The Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment utilized its first-ever convention, a three-day conclave here that ended Sunday, to examine the one issue on which its disparate membership agrees: the need to develop and promulgate practical means to battle prejudice in the United States.
To this serene resort town near lakes and gentle mountains came 225 people, among them Montana farmers, Hispanic war veterans, urban radical blacks, Asian Americans, gay students, Moslems interested in Palestinian rights and members of several American Indian tribes.
They represented 120 organizations including the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee, both charter members of the coalition.
Tony Stewart, head of the political science department at the local North Idaho College and organizer of the conference, described the coalition as a “fragile crystal.”
Oscar Eason Jr., conference vice president, gave a similar appraisal at the conference’s closing plenary. “Each of us has one thing in common: We want to fight racial and religious harassment. We agree on that,” he stated. Eason acknowledged that any number of groups present had “only that one single issue in common.”
“What you need to know,” said Larry Broadbent, a local deputy sheriff who is acknowledged nationally as an intelligence specialist on hate groups, “is that the concerns you have in New York are the same concerns we have in Idaho. There are good people all over the United States and there are hate groups, too, all over, that we all oppose.”
The conference was marked by plaintive descriptions of specific hurts against the various ethnic groups, perpetrated by racist extremists or, in the case of the American Indians, by a long history of government indifference.
Conference participants were silently respectful of all speakers, and vibrant dialogue followed almost every presentation on responses to harassment and prejudice.
A NATURAL SITE
This Idaho town, about 50 miles east of Spokane, Wash., was a natural site for the conference. In recent years it has been the site of attacks by the ultraright-wing Aryan Nations movement, whose compound is located just north of here in the vicinity of Hayden Lake.
The Aryan Nations and allied groups have declared their goal of making the Pacific Northwest an all-white bastion.
Although the Aryan Nations recently has been quiet in the immediate area, conference speakers noted the ongoing underground and sporadic activity in the Northwest and throughout the entire country by loosely aligned, right-wing neo-Nazi groups.
Many of the speakers called for state legislatures to increase the powers of law enforcement officials to combat violence and latent prejudice.
Attorney General Jim Jones of Idaho cited the importance of stronger law enforcement, coupled with strict legislation. Idaho recently enacted laws severely penalizing acts leading to violence or even training for violence.
Idaho and Washington both enacted laws against malicious harassment. Montana, through its Human Rights Commission, has established strict rules that provide for civil rights of all groups.
Deputy Sheriff Broadbent said an important goal is to include hate crimes reporting in national legislation enacted by Congress. Just such a bill was passed by the House Judiciary Committee last week.
Jones said law enforcement officers must advocate the dignity and equality of all citizens. “Too often we assume that when the Bill of Rights was written, when the Constitution was approved, that the job had been done. Well, certainly it hasn’t,” he said.
Referring to the Aryan Nations’ “separate estate” in Idaho, he said “law enforcement officers at all levels have the responsibility to step forward and say, ‘that is something that is completely counter to our way of life, and certainly it ought not to be permitted.’ “
ATTACKS ON DEMOCRACY
The activities of organizations such as the Aryan Nations are more than just ethnic attacks, according to Leonard Zeskind, research associate for the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal and a leading expert on right-wing extremism in America. He said “attacks by hate groups are part of cutting edge of attacks on democracy.”
In a workshop on the status of hate groups, Zeskind emphasized his “job is not to find out what the groups have done, but what they’re going to do next, because if we organize around what the Aryan Nations did in 1985, we are not going to be prepared for 1990.”
Marjorie Biller Green, ADL’s western states education director, presented a workshop featuring written and audio-visual material she develops and disseminates to educators, businesses and community groups.
In her view, “an aging and predominantly white” population in the Unites States confronts a “baby boomlet of increasing minority population” that is “beginning to impact the schools,” coupled with a “service-based rather than manufacturing-based economy and the increasing movement of women into the work place, all of which create a change (that) is often frightening.”
Bob Hughes, mediator for the Community Relations Service of the U.S. Dept of Justice in Seattle, received the coalition’s first Bayard Rustin Civil Rights award at the conference’s closing dinner.
‘GREAT DEAL OF SILENCE’
During the conference, he told of his meetings with children of Holocaust survivors in Port Angeles, Wash., following anti-Semitic vandalism. When he asked them how they felt, he recalled, he was met by “a great deal of silence. They didn’t know how to react yet.”
He told JTA he has learned that “one precipitating incident usually brings out other unresolved problems or grievances from other areas of community life. And hopefully once addressing one, a group will go on to address others and establish not just a reactive mode to these problems, but become proactive in developing preventive measures on through to education programs, and develop new, creative, innovative approaches to anticipate problems and resolve them before they become critical.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
