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
