Commentary: Hate is no lonely hunter

By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – The man’s face just radiated hate.

Twenty years ago, I covered a rally of white supremacists that took place at the Indiana Statehouse. Those were heady days for hate

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com
John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com
groups. Klan leader David Duke had won national attention with a too-close-for-comfort gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana – he finished second and claimed nearly 40 percent of the vote — which he then parlayed into a run through the 1992 Republican presidential primaries. He lost, but he managed to drag the Klan out of the swamps and into the spotlight.

Commentary button in JPG – no shadowEmboldened, white supremacist groups adopted a strategy of demanding to use public places – Statehouses, county courthouses, public monuments – for their rallies. Government officials inevitably resisted. The hate groups then filed suit, won on First Amendment grounds and used the resulting publicity to build their crowds.

Left to their own devices, they probably couldn’t have filled a phone booth.

The rally I covered featured barely articulate speakers using a cheap, muffled sound system. The number of people protesting the rally and declaring that Indiana was no home for hate outnumbered the white supremacists.

Anger flowed like a flood tide through the crowd. At one point, the chants the two sides hurled at each other turned to shouts. Then people started pushing and shoving, and the crowd seemed to move like a snake from the west side of the Statehouse into the concrete corridor dividing the north and south buildings of the Indiana Government Center. People pushed, shoved, punched and jostled against the doors and windows of the south building for a few terrifying moments until police and security personnel managed to restore order.

But that wasn’t the scariest moment.

That came earlier, before the disorganized rally began.

I’d noticed a man standing off to the side, an older white guy in work boots and a frayed green baseball cap. He watched the stage with a laser-like focus.

I told him I was a reporter and asked if I could talk with him.

He nodded yes.

He’d driven over from southeast Illinois to hear the speakers. With little prompting, he shared his story and philosophy.

Both contained the usual inanities. Blacks, Jews and everyone who wasn’t just like him had ruined everything. They’d shattered the economy and wrecked the culture.

His own life, he said, was a tragedy because of them. He told me, barely pausing for breath, how his wife had left him and his teen-age children wouldn’t even return his phone calls or answer his letters.

I lost him when I asked how black and Jewish people could be responsible for his wife leaving him and his children refusing to talk with him.

His eyes narrowed and he stared at me for a long moment, and then said, his voice a hiss:

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

As he walked away, he hurled this over his shoulder:

“You people need to watch yourselves.”

You people.

A little later, when the rally turned violent, I saw him running along the edge of the crowd. He’d taken off his belt and was swinging it like a whip. He was just about to lash a college-age young woman with it when a police officer body-slammed him.

None of the verbs – twisted, contorted, inflamed – normally used to describe anger do justice to the rage that colored his face.

I’ve thought about that man since the news broke that another white supremacist, Frazier Glenn Miller (also known as Frazier Glenn Cross) tried to stage his own version of the Holocaust in Overland Park, Kan. Police say Miller opened fire at a Jewish community center and a retirement complex. He killed three people and terrified who knows how many others.

None of them had ever done a thing to hurt him.

Miller came from the same part of the cultural landscape that the guy I talked with years ago occupied, a warped spot in which people who aren’t exactly like them – you people – always are to blame for everything that doesn’t work in their lives.

It would be comforting to think that Miller was the only person out there who was that angry, that hate-filled, that dangerous.

Comforting, but, sadly, wrong.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.