A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America
The event that launches Langer's problematic narrative is brutal and shocking: In November 1988, an Ethiopian immigrant was beaten and bludgeoned to death by three skinheads in Portland, Ore. Langer offers a riveting story of the murder and events leading up to it, including a surprisingly moving account of the troubled life of Ken Mieske, who wielded the fatal baseball bat, and an important short history of the skinhead movement in this country. But the dramatic climax, the murder, comes in the first part of the book. In moving on to recount the resulting (and admittedly strange) civil lawsuit brought by Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center against Tom Metzger, founder of White Aryan Resistance, the narrative loses momentum as Langer backtracks to relate the not entirely relevant life histories of Dees and Metzger. More substantively, Langer fails in her attempt to impeach both the police and the justice system for constructing false versions of events. First, as Langer acknowledges, there was conflicting testimony about the events of that November night, and the police's belief that it was a racially motivated murder remains as plausible as Langer's that it was just a street brawl that got out of control. Nor does her critique of Dees's wily lawyering indict the entire legal system (she tries to show that Dees's deft maneuverings through the ins and outs of othe legal system were unfair), though it does argue for the need to appoint lawyers for defendants in civil cases who cannot otherwise find legal representation; Metzger clearly could not defend himself against the SPLC's skilled attorneys. And Langer, biographer of Josephine Herbst and a Nation contributor, seems oddly willing to give brownie points to Metzger, who advocates violent race war, for being a good husband and father.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.