Supremacist Seeks Guard Protection at 2nd Rally : Simi Valley: Richard Barrett cites First Amendment rights, but city officials say they are not likely to ask for the troops.

White supremacist Richard Barrett, whose recent Simi Valley parade was aborted by police after a violent counterdemonstration erupted, says he wants to return for a second try, this time under the protection of the National Guard.

“We will be in touch with the city and the county and governor’s office,” Barrett said by telephone from his Mississippi office last week. “We’re going to ask that the National Guard be activated if First Amendment rights and law and order cannot be assured by Simi Valley local authorities.”

A California National Guard spokesman said only city or county authorities can request the troops--and Simi Valley officials are unlikely to do so.

“It sounds absurd to me,” said Simi Valley Police Chief Lindsey P. Miller. “He was protected when he was here last time. He didn’t get hurt.”

More than 100 Simi Valley police officers and Ventura County sheriff’s deputies guarded Barrett and six supporters June 6 in the City Hall parking lot. Barrett was there to march in support of the Rodney G. King beating trial verdicts, which were reached at the nearby East County Courthouse.

When a few of the 300 counterdemonstrators threw soda cans and cursed the supremacists, police called off the parade and whisked Barrett and his followers away for their own safety. Six counterdemonstrators were arrested.

The cost of protecting Barrett and his followers in Simi Valley will not be available until later this week, Miller said.

The police chief does not plan to call the National Guard if Barrett returns, but he may bring in more officers. “If he tries it again, we may need more people,” Miller said. “It depends on how large a crowd he attracts.”

In interviews last week, officials in several other cities where Barrett has marched said the attorney should not be underestimated. They said he has repeatedly stirred up strong emotions in communities where racial tensions exist and has run up hefty law enforcement bills.

Barrett and a handful of followers marched through downtown Atlanta in 1989 and near Martin Luther King Jr.’s tomb in 1990. On each occasion, more than 2,000 National Guardsmen and police officers were called out to protect the supremacists from angry counterdemonstrators.

“His two trips to Atlanta probably cost the citizens of Georgia about $1 million,” said John Bankhead, a spokesman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

When city and school officials have tried to block his plans, Barrett has taken them to court--and beaten them in several cases.

In 1987 in Natchez, Miss., where the firing of a black school employee had triggered racial unrest, city officials denied Barrett an immediate parade permit, saying the city code required a 30-day review period. A court overturned this decision and required the city to pay Barrett’s legal fees.

Barrett and five associates then marched, as 300 to 500 counterdemonstrators denounced him. Although no violence erupted, Natchez police spent more than $25,000 for extra officers and other protective measures.

“We had no equipment for riot-type situations, so we had to go out and buy it,” Natchez Police Chief Eddie Jones said. “Wherever he goes, it’s going to cost something.”

In 1990, after Jackson, Miss., school officials refused to let Barrett fly a Confederate flag at athletic events, he and an associate sought permission to hold a white supremacy meeting in a high school room.

Jackson Public School District officials refused, saying the request did not come from students and was not related to education, said Assistant Supt. Elayne Hayes-Anthony. But a state court ruled in Barrett’s favor and awarded him about $6,900 in legal fees, she said.

“He did have his meeting, and all of five people showed up,” Hayes-Anthony said. “It was almost pointless after everything we went through.”

In Forsyth County, Ga., after a large civil rights march had taken place in 1987, Barrett applied for his own parade permit. But he balked at the county’s $100 processing fee. After a federal appeals court ruled for Barrett, the county appealed that decision.

Barrett himself presented an oral argument on this case before the U.S. Supreme Court in March. A decision is pending.

Forsyth County Sheriff Wesley Walraven said his county has spent thousands of dollars defending its parade permit process and could end up paying Barrett more than $50,000 in legal fees if he prevails before the high court.

Yet Walraven and others who have followed Barrett’s activities insist that the man’s chief motivation is not money.

“If he gets a few legal fees, that’s nice, but the driving force behind Mr. Richard Barrett is the attention he receives,” Walraven said. “He loves attention. He loves to speak in front of the camera. The quickest way to get Richard Barrett out of the community is to keep the reporters and the TV cameras at home.”

Several experts who keep an eye on hate groups say Barrett’s Nationalist Movement is extremely small. His publicity-seeking tactics have cost him the support of other white supremacy groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the experts said.

But Barrett knows how to exploit thorny legal questions related to freedom of speech, they said, and he remains calm even when counterdemonstrators lose their composure.

“When you physically confront him, and you’re trying to shout him down or throw things, that’s exactly what he wants,” said Danny Welch, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch program in Montgomery, Ala. “He knows he’s going to be on CNN for a couple of days. That’s exactly the kind of attention they all thrive on.”

Yet, Welch added, “You don’t want to be totally silent to someone like this.”

That was the dilemma faced by Barrett’s Southern California foes on June 6. Simi Valley officials had urged local residents to stay home because of the potential for violence and because their presence would give Barrett the wide attention he sought.

Monica Hill of Los Angeles, who helped organize the counterdemonstration, said ignoring white supremacists is the wrong tactic.

“History has taught us that these kind of genocidal politics don’t thrive in the light of the public eye,” said Hill, who is active in Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party. “We’re all for exposing them and what they believe. By doing so, we expose their weakness and the civil rights movement’s strength.”

But Leonard Zeskind, research director for the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal, which tracks hate-group activities, questioned whether Barrett poses a real threat.

“I’m not an advocate of ignoring white supremacists,” Zeskind said. “I think they need to be actively worked against. But Richard Barrett is almost entirely a media creation. He has no following. If you took the media lights away, you’d see that he had no substance.”

Miller, Simi Valley’s police chief, said that if Barrett did not generate so much publicity before his parades, there probably would be no angry counterdemonstrations --and no need for a large turnout by police. “If all he wanted to do was march around the block, he could come out with his flag and do it,” Miller said. “And no one would care.”