ustxtxb_obs_1992_01_17_50_00023-00000_000.pdf

Duke sold African Atto through ads in magazines for blacks in 1973. What is the meaning of this aspect of his career? The answer lies in the fact that Duke as a Klansman and a publisher was finding out who bought African Atto. Patriquin quoted Duke’s explanation during a 1976 videotaped interview he had with New York Times reporter Wayne King, in which Duke said: “What that book essentially did is to give us the names of the most radical blacks in the United States so that when the time comes we will know where they are, those who hate white people. That’s essentially what it did, and it was successful in that endeavor.” King asked him: “…so that when there’s trouble you can go take care of those folks?” Duke replied: “Well, we know who they are. Let’s put it that way. It’s just a matter of intelligence….I know America is headed toward a racial conflict.” More recently, Duke has sought to explain away the manual as “a spoof,” a satire, “an exercise in facetiousnes.” He told Patriquin: “There’s nothing in that book that you don’t get from any self-defense book.” She replied that the book described the African Atto movements as “entirely offensive.” He replied to her that basically it taught only karate-type moves and added, “We were taking stuff we heard and read about that was already going on.” In 1974 Duke received his BA from LSU. As the ’70s advanced he spread the KKKK into other states, including Texas, California, and Florida. He was convicted of misdemeanor incitement to not and fined $500 in an incident during the “World Nationalist Conference” in New Orleans in 1976. In 1978 he went to England to meet with far-rightwingers and held a cross-burning Klan rally there. With fellow Klansmen he conducted the Klan Border Watch to stop Mexicans from crossing into the U.S. illegally. In the late ’70s he tried to establish Klan cells in military camps and bases, leading, according to ADL’s “Klanwatch,” to a violent racial disturbance in Camp Pendleton, California. In 1975, while well known to be an active Klansman, Duke first ran for office, for a Louisiana state Senate seat, on a promise that he would “stand up for the white majority,” and got 33.2 percent of the vote. Four years later he tried again for the Senate, that time getting 27 percent. Then he fell out with the Klan \(see Jim Cullen’s story at page 39 of this White People, which has been his ideological vehicle since then. In his new situation he continued selling racist and Nazi books under the title, Americana Books, through the NAAWP News. Duke’s booklists focus on racist and Nazi advocacy; they are not anything like ordinary booklists. He continued this business until mid1989 when he was attacked on it and he stopped. His Americana Books list included: A book on “the takeover of America by minorities”; a book on “the classification of man by race”; a book by the late racist Mississippi senator, Theodore Bilbo; a book that predicts the destruction of the white race in this century; Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, which the Duke list describes as “uncannily accurate”; The Hoax of the 20th Century, which it is said “demolishes The Holy Book of Adolf Hitler; The Myth of the 20th Century,. by Rosenberg, presumably Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Minister for the Occupied Eastern Countries, which Lance Hill of LCARN identifies as “the bible of the Nazi movement of the 1930s”; The Talmud Unmasked; Mein Kampf, “the only authorized translation”; Who Runs the Media, by David Duke, “documenting the Zionist control of America’s mass media,” “this alien domination”; Hitler Was My Friend; The Hitler We Loved and Why; Hitler’s Last TestamentThe HitlerBormann documents; My Part in Germany’s Fight, by Joseph Goebbels; Did Six Million Jews Die? The Truth At Last, and The Six Million Reconsidered, which deny the occurrence of the Holocaust; The Turner Diaries, a novel about guerilla warfare against blacks and Jews and white women who mate with them; and, according to Beth Rickey, pamphlets advocating human breeding to produce a superior race. Tapes Duke advertised and sold in 1989 included: Olympiad and Triumph of the Will, movies that glorify the Third Reich; Birth of a Nation, which, as is said in the squib about it, “paints The Eternal Jew, which it is said “contains a study of Jewish types and stomach-turning sequences of Kosher animal slaughter” and is published in German; tapes of speeches and debates of the U.S. Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, described as “stimulating and provocative” from “the extraordinary individual,” Rockwell; and tapes of “humorous songs about blacks” and other minorities, including “Cowboys and Niggers,” “Some n _iggers never die,” and “Who likes a nigger.” As a candidate since 1989 Duke has defended selling these books and tapes as an exercise in free speech. He also emphasizes a standard disclaimer he ran at the top of his lists that “this listing does not mean that this publication endorses or agrees with every book listed.” As the reader will have seen, the descriptions of the items themselves often endorsed them. Concerning the anti-black tapes Duke sold, during his 1990 race for the U.S. Senate, after he had said on a TV show, “They were…funny tapes,” the lyrics of two of them were published in two Louisiana weeklies and were described, more briefly, in dailies. Thus the lyrics of “Kajun Ku Klux Klan,” which he sold, were shown to tell the story of “a nigger” civil rights activist whose hands are tied so that the Klan can torture him, and the lyrics Of “Nigger Hatin’ Me,” which Duke sold, call the late Martin Luther King, Jr., “baboon mouth” and sing to a black the lyrics call “Jigaboo”: “Stick your black head out and/I’ll blow it and the NAACP/Can’t keep you away from/Little ol’ nigger-hatin’ me.” About this time Duke had his face lifted. According to Tyler Bridges reporting in the Times Picayune, one of New Orleans’ most expensive plastic surgeons, Calvin Johnson, “reduced Duke’s nose and gave him a chin implant. Later Johnson performed chemical peels to eliminate the crow’s feet around his eyes. Duke also began dyeing the gray our of his mustache and hair.” In 1987 Duke ran for President in Democratic primaries, saying he was “a lifelong Democrat.” In the New Hampshire primary he got only 264 votes, but was also listed in that primary for vicepresident, for which post he got 10,531.votes. Overall he got 22,000 votes in the Democratic primaries. In the fall of 1988 he accepted the nomination for President of the far-right Populist Party and received more than 45,000 votes. In 1989, as a Republican, he ran for the Louisiana House in the 81st district, bordering New Orleans, which is 99.6 percent white, and won over Republican John Treen with 51 percent of the vote despite opposition from Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and leading Louisiana officeholders. A challenge to seating Duke failed when a majority of the members of the House opposed it; an attempt to censure him in the Louisiana State Republican Committee failed, 120 to 8. Beginning in 1990 Duke has presented himself aggressively as an evangelical-style Christian. He said he belonged to Carrollton Avenue Church of Christ in New Orleans; subsequently the fact was published that he had not attended there for years. He then identified his church as the Evangelical Bible Church, which was found not to exist; then he said he attends a Bible group that meets in private homes, but would not identify its members. His former statewide campaign coordinator quit, accusing him of temporizing about this. “I’ve never seen him go to church or do anything along the lines of Christianity,” the former Duke staffer, Bob Hawks, told the Times Picayune. Running against incumbent Bennett Johnston for the U.S. Senate, on October 4, 1990, Duke lost, but received 44 percent of the vote, including 60 percent of the whites who voted. A year later, on Oct. 19, 1991, he came in second in the Louisiana gubernatorial primary, knocking the governor out of the race and getting 31 percent of the vote among the three leading candidates. Last November 16th, David Duke lost the governorship to Edwin Edwards, 61 to 39 percent, but received 55 percent of the votes cast by whites. \(Principal sources: Zatarain, David, passim, and LCARN, “Resource.” On African Atto, the cited work is Ronni Patriquin, “Duke poses as black to pen book,” Shreveport Journal, 8/14/90. The numerous other THE TEXAS OBSERVER 23