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Hurricane Katrina

Appeal for Katrina aid carries an ugly message

A neo-Nazi group hands out fliers in Brooksville that ask for support for white victims only.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published September 14, 2005

BROOKSVILLE - Joe Quinn got one.

So did Leslie Taylor.

And a bunch of other people who were downtown on Saturday afternoon for the monthly Band Shell Bash concert.

The fliers started to show up in the early evening.

The headline: "Support White victims of Hurricane Katrina."

The message: "to bring hope to our people - who have become the forgotten men and women of this disaster . . ."

At the bottom of the flier, in bold, black print, was the tag of the National Vanguard Tampa Unit, a branch of a national neo-Nazi, white supremacist group.

Saturday, five members of the group made stops in Hudson and Dunedin, but Brooksville was their first stop and the No. 1 priority, said Todd Weingart, the 27-year-old St. Petersburg resident who is National Vanguard's Tampa Bay Unit coordinator.

"The white-flight people are up in the area," Weingart said when reached Monday afternoon on his cell phone.

He called the bash "more of a whiter event."

"We had a very positive response," he added. "People would read through it and give us a thumbs-up. Some people just walked away, but the majority were happy to read the flier."

Not Taylor.

"It disgusted me," said the 38-year-old Brooksville resident.

"I was infuriated by it," said Lori Manuel, her twin sister.

Quinn, 40, another longtime Brooksville resident, used a different word: "garbage."

"Somebody gave one to me after the fact, and by then they were gone," said Dave Weinman, chairman of the Hernando County Fine Arts Council, which puts on the bash. "Certainly, this is not something the Fine Arts Council condones, and I personally find it reprehensible."

The National Vanguard used to be called the National Alliance, but it was reorganized and renamed in April. On its Web site, the group has a mailing address in Charlottesville, Va.

A call to the number listed on the bottom of the Tampa Unit's flier gets a recorded message: "The foremost organization for the long-term interests of white people," a voice says.

Members of this regional branch are drawn from Sarasota, St. Petersburg, Tampa and the North Suncoast.

Florida is home to 43 hate groups, including the National Vanguard, the Ku Klux Klan, the Confederate Hammer Skins and the National Association for the Advancement of White People.

Only South Carolina has more, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

In July, at a Tampa Comfort Inn, more than six dozen people came to a National Vanguard-sponsored event to hear British author David Irving, who is best known for his stance that the Holocaust never happened.

Now, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the group is trying to collect water, food and sanitation supplies for - as the flier puts it - "our target families."

A seven-person, three-truck caravan is heading this weekend to the National Vanguard staging area in Mobile, Ala., Weingart said.

National Vanguard also has set up white evacuees with white families all over, particularly in the Southeast, Weingart said, and continues to do that.

The group's efforts stand in stark contrast to one of the most controversial narratives in the national post-Katrina dialogue.

Some have said the Bush administration reacted so slowly in New Orleans and elsewhere on the Gulf Coast because many of the victims were poor and black.

"The storm didn't discriminate, and neither will the recovery effort," President Bush told reporters Monday.

"When those Coast Guard choppers . . . were pulling people off roofs, they didn't check the color of a person's skin. They wanted to save lives."

Weingart and his group saw just the opposite.

"Watching the news, we see a lot of Jesse Jackson and a lot of other black leaders standing up for black people," he said. "We want to do the same for white people."

Saturday, they passed out about 1,000 fliers, Weingart said, leaving them in driveways, under windshield wipers, and going person to person too.

This is not a first for Hernando County. Last September, when National Vanguard was still known as the National Alliance, fliers were left in a Spring Hill neighborhood telling residents to "Love Your Race."

In June, the group had its annual Summer Solstice Festival in Spring Hill - according to the Web site, "a day of beauty, of music, of White life."

Weingart says he has no membership numbers for the Tampa Bay Unit. But he says it's growing and Brooksville is a major target for expansion.

"We really haven't gotten up into that area . . . as much as we'd like to," Weingart said. "It's definitely an area we want to focus on more in the future.

"They'll definitely be hearing more from us."

But Brooksville City Manager Richard Anderson would rather Weingart's group peddle its ideas elsewhere.

"Like most parts of the world, we get our share of people who want to extol their prerogatives," Anderson said. "But I'm confident that the good sense of our people will prevail."

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

[Last modified September 14, 2005, 09:39:13]