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Written by Leonard Zeskind
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Wednesday, 23 July 2008 |
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The Zeskind Fortnight No. 8 A Twentieth Anniversary
By Leonard Zeskind It was July, twenty years ago. David Duke was in the middle of a Populist Party campaign for president that would spill over into his election to the Louisiana state legislature. A black family living in a mostly white neighborhood of West Deptford, New Jersey suffered a cross burning on their front yard. A synagogue in Atlanta was defaced with a swastika daubing. Skinheads in Milwaukee were arrested in a racially-motivated shooting. Aryan Nations had just finished their latest “congress” in Idaho. A Klan march in St. Petersburg, Florida ended in mayhem. Police stopped a demonstration in support of South African apartheid by the Southern White Knights at the Democratic Party’s convention in Atlanta, after large numbers of anti-Klan protestors occupied the streets. And Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, having won his party’s nomination after a long primary fight with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, formally embarked on his disastrous run for president, giving the Republican Party a third quasi-Reaganite term in the person of George Herbert Walker Bush. Not everybody was standing idly by as the malevolent and |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 01 August 2008 )
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Written by Leonard Zeskind
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Friday, 27 July 2007 |
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Almost three decades ago, I began writing regularly about white supremacists, anti-Semites and related topics with a portable typewriter and plastic press-on letters. I have been trying to catch-up with technological change ever since. This website re-captures many of the articles, opinion pieces and essays that have been published over the years. Additional material from this archive will be added to this site each week. Please note that on March 1, 2008 a cyberspace bulletin, The Zeskind Fortnight, will begin regular publication. I am now trying to finish a book on the history of the white nationalism movement for Farrar Straus and Giroux.
Before turning to research and writing and professional human rights activism, I worked in heavy industry: on the warehouse dock of a lamp factory, on an automobile plant assembly line, and in steel fabrication shops helping to build large girders, columns, trusses, and other elements of the manufacturing architecture. It was work that I enjoyed and still believe is undervalued. I am a high school graduate, and have earned certificates in welding and structural steel blue print reading. My work has been recognized by several institutions. In 1987, I received the Columbia University School of Journalism Paul H. Tobenkin Award for my contribution to an award-winning edition of the Spokane Spokesman-Review. I became a Petra Foundation Fellow in 1992 and was given the “Owen Bieber Civil Rights Award” by the Civil Rights Department of the United Automobile Workers Union in 1993. In addition, I received the “Bayard Rustin Award” from the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment in 1996. And the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded me one of its famous five year fellowships in 1998. I remain a life-long activist with the hope of repairing a badly torn world. |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 09 November 2007 )
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