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<h1 class=" "><small>Want to Meet America’s Worst Racists? Come to
the Northwest</small></h1>
<p class="subhead"><b><big>Confederate sympathizers have nothing on
the ‘Northwest Front.’</big></b></p>
<footer class="meta">
<p class="byline">By CASEY MICHEL<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/northwest-front-americas-worst-racists-119803_full.html?print#.VZ2FtvnqV_A">http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/northwest-front-americas-worst-racists-119803_full.html?print#.VZ2FtvnqV_A</a></small></small></b><br>
</p>
<p class="timestamp"><time datetime="2015-07-07">July 07, 2015</time></p>
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<p>Much of the national debate over racism in the aftermath of last
month’s mass murder in Charleston, S.C., has focused on the South
and its strange and sometimes jarring nostalgia for the
Confederacy. And yet tucked away in the Pacific Northwest of the
United States is a vicious group that most people have never heard
of but the nation’s most virulent online racists know well (among
them, accused South Carolina murderer Dylann Roof, who wrote about
the group in his now-infamous “manifesto”).</p>
<p>The group is called the Northwest Front and its final solution to
the race "problem," if you will, is to expel non-white people from
the Pacific Northwest and to establish a mono-racial republic
there.</p>
<p>Racism knows no region, it’s safe to say. While the Pacific
Northwest can abstain from the debate on the removal of traitorous
colors from the Capitol grounds—Oregon was the last state in the
Union before the Civil War’s outbreak, after all—the region bears
a racial legacy tinted by an ignorance, a decades-old vision of
minority-free lands, as stark as any in the United States.</p>
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<p>To be sure, the Northwest Front represents a fringe campaign, a
minority of a minority seeking to expunge the Pacific Northwest of
any color but white. According to Harold Covington, the group’s
leader, the union of Washington State, Oregon, Idaho and western
Montana <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.vice.com/read/this-guy-wants-to-start-his-own-aryan-country">would
be</a> “kind of like the white version of Israel. I don’t see
why the Jews are the only people on Earth that get their own
country and everyone else has to be diverse.” Covington knows
precisely what he’s gone in for: “Of course it’s racism. What’s
wrong with racism? It’s the purist form of patriotism.”</p>
<p>Numbers on the Northwest Front are hard to come by—the group does
without formal membership—but the Southern Poverty Law Center
maintains Northwest Front as one of the foremost white nationalist
groups in the region. The group’s reach has as much to do with its
push as it does with its leader, Covington. While no direct
connection between Roof and Covington has yet emerged, aside from
Roof’s broadsides about Northwest Front, circumstance and parallel
motivations twin the two.</p>
<p>In 1972, while a member of the U.S. Army, Covington wormed his
way into his <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2001/fall/the-ties-that-bind">first
neo-Nazi organization</a>. He soon found himself in Bulawayo,
Rhodesia (a nation whose colors Roof, coincidentally, didn’t
hesitate to <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.vox.com/2015/6/18/8806633/charleston-shooter-flags-dylann-roof">sport</a>).
While there, Covington managed to start both the Rhodesian White
People’s Party and the South African Friends of the Movement. But
Covington quickly outstayed his welcome, and his screeching
anti-Semitism soon saw him deported from one of the most racist
regimes extant.</p>
<p>Not long thereafter, however, Covington set his sights more
domestically—and tapped into a vein of racial stratification long
overlooked within the U.S. For Covington, the Pacific Northwest
could prove the well-spring for the white supremacists’ dreams. An
independent <em>ethnie</em>. A Rhodesia regained.</p>
<p>But don’t think Covington’s claims—that he can flip the
vertiginous Northwest into an autarkic ethno-state—are novel.
Rather, Covington tapped into a racist longing that has long
festered in this part of the country, a tide of American history
that’s never been properly addressed. From its earliest American
outset, the Pacific Northwest was long meant to be a land for the
white caste. “Whites Only” writ large.</p>
<p>Look at <a target="_blank"
href="http://gizmodo.com/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia-1539567040">Oregon</a>,
for instance. As Walidah Imarisha of Portland State University’s
Black Studies Department told me, “Oregon was founded as a state,
as a territory, as a white homeland. Folks who answered that call
wanted to build their perfect white society.” And not in the same
vein of a three-fifths-clause South, where black Americans would
be tolerated, if in servitude. Oregon would be different. While
the state remained in the Union—and actually <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.amazon.com/Team-Rivals-Political-Abraham-Lincoln/dp/0743270754">proved
pivotal</a> to Abraham Lincoln’s nomination on the Republican
ticket—Oregon’s founders mentioned racial unity in the state's
original documents. To wit, the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Act <a
target="_blank"
href="http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf">allowed</a> free
land to whites alone. And during an 1857 vote on the
constitution’s formulation, some 83 percent of participants voted
to prohibit “free negroes” from living or working in the state.
