Rodney King Dead at 47

Twenty-one years ago I was in high school when the video of Rodney King being beaten by members of the LAPD made international news.

I had already been following news stories about racist groups in Canada and the United States. The Heritage Front had started making headlines and was fast becoming the most influential hate groups Canada had experienced since the Saskatchewan Klan of the 1920s. In Saskatchewan, Carney Nerland of the Aryan Nations had just killed a First Nations trapper, Leo LaChance (he would later be convicted of manslaughter). In the United States, Years before that, neo-Nazis affiliated with Ton Metzger's White Aryan Resistance had murdered Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw; W.A.R was subsequently bankrupted as a result of a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1990 because Metzger's influence was proven to be a key factor in the murder.

However, it wasn't until the beating of Rodney King made headlines that I came to understand that systemic racism was pervasive in institutions that were supposed to be color blind.

Rodney King wasn't a saint. He himself admitted that he struggled with demons and in one of his last interviews he stated that he would always struggle with sobriety. In other words, he was as human as any one of us. But the assault he endured on March 3, 1991 did serve to make very public a reality that primarily Black men had been systematically targeted because of their ethnicity.

We here at ARC hope that Rodney King finds the peace that he struggled to find in life.

The Rise and Fall of a Racist Gang: Long, Nerland and Sims

We thought we'd direct our readers to this video from an old CBC story covering a racist skinhead/Aryan Nations rally in Provost, Alberta in the early 1990s. In this video is Carney Nerland, the Saskatchewan Aryan Nations leader who not long after the "First Annual Alberta Aryan Fest" took place shot and killed a First Nations trapper named Leo LeChance in Prince Albert. The organizer of the Provost rally, Terry Long, ran into his own legal problems when he was implicated in the brutal attack against Keith Rutherford in Edmonton. The attackers, young skinheads, were influenced by Terry Long.

The parallels between the Aryan Nations of the late 1980s and early 90s in Alberta and the Aryan Guard are compelling. Both groups had roughly 25 core members. Both groups became brazen enough to engage in public protests and/or rallies. The difference is that the Aryan Nations eventually collapsed as a result of the criminal activities of the membership. The Aryan Guard, thus far, is still going, however it hasn't been around as long as the Aryan Nations that was created by Long.

Any bets on how long it will be before the Aryan Guard also implodes?

Sources

The Skinhead International: Canada (from the Nizkor Project)

The CBC Digital Archives Website.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Last updated: Jan. 24, 2005.