Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Great American Crime Fighters

The news this past week of a hideous crime inspired this post. 


The alleged criminal Frazier Glenn Cross, 73 (aka Frazier Glenn Miller) is charged killing three people near a Jewish center outside Kansas City.   He was a former 'grand dragon' of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.  Here is Cross in the 1980’s dishing out his white supremacist venom:



Here is a recent mug shot:



He allegedly shot these people to death:

A boy singer and his grand father




A mother of three about to celebrate her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary




Prosecutors say they have enough evidence to charge Cross with federal crimes that could get him the death sentence.

All the major news outlets are turning to the Southern Poverty Law Center for information about the sort of killer Cross seems to be.  SPLC has history of fighting hate crimes in general and white supremacists in particular.  They seek justice for the most vulnerable members of our society.

Founded in 1971, by civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. in 1971 tracks and exposes the activities of hate groups. I remember very well, when President Obama took office that they already had on their radar, groups who might target him because a black man had to audacity to run for the presidency.  And to get elected.  Twice.  Pictures of those goons appeared that month in their Intelligence Report—which keeps its fingers on the pulse of such doings.



Early on, Dees and his colleagues mounted a number of successful civil suits against the KKK, suing them for damages when they killed innocent black people in the South.  In one of my favorites, they bankrupted a KKK group to the point where the survivor of one of their victims ended up owning the local KKK clubhouse.  Many of those groups went bankrupt.  Stopping the Klan with words has been the hallmark of their work ever since.

I have been a supporter of their work since 1980.  If you care about crime fighting, I urge you to so the same at:


Annamaria Alfieri










2 comments:

  1. I've been watching this on TV and reading about it in the Times. It is hard to accept this country still has these people... yet, in my tons of research on hate groups for one of my books I'm highly aware of how many there are in certain geographic pockets... Some of my students at the prep school in Sewanee, TN, who came from MISS and ALA had close relatives who were high up in the KKK. Once, as I was driving alone down to the Gulf, the head of the KKK in MISS had me followed and protected on the highway down... That man, the student's uncle, was a perfect gentleman, very well- educated, not at all like what I thought of as the horrible KKK... sounds like something out of a novel in other parts of the world, doesn't it!!!!!What situations we do find ourselves in in life.... tjs

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  2. This was just such a disturbing crime. It's time for me to pull out the checkbook and start contributing to Southern Poverty Law Center again.

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