For this week’s Throw-Back-Thursday, I would like to share this image from March 4th 1989. This original Associated Press Wire LaserPhoto would have shown up on editors’ desks in newspapers and magazines across the US back in 1989.
I have covered many protest and riots over the years, most recently the crazy Occupy Oakland protests, but the one that stands out as the most disturbing, was this white supremacist neo-Nazi skinhead protest in Napa, California.
Originally touted as the “Aryan Woodstock,’’ this week long recruiting concert was to be held at a private isolated ranch just outside Napa. With bands sympathetic to white supremacist neo-Nazi skinheads and Ku Klux Klan members.
Unfortunately, the necessary concert permits had not been obtained, putting an end to the music but not to the hateful gathering.
Lacking the music concert the number of white supremacist dwindled down from an expected crowds numbering in the thousands, to about one hundred. Now facing off with around four hundred anti-skinhead protesters, including members of the New York based Guardian Angels.
Fearing violence between the skinheads and protesters over 200 law-enforcement officers, some in riot gear, were on duty at the site.
What surprised me from the start was that the white supremacist members who were condemned by the protesters for their racist views and violent history were relatively quiet and subdued.
It was the protestors who came to denounce the skinheads who were the ones with all the anger, hateful language, and threats of physical violence, many of them spitting, throwing rocks and gravel, and forcing confrontations. Including a Guardian Angel who through a punch at a Klan member.
Bill Albers, a member of the Ku Klux Klan being chased by a mob of protesters. AP/Peter DaSilva
Disturbing…YES! Not the way I would have thought when the day began. The groups who deplored hatred, racism and violence were no different than the ones that prescribed hate, racism and violence.
Don’t get me wrong, I disagree with what the Klan and groups like them stand for, but how are we to change how people treat each other, if the ones fighting against these views, become just as violent?