escalate racial tensions.

It is unclear how many papers were distributed, but they were found last month on porches along 600 East from Emerson Avenue to Liberty Park.

The papers were stamped with the insignia of the United White Working Class, a Salt Lake City organization; Group representatives declined to answer any questions.

Cosette Joesten, principal at Hawthorne Elementary, 1675 S. 600 East, said Mrs. Hamilton is the only parent who brought the paper to her attention so she doesn't know if it reached many in the community. But the principal was not pleased: "I got sick to my stomach."

"This is a clear example of the increased efforts of white supremacist groups to spread their message of hatred," said Ronald Coleman, Associate Vice President for Diversity and Faculty Development at the University of Utah. "They obviously see us [in the Salt Lake area] as a community vulnerable to the rise of skinheads and neo-Nazis and the like."

The 12-page newsletter was published in Otto, N.C., by The Church of the Creator, which preaches "the survival, expansion and advancement of the white race."

Ben Klassen , the 75-year-old leader of The Church of the Creator, said in a telephone interview he doesn't know any members of his church in Utah, but he believes he has an audience here.

John Foster of the Salt Lake City Police Department Intelligence Unit monitors publications that are inflammatory or a threat to the community. "This publication is clearly inflammatory and distasteful," he said. "But not illegal."

[White Supremacist Plans Church in N.C. Mountains]

White Supremacist Plans Church in N.C. Mountains

The Dispatch (Lexington, N.C.)
May 25, 1982

Mulberry -- Hailing Nazi Adolph Hitler as a great man and scorning Jesus Christ as a myth, an avowed white supremacist says he's building a church which will disseminate white-power messages.

Called the Church of the Creator, its founder, Ben Klassen, 63, of Lighthouse Point, Fla., says the religion is for white people only.  He says it considers blacks and Jews as two of America's greatest threats.

Klassen says he is now supervising construction of a church in the small Macon County community where people can practice the religion.

The church's literature says Hitler was one of the greatest men who ever lived and Jesus Christ is myth created by Jews to gain power.

Local black leaders say they do not fear Klassen and his church, and the regional director of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League calls Klassen a "kook."

Norman Olshansky, regional director of the ADL in Richmond, Va., said the league was monitoring Klassen, but said his major visibility thus far has been in press reports.

Olshansky said Klassen has disseminated anti-Semitic literature across the nation but no one knows how many people practice his beliefs or are ministers in his churches.

Mulberry, located less than three miles from the Georgia-North Carolina line, was chosen for a church site because Florida is in peril, Klassen said.

"I think south Florida is due for a lot of turmoil when bloody fighting breaks out," Klassen said.  "Actually, I expect the financial collapse of the entire country, and blood will be flowing in the streets.

['Loyalty' Rooted in a History of Hate]

'Loyalty' Rooted in a History of Hate
Ben Klassen says he didn't distribute Racial Loyalty, his anti-black, anti-Jewish trabloid, in a local neighborhood.  But he's glad someone did.

St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, Florida)
By Sheryl James
Times Staff Writer

Last week, Valrico resident Patricia Moorhead took what looked like a shopping advertiser from two neighborhood teen-agers who had found it on their street.  She unfurled it.

She realized that the 12-page tabloid newspaper, which mysteriously appeared on lawns and windshields in this integrated neighborhood in Hillsborough County, was clearly no shopper.

"It's Great To Be White!" read one slogan at the top of the publication, Racial Loyalty.

"Let them Wither on the Vine: They are not our kind, they are not our brothers and they are not our concern!" was the cover story headline.

To the right was a photo of a woman's face" "ANOTHER VICTIM of the Black/Mud/Jew Criminal Terror Against Whites," the headline read.  The item detailed the alleged murder of a California woman by a rabbi.

Moorhead was shocked and upset.  So were her neighbors.  She called the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.  Newspaper and television reporters rushed to the scene.  No one knew who distributed the papers, which also had been found in the Town 'N Country and Forest Hills in Tampa.  The newspaper had a North Carolina address, but, as Moorhead said last week, "I don't think someone would drive all the way down from North Carolina to do this."

Ben Klassen, publisher of Racial Loyalty and a former Florida state legislator, would have smiled.

Klassen wrote most of the articles in the newspaper.  He also founded the paper's publishing entity, the Church of the Creator, which is dedicated not to a deity but "to the survival, expansion and advancement of the white race."

"I don't know who distributed it," Klassen said in a telephone interview last week from his home in North Carolina.  "But I'm glad they did."

He said that his church does have members in the Tampa Bay area, that they include some white supremacist "skinheads" and that he probably could easily track down who delivered the papers in Valrico.

But he declined to identify the distributors, saying the "would be harassed; they might lose their jobs."

Mystery is part of Klassen's method of operation.  Racial Loyalty has turned up in several U.S. cities, including Denver and Austin, Texas.  The papers usually are distributed in the middle of the night, and the shock value is the same in most communities, said Stephen Goldman, director of the West Florida Region Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith in Tampa.

"People wonder: Was I picked out?  Do they know I'm Jewish?  It instills fear in the most insidious way," Goldman said.

Klassen is no mystery to the Anti-Defamation League, an organization founded to stop the defamation of Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens.  The league has a two-page fact sheet about the church leader and author of several books, including The White Man's Bible.

