Turn out by over 300 progressives at Gabriel Park leads to Nazi no-show.

By Abby Sewell

Oregon, among its other dubious distinctions, has a long history of hosting white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. In Dec. 2004, the Tualatin Valley Skins, a neo-Nazi skinhead group based in the suburbs around Portland, announced plans to launch a new recruitment drive, with a rally and fliering campaign to be held in southwest Portland on Jan. 8, 2005.

This was the first visible sign of the Tualatin Valley Skins in nearly a year. Through most of their history, the group has concentrated its recruiting efforts in the blue-collar suburbs of Gresham and Milwaukie, as well as Beaverton, Tigard, and Tualatin. The rally planned for Jan. 8 would have been their first open move into Portland proper. The location they picked for their rally, Gabriel Park, lies in an area with a large Jewish and Middle Eastern population, and these were the groups the skinheads primarily attacked in their fliers, along with gays, communists, and people of color.

However, when over 300 Portlanders showed up at the proposed site of the neo-Nazi rally to protest them, the skinheads failed to appear.

What’s a skinhead?

The skinhead phenomenon began in Britain in the 1970s, among working class youth who, at the outset, were not racist but anti-hippy. In fact, early skinhead culture was greatly influenced by the music and style of Jamaican immigrants, many of whom worked in the factories alongside white skinheads. However, extreme nationalist groups began recruiting among the white skinheads, blaming immigrants for high unemployment rates, crime, and other social ills. The skinheads splintered into racist and anti-racist factions, with both sides maintaining an affinity for machismo and violence. The skinhead trend soon spread to the United States and became a part of the punk scene in the 1970s.

Randy Blazak, a University of Oregon sociologist who did research on racist skinhead youth in the United States, found that many of them came from downwardly mobile families and resented it. They blamed their economic troubles on affirmative action and immigrants.

The Tualatin Valley Skins, while openly embracing Nazism, claim to be a law-abiding group concentrated on spreading their racist ideology rather than on physically attacking minorities. Their Web site includes a disclaimer stating that any member who engages in criminal behavior automatically voids his or her connections to the group.

“Some consider this policy harsh, but it is needed since so many White Power groups have been destroyed by unnecessary lawlessness. We don’t want crooks, vandals or terrorists: only honorable racial Patriots willing to bust their white Asses working legally for Hitler,” the Web site explains comfortingly. Their fliering campaigns, or “Mass Exposure Events” are part of their initiation process for new recruits.

The Web site goes on to say, “Anti-racist infiltrators cringe at the idea of handing out hundreds of white power flyers to their neighbors or school children. You must be capable of dropping at least 1000 White Power flyers into any town and avoid getting caught.” The usual method of fliering without getting caught is to place leaflets inside plastic bags along with gravel or rocks and then lob them onto people’s driveways during the night.

Two community responses

The police and the Portland city government were aware of the Tualatin Valley Skins’ plans for a Jan. 8 rally at least as early as the beginning of Dec., when they alerted neighborhood groups in the area around Gabriel Park. Without publicizing the skinheads’ presence widely, neighbors, Jewish and Muslim groups began planning a neighborhood “unity rally,” to be held at a cultural center a mile away from Gabriel Park. Outside of the immediate area, however, the city attempted to keep the situation quiet. The residents of Portland at large were not alerted to the neo-Nazi’s plans until about two weeks before the rally was scheduled to take place.

When word did leak out, a variety of feminist, labor, student, Muslim, and immigrant rights groups quickly formed what they called the Ad Hoc Coalition Against the Tualatin Valley Skinheads. Organizers saw the city-sponsored Unity Rally as handing Gabriel Park over to the neo-Nazis for the day; they wanted to bring community members out to confront the skinheads directly. The Ad Hoc Coalition held its first planning meeting on Dec. 28 and called for protesters to gather at Gabriel Park on Jan. 8.