Chief Justice George Williams, who later served as attorney
general for President Ulysses Grant, summed the sentiment, <a
target="_blank"
href="https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/4561/83_2_731.pdf?sequence=1">lobbying
voters</a> to “consecrate Oregon to the use of the white man,
and exclude the negro, Chinaman, and every race of that
character.” According to <a target="_blank"
href="https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/4561/83_2_731.pdf?sequence=1">one
researcher</a>, Oregon was “the only state ever admitted with a
black exclusion clause in its constitution.” There’s a reason,
growing up in Portland, that my seventh-grade teacher informed us
Oregon was often considered the most racist state west of the
Mississippi.</p>
<p>Remarkably, such laws remained in force in Oregon until 1926,
allowing a white population to steer a demographic legacy apart
from other parts of the country. At one point, Oregon boasted the <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wou.edu%2Ftri%2Fusp%2F556%2FOregonRacialLaws.pdf&ei=24iRVfPnKYagyASH9YIQ&usg=AFQjCNE7-wX2682KG5ome_k-dTNO2ST6MQ&sig2=6EJ68HyEynRIdCkLdzQO4g&bvm=bv.96783405,d.aWw">highest
per-capita membership</a> in the Ku Klux Klan. For good measure,
Oregon failed to ratify the 15th Amendment, allowing
African-Americans the right to vote, until 1959; the state also
didn’t formally ratify the 14th Amendment, allowing equal
protection under the law, until 1973. “Oregon was a Klan state—it
was as prejudiced as South Carolina, so there was very little
difference other than geographic difference,” Otto Rutherford, one
of the state’s leading civil rights activists, <a target="_blank"
href="http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf">said</a>.
Despite its current trappings of progress and tolerance, mid-20<sup>th</sup> century
Portland, <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.opb.org/artsandlife/series/historical-photo/oregon-historical-photo-portlands-struggle-for-racial-equality/">according</a> to
Oregon Public Broadcasting, “was still considered the most
segregated and prejudiced city on the West Coast.” Today, not only
does Portland remain the <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/24/how-the-whitest-city-in-america-appears-through-the-eyes-of-its-black-residents/">whitest
major metropolitan area</a> in the country, but the city managed
to slough its remaining African-American population even further
in the 21<sup>st</sup> century, dropping from <a target="_blank"
href="http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk">6.6
percent in 2000</a> to <a target="_blank"
href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/41/4159000.html">6.3
percent in 2010</a>. Seattle’s decline has proven even steeper,
with the city’s black population sagging from <a target="_blank"
href="http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/DEC/00_SF1/DP1/1600000US5363000">8.4
percent</a> to <a target="_blank"
href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/53/5363000.html">7.9
percent</a> in just 10 years, with no end to the drop in sight.</p>
<p>All through it, Oregon—and the Pacific Northwest more
broadly—remained a bastion of white supremacist visions of
isolation and conformity. Trends <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2011/winter/extremists-are-coming-together-in-mon">peaked</a> in
the mid-1980s with Richard Butler, founder of the Aryan Nations,
helping to push the idea of the Northwest Territorial Imperative,
of a piece with Covington’s recent push. Butler’s compound in
northern Idaho eventually fizzled, but his dream, tied directly to
the region’s days of primordial statehood, has continued.</p>
<p>Indeed, the Pacific Northwest was recently the site of an
attempted white supremacist bombing that could well have outpaced
the carnage unleashed in Boston a few years ago. In <a
target="_blank"
href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/09/nation/la-na-mlk-bomb-20120209">early
2011</a>, Kevin Harpham planted a backpack tangled in wire,
fishing weights, and rat poison along the route of Spokane’s
annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. Fortunately, sanitation
workers spotted the device before detonation. A few weeks later,
after <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2011/summer/mlk-day-bomb-suspect-has-extensive-wh">Harpham’s
white supremacist screeds</a> came to light, officers
camouflaged as road workers–and using a backhoe to pin his
car–grabbed Harpham. But not all domestic terrorists in the
region, operating under the auspices of white supremacy, are
caught prior to their crime. A white supremacist and his
girlfriend out of Washington State <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/24/us-usa-crime-supremacist-idUSBREA3N02G20140424">recently</a> murdered
a black man alongside a separate 19-year-old, the latter of whom
they “thought … was Jewish.”</p>
<p>No ties have come to light between any of the criminals and
Covington, nor between Covington and Roof—though it is worth
noting that the Northwest Front was apparently <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.foxcarolina.com/story/26693968/white-separatist-groups-card-ends-up-in-greenville-county-mans-mailbox">recently
recruiting</a> in South Carolina. But Covington chose his swath
of America for a reason. Not only does the region’s white
supremacist legacy—legal and otherwise—linger, but check the
latest Census figures. Washington State’s population remains only <a
target="_blank"
href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/53000.html">4
percent black</a>. Oregon? <a target="_blank"
href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/41000.html">Two
percent</a>. Idaho? <a target="_blank"
href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/16000.html">Eight-tenths
of a percent</a>. Montana? <a target="_blank"
href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/30000.html">Six-tenths
of a percent</a>.</p>
<p>For the accused South Carolina killer, apparently, the Northwest
Front’s goals were too meek. “I think this idea is beyond stupid,”
Roof <a target="_blank"
href="http://lastrhodesian.com/data/documents/rtf88.txt">wrote</a> in
his presumed manifesto. “Why should I for example, give up the
beauty and history of my state to go to the Norhthwest? (sic)”</p>
<p>But other racists have, and they will continue to do so. And we
shouldn’t forget about them. </p>
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<footer class="author-bio">
<p><em>Casey Michel is a recent Master’s graduate from Columbia
University’s Harriman Institute. His writing has appeared in
the</em> Atlantic, Foreign Policy, <em>and</em> Slate, <em>and
he can be followed on Twitter at <a
href="http://www.twitter.com/cjcmichel">@cjcmichel</a>.</em></p>
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