ABSTRACT

This chapter examines cases of racial victimization with violent dimensions. It discusses the racist actions and practices of white-racist activists and supremacists. The first analysis reviews Charles Stuart's story of his wife's murder by a black attacker in Boston's Mission Hill area and asks why Stuarts account was so easily believed by the Boston police department, local politicians, and local and national mass media commentators, even though it was clear from the beginning that his story was probably a hoax. The second case concerns the brutal murder of a black man by a group of modern American Nazis, called Skinheads, who killed the man apparently because they regarded him as inferior. These Portland, Oregon, Skinheads had been indoctrinated in part by organizers from the white supremacy organization White Aryan Resistance. The third case is about a modern lynching—the vicious and brutal dragging death of a black man, James Byrd, Jr., in Jasper, Texas.