Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a 20-year-old student at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., was a neo-Nazi. Complete with mustache and Nazi uniform, Hawke attracted a following on the Internet of fellow Aryan supremacists. That is, until the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) featured him in their magazine.
Researchers for the SPLC found that Hawke’s real name was Andrew Britt Greenbaum; his father was Jewish.
Greenbaum’s story flooded local, then national newspapers, and the aspiring Nazi was ostracized from every white supremacist group in the country.
This is the mission of the Southern Poverty Law Center, founded in 1971: to destroy hate and extremist groups in America.
Mark Potok, editor of the SPLC Intelligence Report, visited DePaul professor Aminah McCloud’s Islamic Studies class Thursday, May 30, and led a discussion of how the SPLC combats racial and social injustice.
“Our real purpose is to utterly destroy (hate groups) if we can,” said Potok. “To marginalize them, weaken them and make it so they don’t have a voice.”
Before coming to the SPLC, Potok worked as a journalist for 20 years, most recently for USA Today. Potok was on the scene of the 1995 Oklahoma City terrorist bombings that killed 168 people, 19 of them children under the age of six. This tragedy, and his work covering the militia movement, led him to the SPLC, which he thought was more involved in combating these violent hate groups.
“(These investigations) are a hell of a story – extremely important and relevant to what’s going on today,” said Potok.
Sixteen years after joining SPLC, Potok is recognized as an expert on world extremism and is currently editor-in-chief of the Intelligence Report, the Hatewatch blog and other SPLC investigative reports.
“We’re very much about being real journalists,” said Potok. “The truth is what will tell the story.”
The SPLC works by filing civil court cases against hate groups as well as publishing and sharing information through the media. Morris Dees, one of the founders of the SPLC, was involved in the famous civil court case Donald v. United Klans of America in 1981.
The SPLC also uses journalism and media to broadcast information about these groups and isolate them from the mainstream.
“The people who are reading our material (are the hate groups),” said Potok. “We become The New York Times to the radical Reich.”
Similar to the Andrew Briff Greenbaum investigation, the SPLC aims to expose the hate groups’ secrets and destroy their credibility in the mainstream. Once the public refuses to listen to these groups’ propaganda, the groups lose power.
“When public opinion moves away from (hate groups), they get violent, they get desperate,” said Potok.
Hate and extremist groups also develop in waves, Potok said. The most recent of which is the “Islamaphobic” wave that started after Sept. 11, 2001. Potok said the increase in hate groups and hate crimes rose by 1,600 percent.
Potok said, however, that in 2001 President George Bush played a very important role in emphasizing to the public that Al-Qaeda was the enemy, not Muslims or Islamic people in general. As a result, Potok said that by 2002, the number of hate crimes fell by 67 percent.
Yet in 2010, hate crimes rose again by 50 percent. There were no major bombings or terrorist attacks. That was the year political activists like Pamela Geller loudly opposed the construction of the Islamic community center near the former site of the World Trade Center.
The following year, Peter King, a House of Representatives candidate for New York, claimed that Muslims become radicalized through their mosques. In 2011, King, chairman of the House of Homeland Security Committee in the House of Representatives, held a number of hearings about radicalized Muslims.
“The overwhelming majority of Muslim Americans are outstanding Americans, yet the reality is that the Islamist terror threat comes from the community,” said King in a Huffington Post article.
Potok said that hate groups have influence in Congress, and their ideas are spread to the public through their legislators and the media. Potok also said that oftentimes this hatred has nothing to do with reality, and is in fact the work of hate group propaganda.
McCloud, who invited Potok for the discussion, said for students to meet someone who works against extremism is “a treat.” McCloud said addressing these issues of hate and extremism is very important for DePaul, given its mission of learning about the healthy and unhealthy aspects of the community.
“For students, it’s important to see the multifaceted ways they can be involved by ratcheting down the hate,” said McCloud.
Rabbi Larry Edwards, a DePaul religious studies assistant professor, said he closely followed the SPLC and was very interested by the Judaism movement in the U.S. He studies modern anti-Semitism, and hopes to build a society supportive of inclusion and positive intergroup relations.
Once a year, the SPLC publishes a dataset of how many extremist groups exist in the United States. According to the report for Spring 2013, 21 groups practice in Illinois, four of which have locations in Chicago.
DePaul student Rachel Berg said she was interested in how the SPLC used the media to bring down prominent members of hate groups because her Islamic Studies class had studied public perception of Muslims in the media.
“Muslims aren’t involved in the media – it’s something that can shift Americans’ viewpoint,” said Berg. “We need to bring Muslims into the mainstream.”
Berg said her class related to Potok’s discussion because hate group propaganda produces a negative view and portrayal of Muslims in the media. Berg was enthusiastic about the work of the SPLC.
“(The Southern Poverty Law Center) is really effective and more groups should do stuff like that,” said Berg.