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In 1977, David Duke and a handful of
his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan got tremendous media
attention when they inaugurated their 'Klan Border Watch.'
The patrol turned out to be little more than a publicity
stunt. |
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Although
Chris Simcox and Jim Gilchrist are seen as the fathers of the
Minuteman movement, citizen vigilante border patrols are not a
new concept. Simcox and Gilchrist are following in the footsteps
of other anti-immigrant activists before them, and it is
well-trodden ground.
Klansmen were on the Mexican border 28
years before the Minutemen co-opted the concept. And they were
talking about the Hispanic immigration threat more than five
decades before that.
In 1926, Klan Imperial Wizard H.W. Evans
warned that "to the South of us thousands of Mexicans, many of
them Communist, are waiting a chance to cross the Rio Grande and
glut the labor marts of the Southwest."
In an article that traces the history of
the Klan in San Diego from the 1920s through the 1970s, The
Journal of San Diego History describes an atmosphere of fear
that persisted for decades. "Any Mexican worker who challenged
authority or appeared suspicious of one thing or another would
forfeit his life," Mercedes Acasan Garcia, a maid during the
1920s, said in a 1979 interview. Garcia tearfully recalled
lynchings, whippings and burnings of Hispanics. "Since they were
ragged wetbacks, nobody cared who they were and nothing was done
about it."
With such a history of anti-immigrant
violence, Klan boss David Duke and his California leader, Tom
Metzger, had little trouble directing the energies of their
followers to the Mexican border a half century later.
In 1977, after shoring up their ranks with
Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton, the Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan kicked off its Klan Border Watch. Klansmen were supposed to
drive the border from Texas to the Pacific Ocean in a caravan,
instructed to report suspicious people to the Border Patrol.
Media attention was huge, and cameras at times outnumbered
Klansmen eight to one. The event wasn't much more than a
publicity stunt, although Metzger boasted of leading 500
volunteers from four states.
Metzger split with Duke in 1979, critical
of what he saw as Duke's showmanship and inveterate womanizing.
But, in the spring of 1980, Metzger formed his own rogue Klan
chapter and led a "security force" of around 40 Klansmen to John
Landes Park in Oceanside, vowing to rid it of Mexicans.
Metzger's followers carried black shields emblazoned with "KKK"
in white letters. They wielded bats, chains and nightsticks and
wore hockey masks and helmets. Some brought attack dogs.
Protesters met the Klansmen at the park and pelted them with
rocks. Seven people were injured.
That same year, Metzger parlayed the
attention he had gained, along with growing anti-immigrant
sentiment, into a victory in the Democratic primary for his
local congressional district. He got some 33,000 votes, although
he lost the general election handily.
Today, Metzger is dismissive of the staying
power of the Minutemen. "They remind me of the big splash about
the militias a few years ago," he told the Intelligence
Report. "When the Murrah Building in OKC went up they all
disappeared. The Minutemen are similar and when the blood really
flows on the border, most will be long gone. They go out of
their way to claim not to be racist. They are hypocrites of the
worst order. They go on and on that they want no racists among
them. What a joke."
Southern Poverty Law Center
Intelligence Report
Fall 2005
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=360
© Copyright 2005 Southern Poverty Law
Center |
