Whispers in the Darkness

On the battlefield of American racism, where the power of hatred is an awesome passion, it’s best to know your enemy in order to combat him. Telling you about one might help.

His name is Frank Collin. I met him in 1977 when he was head of the American Nazi Party and I was wandering the country writing about the resurgence of his misanthropes into loosely organized armies.

It was in a storefront building on the South Side of Chicago, long before the Nazis marched in Skokie. The small, wooden structure had been painted a bright red. Even the windows were red.

Inside, there were swastikas on the wall. A gaunt, sour-faced man who made no effort to conceal his hatred toward me held large dogs at bay as we waited for Collin to make an appearance.

Then he entered.

He came downstairs at the far end of the room in what was to have been a dramatic entrance: a paunchy, dull-eyed man in rumpled olive drab, yawning and scratching.

I remember staring at him and thinking, this was an American Hitler? This befuddled, mumbling fool with a half-zippered fly who was barely able to articulate his own hatreds?

This was the Fuehrer ?

The interview lasted an hour and confirmed my suspicion of Collin as mean and stupid. Years later, he led his bedraggled storm troopers through the streets of Skokie, was subsequently imprisoned for molesting little boys and then dropped from sight.

I mention this not because Collin remains a viable threat, but because a black woman pointed to swastikas spray-painted on the walls of her small Beverly Hills business the other day and asked, “What kind of people would do this?”

I say to her now they were Frank Collin’s kind of people, witless and inadequate humans whose special dementia takes racist forms. They whisper epithets in the night and spray-paint their antipathies on shadowy walls.

And they sure as hell don’t measure up to the woman they vilified.

You know about Larryette DeBose. Someone entered her word processing and mailbox business on Robertson Boulevard over the Thanksgiving weekend and defaced her walls with racial slurs.

The obvious results of the incident have been threefold. More than 100 people have telephoned, written and stopped by to express both their outrage and their support.

For that, DeBose is grateful.

The second result of the racist attack is less pleasant. Her only employee has quit in terror and at least one agency that furnishes temporary workers refuses to place one at DeBose’s business.

The third obvious result is DeBose’s own rage at those who defiled the business she has worked three years to build.

“I won’t be pushed out,” she says angrily. “I won’t run.”

But less obvious is the pain that sets in when the rage fades, the erosion of self-esteem that remains, and a question that claws at the heart whenever hatred exists: What have I done to deserve this?

There are ironies here. The kinds of people who debase others are Frank Collin clones, trapped by their own emotional and intellectual despair into lives of seething hatred.

Call them Skinheads, Nazis or Klanners. It doesn’t matter. They march to the same mad drummer.

Their “inferior” enemies? Consider Larryette and Charles DeBose.

She is a bright, articulate businesswoman with a bachelor’s degree from UCLA and a master’s degree from USC.

Her husband has two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. and is a career foreign service officer who travels the world on behalf of our government.

They are a refined and cultured couple who, to answer Larryette’s question, have done nothing to deserve the insidious imprints left on their walls and on their lives.

“I can only recall one other incident like this,” Larryette said to me. “I was trying to rent an apartment in the Valley once. The owner said, ‘I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t know how others would feel about you using the swimming pool.’

“ ‘Lady,’ I said, ‘the color is permanent, it doesn’t come off,’ then left. I didn’t want to live in the Valley anyhow.”

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has offered to pay for removal of the racial slurs from DeBose’s walls, police have increased their patrols and neighbors are watching out for her.

That helps some. But racial hate crimes in L.A. County have been increasing steadily over the last decade. There were four in 1981 and 95 in 1988.

“I want everyone to know what’s happening,” DeBose said. “I want everyone warned.”

She’s right. There are lunatics among us. Their muffled drums, like distant thunder, sound on the horizon. And, to the detriment of us all, they grow louder every day.