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SkinheadsNeo-Nazi skinheads in the United States have been responsible
for at least 41 murders since December 1987. Some of the more
notorious of these killings have included the stomping death of
a 15-year-old Vietnamese immigrant by two 18-year-old skins in
Houston, Texas. The following year in Arlington, Texas, three
16-year-old members of the Confederate Hammerskins killed an African-American
man while he sat on the back of a truck with white friends. Skinheads
belonging to the Aryan National Front were responsible for two
separate killings of homeless African-American men in Birmingham,
Alabama, during the winter of 1991-92. In January 1995, two skinhead
brothers near Allentown, Pennsylvania, murdered their father,
mother and younger brother; the two murderers had reportedly been
visitors to the "Christian Identity" compound of Pennsylvania
Aryan Nations activist Mark Thomas. So immersed were they in skinhead
culture that the two had slogans and Nazi insignias tattooed on
their foreheads.
Racist skinheads do not confine their bigotry purely to ethnic
prejudice. They have also been responsible for several murders
and countless assaults against gays and lesbians. Fatal attacks
have occurred in New York City; San Diego; St. Louis; Salem, Oregon;
and Reno, Nevada. Furthermore, racist skinheads have also attacked
and even killed their anti-racist counterparts in brawls and unprovoked
attacks. Like the most militant members of the "Christian Identity" and militia underworlds, some skinheads have harbored fantasies of fomenting a race war in the United States. In July 1993, four members of the Fourth Reich Skins were among a group of eight charged in Los Angeles with planning a conspiracy to bomb an African-American church, to mail a letter bomb to a rabbi, and to assassinate several Black public figures. Within 10 days of the Los Angeles arrests, three skinheads from Washington State were also arrested in connection to two bombings that were part of another plot to ignite a race war. The three Washington skinheads later pleaded guilty. Source: Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents 1996. Copyright Anti-Defamation League (ADL). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
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