The Ranger Online

Issue date: 4/18/08 Section: News

Media Credit: AccuNet/AP Multimedia Archive Former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry in 1997. Cherry was convicted in 2002 in Birmingham, Ala., for the 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls. He died in 2004.

Media Credit: AccuNet/AP Multimedia Archive Quanell X, right, a Muslim leader from Houston, is restrained by a Jasper police officer as he yells at a member of the Ku Klux Klan after a rally June 27, 1998, in Jasper.

Media Credit: AccuNet/AP Multimedia Archive Jackie Meyer, left, Jonathan Rook, center, and his mother Lisa Rook, right, listen to the playing of the national anthem during a rally held by The Traditional Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan March 17, 2007, in Stephenville.

Media Credit: AccuNet/AP Multimedia Archive Demonstrators protest across the street from a Ku Klux Klan rally Nov. 5, 2005, at city hall in Austin.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors the actions of 888 listed hate groups across the United States, has seen a 5 percent increase in membership in these groups in the past year.

Mark Potok, editor of Intelligence Report, the center's quarterly publication, said the center aims to make the public aware of the groups' activities.

"We are a private, nonprofit organization made to investigate what they do; we do not try to regulate them," Potok said. "We are in favor of free speech."

The spring 2008 issue of Intelligence Report indicates a 48 percent increase of hate groups since the year 2000.

In its latest statistics, the FBI tells of a 35 percent rise in hate crimes directed toward Latinos between 2003 and 2006.

The Intelligence Report article, "The Year in Hate," listed the Federation for American Immigration Reform as a hate group for the first time when the center uncovered ties to racist groups and individuals.

FAIR's platform includes stopping what it believes to be a movement by Mexico to take over the Southwestern United States. Another named anti-immigration group, the United Citizens of America, made a claim about the way it has been persecuted.

"We are being invaded by a foreign country, and we are all being betrayed from within. They have infiltrated our government at all levels," according to www.splcenter.org.

The Intelligence Report said the center listed about half of 300 newly listed hate groups in the past three years as "nativist extremists."

Intelligence Report also now recognizes roughly 300 anti-immigration groups, with about half of them known as "nativist extremist" groups.

However, these groups are not necessarily hate groups.

While hate groups intend to belittle groups and races who oppose their platform, nativist extremists aim to target individuals, sometimes through harassment, as opposed to suggesting changes in policy.

In his editorial, "Hope Amidst the Hate?" Potok reported only 16 percent of Florida Republican primary election voters named illegal immigration as the country's most important issue.

Potok spoke of the anti-immigration platform U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., used in his failed presidential campaign.

"Tancredo based his whole campaign on preventing illegal immigration and building a wall between Mexico and the United States," Potok said in an interview. "When fewer people kept thinking the issue was important, he dropped out of the race."

Potok believes the solution to immigration is avoiding propaganda.

"We need to turn down the volume of the debates," Potok said. "It should be debated by facts, not anti-Latino propaganda."

Potok cited an example of false information used by Lou Dobbs, host of CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight."

"Dobbs claims between 2004 and 2006, illegal immigrants brought in over 7,000 cases of leprosy - that's not true," Potok said. "It was actually more like roughly 398 cases in that time."

History Professor Alfonso Cervantes talked about some of the movements being made to prevent immigration.

"They are talking about not making people citizens right away," Cervantes said. "The people would not be allowed for a certain period of time after they come into the country."

San Antonio currently hosts two of Texas' 67 registered hate groups, the Nation of Islam and Texas Knights of the Invisible Empire Inc.

Nation of Islam, a division of the black separatists, encourages blacks to live in their own republic, without any interference or interaction from other races.

The center described the actions of black separatists as "a response to centuries of white racism" and believes "racism must be exposed in all its forms." The black separatists rival the Texas Knights of the Invisible Empire Inc., a local chapter of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan. This group did not respond e-mails.

The KKK formed in 1865, making it the oldest of all known hate groups in the United States.

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