The Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, led by its president Leonard Zeskind, is reporting that the National Socialist Movement is planning a rally in the Kansas City area Saturday, Nov. 9. Zeskind believes it will take place between 3 and 5 p.m. that day, but he does not know its exact location.
“Most of the chatter about the would-be rally place it in downtown,” he wrote in an article he posted on IREHR’s website, www.IREHR.org, this week. The Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights is a national organization with an international outlook examining racist, anti-Semitic, white nationalist and far-right social movements, analyzing their intersection with civil society and social policy, educating the public, and assisting in the protection and extension of human rights through organization and informed mobilization. It is based in Kansas City.
“It should be noted that Nov. 9, 2013, will be the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, when Nazi Storm Troopers and others killed an estimated 91 Jews, sent almost 30,000 to the camps, destroyed synagogues, Jewish homes and shops, and began the process that became the Holocaust,” noted Zeskind about the significance of this rally. “The National Socialist Movement is aware of the anniversary.”
In the article Zeskind, who is the author of “Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream,” noted that Kansas City area NSM members already have commitments from members in several other states including Alabama, Iowa and Maryland.
“Matt Heimbach from Maryland is also planning to bring a couple of people,” Zeskind wrote. “Heimbach has created a string of white student groups at Towson University outside Baltimore, and the latest incarnation is called the Traditionalist Youth Network. He has also traveled across the country, speaking at white-ist events, and is a likely candidate to give a speech in the Kansas City area.”
Zeskind has heard that the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, which considers itself part of Aryan Nations, might also participate in this rally.
“And the Kansas City-area organizer claims to be seeking out the Traditionalist American Knights of the KKK, led by Frank Ancona (not the car dealer with the same name) in Park Hills, Mo. This group has rallied with the NSM previously, most recently in Memphis. Whether or not all these factions do attend the Nov. 9 event, it will be a significant event in the Kansas City area,” Zeskind said.
In addition a private swastika-lighting is slated to take place at the end of the day, away from the rally site. Zeskind explained it is a ceremony similar to the Klan’s cross burning.
According to Zeskind, the lead organizer appears to be Kansas City-area resident Buddy Rumble. Rumble is a regional organizer for the NSM, and the primary contact person for a number of states, including both Kansas and Missouri. Zeskind said the NSM has been active in these states — off and on — for a number of years.
Zeskind said the NSM has been holding rallies in the region for more than 10 years. Each rally has attracted more participants. The “white unity” rally held in Topeka in 2002 attracted almost two dozen members dressed in Hitler-era brown shirt uniforms. In 2008 a rally in Jefferson City attracted 63 uniformed NSM members. They were escorted by about 200 area police. In protest, 250 people participated in an anti-racist rally in a public park at the same time.
This is not the first time such an event has taken place here. The NSM held its national convention in a Kansas City-area hotel over the Hitler birthday weekend in April 2005. Following a celebration at a now-defunct German restaurant, there was an altercation between NSM organizer Steve Boswell and Rabbi David Fine, then the rabbi at BIAV.
The Missouri legislature has been battling white supremacist groups since at least 2009, when the Springfield NSM unit began an Adopt-a-Highway clean-up program and won an Adopt-a-Highway recognition sign. After several years of controversy, the state legislature, at the initiative of Rep. Sara Lampe, named that same swath of highway in memory of Rabbi Ernest I. Jacob, who was born in Breslau, Germany, and served congregations in Germany before the Nazi onslaught. In 1938, Rabbi Jacob had been arrested and sent to the Dachau camp, but was released in 1939 and ultimately made his way to Springfield.
“Now the NSM members were forced to keep the good rabbi’s highway clean,” Zeskind said.
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