"He's a crackpot," says Ira Gisson, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League in Norfolk, Va.  But a crackpot who has some impact.  "He is a prolific pamphleteer.  He gets distribution of his materials in specifically targeted areas.  He likes to try to get his White Man's Bible distributed in prisons -- in some cases he's been successful."

Klassen's reputation is well known by his neighbors in Otto, a tiny community in mountainous, western North Carolina near the Georgia state line.  Since he moved there in 1981 from Lighthouse Point, near Pompano Beach, Klassen has built a church and started a School for Gifted Boys.  The enrollment this year was four.

Recently, according to reporter Bob Scott, who has written about Klassen for the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen for eight years, "people who seem to resemble the skinheads have reportedly been seen around the church."

Area residents say Klassen generally keeps to himself.  There is no evidence he has participated in any kind of violence.  But his rhetoric, which lives through his church and publications, is viciously anti-Jewish, anti-African American, anti-Hispanic, and anti-any-other-race that is not Anglo-Saxon.  He calls non-white people "the mud races."  All minorities in the United States should be sent back "to their natural habitat," he says.  He calls Adolf Hitler "the greatest white men that ever lived."

Klassen, who also is anti-Christ, calls himself "Pontifex Maximus" (Latin for "high priest") in his church.  At 72, he says he soon will retire and has designated as his successor the "Reverend" Rudy "Butch" STANKO, who was convicted several years ago of selling rotten meat to public schools.  STANKO will take control of Klassen's organization as soon as he gets out of the federal peinitentiary.  That could be sometime this year, Klassen says.

He is exercising freedom of his religion -- the religion of white racial purity, Klassen says.  "What we''re trying to do is ... I presume you're white.  Do you have children?  How would you like to have a world similar to Harlem?  That's what we're trying to avoid."

Hostility Magnet

Klassen spent the first six years of his life in the Ukraine, in a large Mennonite colony.  he says he is of German descent, they youngest of five children.  The Mennonite colony was prosperous and happy until the Bolshevik Revoloution.  During the early '20s, Mennonites were persecuted by Communists, who were, Klassen says, secretly inspirted by the Jews to revolt in 1917.

"The Mennonites were raped and murdered.  They took all our grain.  People starved to death.  When I was 3 years old, we were having dinner, my dad was dividing black bread among the family.  It was half a slice."

His family emigrated to Mexico in 1924, and later to Saskatchewan, Canada.  When he took an ancient history course in college, he says, "I studied ancient Greeks and Romans.  I discovered there had been thousands of religions that had come and gone.  I came to the conclusion that our Christian religion was one of those -- based on supersition, gullibility, ignorance.  I didn't believe in it anymore."

Klassen settled in Florida in 1958, rushing to the political right.  In 1966, he was elected to the Florida House of Representatives, representing an area in Broward County.  After one term, he says, "I guess I was a little too radical for the Republican party.  On the second go-around, they didn't support men, and I was out."

In 1968, he served as the Florida chairman of George Wallace's American Independent Party, when Wallace ran for president.  But Klassen soon rejected both Wallace and a membership in the John Birch Society, saying both had become too liberal.

Already known for his anti-Jewish and anti-black views, Klassen decided no existing organization or religion suited him.  He established the now-defunct Nationalist White Party.  In 1973, he created the Church of the Creator, headquartered in Lighthouse Point.  He wrote several books, including The White Man's Bible, and Nature's Eternal Religion, and sold them in his American Opinion Bookstore in Pompano Beach.

The contents of his books, from which he quotes at length in Racial Loyalty, are generally considered too inaccurate or offensive to publish in daily newspapers.  He said during the interview that white people must regain control of the country and their destiny.  He believes the United States must stop subsidizing Israel and all "mud countries," and cut off non-whites in this country as well.  He has no mercy for non-whites in any situation.

Klassen says his church also advocates whites marrying whites.  Racial Loyalty does its part by featuring "Cupid's Corner," a "white racial matching service."

"One of the Sixteen Commandments of Creativity states: Be fruitful and multiply," one Cupid column stated.  "Eligible white men take note: We already have some very interesting inquiries from beautiful blond and blue-eyed White women from Sweden."

In 1982, Klassen said, he left Florida because it had too many non-whites, too much congestion, and too much crime.  He moved to vacation property he had owned for years in Otto, where he lives in a Swiss-chalet style house.  He lives with his wife, Henrie Etta.  He has one daughter and three grandchildren.

He is challenging Macon County's refusal to grant him tax-exempt status for his church and school.  "We are depending on the First Amendment," Klassen said.  "We're entitled to our own religion, our own means of having peaceful assembly, to distribute literature.  We want to do our thing, to promote ideas peacefully."

When asked whether his church advocates violence, he said, "We don't, we don't, we don't."  But if faced with violence, "We would fight."

He admits the church is hoping to lure skinheads.  "Yes, we're very much together with them.  They're rebels without a cause; they don't know what they believe.  We think we have what they're looking for.  They're glad to be with us."

Defining "we" is difficult with Klassen.  He refuses to cite church membership numbers, or say how many subscribe to Racial Loyalty.  He says only that the church has "worldwide" membership.

The numbers don't matter, said Ira Gisson at the Anti-Defamation League in Norfolk.

"It is potentially dangerous.  With the expected arrival of the inmate STANKO as the leader, I would say the prospect of violence is enhanced.  These are dangerous people.  And while few in number, it doesn't take many to do a great deal of harm."