Hate Literature Sent to Student Council

A packet of racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-gay literature was mailed to Granada Hills High School last week, the school’s assistant principal said Friday.

“It was definitely hate-type literature,” said Assistant Principal Joan Lewis. “It was inappropriate and full of lies.”

The six-page packet, stuffed inside an ordinary white envelope and addressed to “Student Council President,” included a section entitled “Origin of the Negro,” which said that the offspring of humans and chimpanzees “became the negro of today” and another section stating that “The Holocaust did not happen.” It also blamed homosexuals for sparking “the world-wide deadly AIDS epidemic.”

None of the Granada Hills students saw the mailing, Lewis said, because the teacher who oversees the student council brought it to the school’s administrators unopened.

The letter carried a Sept. 23 postmark from north Texas and a return address of a post office box in Hillsboro, W. Va.--the town that serves as home base for the National Alliance, a white supremacist group implicated in several recent hate incidents in the Valley. Thinking the mailing might be connected to a broader movement, Lewis sent it to the Anti-Defamation League.

The school also reported the incident to the Los Angeles Police Department, but the detectives who handle such cases were unavailable for comment Friday.

In late July, two Valley synagogues were defaced with spray paint, and anti-Semitic leaflets were discovered in mailboxes and food products across the metropolitan area. Both the leaflets and the vandalism included the Internet address of the National Alliance, prompting the ADL to release a report last week on the group and its apparent local growth.

Aaron Levinson, director of the ADL’s Valley office, said he was not sure whether the school mailing was linked to the National Alliance.

“The only reason I would have a connection is they have similar addresses,” Levinson said. “They’re in the same post office in the same town in the same state. With the recent activities in the Valley, it looks like it could be the same individual or group, which is of great concern to us.”