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Los Angeles, November 13
Tom Metzger, the infamous former Ku Klux Klan leader who rose to prominence in the 1980s while promoting white separatism and fueling racial violence, has died at the age of 82.
Riverside County Department of Public Health spokesman Jose Arballo Jr, said Metzger died on November 4 at a qualified nursing facility in Hemet.
The cause was Parkinson’s disease, Arballo said Thursday.
The former great dragon of the Californian section of the Ku Klux Klan has become one of the most important figures in racism after leaving that organization in the 1980s to form the White Aryan resistance movement.
He was eventually pushed into shadow and financial ruin, however, over his organization’s role in the 1988 knocking death of Ethiopian college student Mulugeta Seraw in Portland, Oregon.
Seraw’s family won a $ 12.5 million sentence against Metzger, his organization and others in 1990 following a trial in which a Metzger recording was played praising the killers for performing what he called theirs. ” civic duty “.
Metzger lost his San Diego area home, television repair business, and other assets. Though left penniless, Metzger continued to produce a racist newsletter for years and ran a racist hotline, personally answering calls.
Until a few months ago, he regularly posted on his organization’s website, according to a short bio announcing his death on the site.
Metzger’s death was first reported by the San Diego Times.
“Tom Metzger has spent decades working against core American values as one of the most prominent white supremacists in the country,” Jonathan A Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told The Associated Press.
“Throughout his life, he has engaged in a wide range of hateful activities, from spreading anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric to launching vigilant border patrols like a California klansman to recruiting skinheads for the white supremacist cause,” he added. Greenblatt.
Seraw’s killing left Portland racial wounds that continue to this day, said Randy Blazak, a sociology professor at Portland State University who has written extensively on hate groups.
“We became known as Skinhead City, we had racist skinheads and anti-racist skinheads fighting in the streets, which is sort of a precursor to the antifa and the Proud Boys,” he said, referring to those involved in the recent violence that they have gripped the city.
Born in Warsaw, Indiana on April 9, 1938, Thomas Linton Metzger served in the military from 1956 to 1959 before settling in California and a career as a television repairman.
He joined the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1970s, assuming the role of the great dragon of California before leaving to form the White Aryan Resistance in the early 1980s.
He ran for Congress from upstate San Diego County in the early 1980s, winning the Democratic Party primary but losing to a landslide victory in the general election after Democrats and Republicans united against him.
He became a prominent media figure in those years, appearing on television talk shows, organizing white supremacy demonstrations and cross-fires, and promising a white civil war that would cause “blood in the streets.”
His son, John Metzger, and other white racists appeared on Geraldo Rivera’s television talk show in 1988 and quarreled with Roy Innis and other black civil rights activists.
Rivera suffered a broken nose during the televised chaos, which created a national furore.
Tom Metzger’s downfall began after he sent one of his White Aryan Resistance members to Oregon to organize a local Nazi skinhead group.
Within a month, local skinheads had beaten 28-year-old Seraw to death with a baseball bat. They later admitted that they spotted him because he was black.
The civil trial resulting from the murder was devastating for Metzger, said Elden Rosenthal, one of the attorneys representing the Seraw family.
“We have chased him for 20 years. We’ve been raising money from him for 20 years, which is the limit under Oregon law, “Rosenthal said, adding,” The goal of the case was to put him out of business and influence his position in the white supremacy movement. and we thought we accomplished both. “
Another attorney, James McElroy of San Diego, arranged the sale of the Metzger home to a Latin family to help meet the judgment.
“Poetic justice,” said McElroy, who went on to adopt Seraw’s 7-year-old son.
Although Metzger has long been identified as a white supremacist, he actually avoided that term, saying he was a white separatist and had no problem with blacks not interacting with whites.
However, the racial hatred it fomented continues today, McElroy and Rosenthal said.
“At the time, I looked at it as totally on the fringes,” Rosenthal said.
“What we have sadly learned over the past 30 years is that there are many people who share his views. … He seemed a little cheeky at the time, now he looks a little scary. “AP
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