Protesters, Few Others at Forum : Conference: A meeting on the Holocaust at a Masonic hall fizzled. Outside, demonstrators clashed with each other and police.

Carrying placards denouncing racism and exchanging angry words with each other and the police, more than 100 protesters skirmished Saturday outside a Masonic hall in South-Central Los Angeles where a conference on the Holocaust and the 1st Amendment was supposed to bring together black nationalists and white supremacists.

But when several controversial speakers, including black historian Leonard Jeffries Jr., an African-American historian at City University of New York, and Legrand R. Clegg II, Compton’s chief deputy city attorney, failed to show up, many residents of the predominantly black community just west of Watts concluded that the conference was a front for Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan attempting to raise money and recruit members.

The conference, which was organized by self-described black nationalists, was billed as a 1st Amendment forum questioning the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust. The event had been denounced by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith as a “hate fest featuring a who’s who of bigots.”

Although the hall had been set up to accommodate 450, other than Los Angeles police officers only a dozen or so observers even entered the building--most of them reporters and cameramen. The small turnout was blamed by the organizers on police, more than 30 of whom donned riot gear and barricaded the street outside the hall to keep protesters under control.

Several competing protests took place simultaneously by a multiracial group that included the Marxist-Lenin Party and the International Commission Against Racism.

No one was seriously injured and there were 17 arrests.

At the end of the conference, more than a dozen mounted police dispersed the crowd so that the speakers could leave.

It was not known for certain why Jeffries did not attend. Robert L. Brock, head of a small grass-roots group known as the Cosmopolitan Brotherhood Assn., which organized the conference, said that he had talked to the controversial historian by telephone late last week and that Jeffries had said he has “more problems than he can deal with.”

Early last week, it was reported that Bernard W. Harleston, president of City University of New York, had told the university’s trustees that he planned to remove Jeffries in the spring as head of the black studies department in part because of racial slurs against Jews and other non-black groups.

The day before the conference was to begin, Clegg, who has been sharply critical of what he calls Jewish domination of Hollywood, wrote an angry letter to Brock denying ever agreeing to participate in the program and threatening a multimillion-dollar lawsuit if Brock did not disassociate him from the conference.

“I am outraged,” Clegg said in a press release distributed to the media Friday. “I have participated in the Afro-American struggle for justice for the past 30 years, but I have not and shall not ever share the podium with white supremacists whose agenda calls for the extermination of black people and who blatantly propagate the myth that there was no Jewish Holocaust.”

Many of the black protesters outside the conference agreed with Makungu Akinyela of the Malcolm X Grass-Roots Movement that it would be impossible for Clegg or any self-respecting black to share a podium with white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan who they said were among Saturday’s speakers.

Among the speakers who did show up for the conference at Prince Hall Memorial Auditorium were Mark Weber, editor of the Institute for Historical Review, a revisionist organization that denies many of the generally accepted details of the Jewish Holocaust, and Dee Fields, Afrikaner wife of Populist Party leader Joe Fields, both strong proponents of racial separatism and Holocaust revisionism.

Brock, the conference organizer, did not venture outside the hall but talked to reporters inside as he waited for conference participants who never appeared.

“You see I don’t get caught up in the ‘good white folks, bad white folks,’ argument that concerned Mr. Clegg and those folks (protesters) out there,” said Brock, a longtime proponent of reparations for blacks. “All white people were responsible for slavery, whether Nazi, liberal, Communist, Catholic, Protestant or Jew. All slave masters, all decendants of slave masters are equal. You can say some slave masters are better than others, but they are still slave masters.”

The reason historical revisionists participated in the meeting was because “we have a lot in common” with Brock’s thinking, Joe Fields said. “We believe in the purity of the races . . . the desirability of segregation,” Dee Fields said. She declined to say how she would keep the races separate. “I’m not God. I don’t have a total master plan for the world,” she said.

Dee Fields said she also resents Jews’ claim that they are the only ones who were persecuted. “The Jews say never forgive and never forget. I find this very unchristian,” she said.

Many in the neighborhood, who had little advance warning about the conference, looked on in amazement as it and the protests dragged on into the afternoon.

Gary Fergerson, 14, looked dazed and scared as he watched the protesters brandish signs and sticks and hurl epithets at the police. He heard that the klan “was coming to take over our community,” he said. “I don’t want them here. It’s not right.”

Some older boys in the neighborhood were not so gentle. “Keep KKK out of L.A.,” chanted one.

“This building is dead meat tonight,” said another.