White Supremacists Plan Knoxville Area Rally

Presented as a memorial to slain University of Tennessee student Channon Christian and her boyfriend Christopher Newsom, a coalition of neo-nazi and white supremacist groups are organizing a spring demonstration in the Knoxville area. Organized around Alex Linder's vulgarly racist and misogynist Vanguard News Network, planners hope to put a more mainstream face on their message of intolerance and white racial superiority. Linder has asked those in attendance to forgo the usual swastikas and pointed Klan hoods in order to not offend residents who he fears would be turned off by those overt symbols of hate.

In a movement historically plagued by infighting and division, this rally is a reaction to a crisis of leadership among organized white supremacist groups. Two of the event planners, Alex Linder of Kirksville, Missouri and James Leshkevich of Hurley, New York were associated with the organization National Vanguard, which was dissolved recently after leader Kevin Alfred Strom was arrested for possession of child pornography and wittiness intimidation. National Vanguard's Boston unit, one of their most active, folded in January after unit leader Matthew Downing was charged with the statutory rape of a 14 year old girl. Leshkevich headed NV's Hudson Valley unit and Linder achieved prominence in the neo-nazi movement after raising almost $80,000 for the legal defense of former KKK Imperial Wizard Chester Doles who was arrested on five felony charges in 2003. Doles later plead guilty to federal firearm violations.

One supporter of the protest, neo-nazi Bill White of Roanoke Virginia, says his group will wear swastikas, despite the wishes of the other planners. White heads a group that split recently from the National Socialist Movement after it was revealed that NSM chairman Cliff Herrington's wife ran an internet and mail order satanic cult called The Joy of Satan. Membership in White's group was also likely bolstered after NSM state leader and former KKK Imperial Wizard Gordon Young of Sharpsburg Maryland was arrested in January for child molestation. Another of the event planners, Glenn Miller, was once reviled by many within the white supremacist movement but now appears to be working closely with other racist leaders. In the 1980s Miller was caught purchasing machine guns and rockets from a North Carolina military base and avoided prosecution by testifying against members of the violent racist group 'The Order' who had been funding his activities with the proceeds from a series of bank and armored car robberies.

The tactic of protesting a crime as a cover for promoting racist ideals is not new. One of the planned speakers, racist internet 'shock-jock' Hal Turner of North Bergen, New Jersey staged a "Rally against violence" in November of 2005 in reaction to the beating of a high school student in Kingston New York. While Turner claimed the protest was "against violence" he has stated numerous times that he advocates violence against "non-whites" and has called for the assassination of members of congress and the judiciary that he disagrees with. The mother of the victim in the Kingston case declined to attend the rally stating she was not a racist. The families of Christian and Newsom were not available for comment on the planned rally, but a friend of Christian's stated "[Channon] would never have wanted that kind of hate..." associated with her memory.