Jordana Sardo, of the Freedom Socialist Party, one of the main organizers of the Ad Hoc coalition, said that city officials were anything but supportive of this plan. “We know they didn’t want us there – they told us as much,” she said. In fact, after finding out about the coalition’s plan to protest at the park, a representative from the Office of Neighborhood Involvement called to ask the coalition to cancel their plans.

Emily Gottfried of the Portland Chapter of the American Jewish Committee, one of the organizers of the Unity Rally, explained that the idea of holding the rally away from Gabriel Park was that the neo-Nazis did not deserve as much attention as an on-site protest would give them. Concerned about possible outbreaks of violence between skinheads and protesters, she and the other unity rally organizers wanted their event to be a show of unity, not of anger.

“We want to show that the community is unified and have it be a place where people can bring their families and kids,” Gottfried said.

The Unity Rally, co-sponsored by the Portland Trailblazers basketball team and Portland General Electric among others, drew a crowd of over 1000, with speeches by Mayor Tom Potter, religious leaders and others, along with musical interludes. A few days earlier, the Portland City Council had passed a symbolic anti-hate resolution.

The protest at Gabriel Park, on the other hand, which was mainly publicized through the Portland Indymedia Web site and a last-minute postering and canvassing campaign, drew about 350 people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Sardo said the protesters had their own security team for the event and while police were also present at the park, they generally followed the coalition’s request to keep their distance.

Sardo said while the coalition intended the protest to be peaceful, they did not want to rely on the police for their safety. “Historically, when there are confrontations between Nazis and anti-Nazis, the police tend, if anything, to crack down on the anti-Nazi groups. That’s why we have our own security,” she said.

A few of the protesters, of course, had every intention of physically confronting the skinheads if they got a chance, including a group called the Psychos and Punks against Nazis. Members of this group told Alliance photographer Matthew Graybeal that many of them had either been approached themselves or had friends or family members who had been approached by skinhead recruiters in the past. Some of them had friends and family who actually joined the group, and they stated their belief that the Tualatin Valley Skins were only part of a larger network of neo-Nazi groups spanning the Pacific Northwest. This theory contradicts police and gang enforcement units in Washington County, who told reporters they believe that the skinheads are a fringe group with only a handful of members.

In the end, there was no physical confrontation at the park. The only sign of the skinheads was a pair of young men in full regalia who marched towards the community center and shouted, “White power.” When they saw the large crowd of protesters, however, they left in a taxi. Previously, police had pulled over the car they were riding in and arrested the driver for refusing to show ID. This was the only arrest of the day.

Jim Ramm, the director of the Tualatin Valley Skins, later called the Oregonian newspaper to explain that the rally had been cancelled due to the group’s Web site being down, not because of the protesters. He said the rally was to be rescheduled for the following Saturday; but the following Saturday, the Web site was still down. On top of that, Portland had a bout of freezing rain, leaving the roads covered in ice, and neither Nazis nor protesters were inclined to brave the elements.

Sardo said, “[The skinheads] tested the waters and found opposition and they turned tail.…If we had not done that rally, the Nazis would have showed up and done their thing. The rally at Gabriel Park is a good example of what works and what we need to keep doing.”

She believes that the skinheads saw the reelection of the Bush administration and the passage of the anti-gay Measure 36 in Oregon as a sign that the public might be ready to accept their philosophy.

“Lessons came out of Nazi Germany – Hitler came to power because there was not a united front of the left,” Sardo said. “A lot of people say [the neo-Nazis] are not a threat because they’re so small. When do they become a threat - when they’re three hundred strong, five hundred strong, a thousand strong? I’m a woman, I’m gay, and I’m a feminist socialist; I’m not going to wait.”

The groups involved in the Ad Hoc Coalition plan to continue doing anti-fascist organizing, particularly concentrating on helping neighborhoods organize and educating people about the roots of fascism.

Abby Sewell is a local freelance writer and a worker/owner at the Back to Back Café on E. Burnside.