Word: skinheads
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...Skinhead Attack...
Until November of 1988 Portland had no more racist fanatics than any other Northwestern town. But when the East Side White Pride gang killed an Ethiopian student named Mulugeta Seraw and the murder made national headlines, about 200 skinhead newcomers flocked to the city...
Today it takes a keen sense of iconography to know the players. Like their cousins elsewhere, Portland's racist skinheads sport flight jackets, suspenders and Doc Martens with shoelaces in various colors: white for racial purity, red for the blood they are willing to shed and yellow as a signal they have shed someone else's. But another gang of skinheads is slightly different in appearance: the swastikas have diagonal lines slashed through them, and black-and-white breast-pocket patches depict a crucified skinhead with the letters SHARP written over the top. These are the Skin Heads Against Racial...
When the movement peaked in England in the 1970s, "skinhead" was more a punk style statement than a racial stance; "Nazi" skins were just a nasty subgroup, devoted to the bullying of immigrants. Both strains crossed the Atlantic, but in the late '80s, propelled in part by youthful embitterment at the recession economy, the Nazi versions of the skinhead strutted through such cultural crossroads as San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. They attracted immediate attention for their coiffure, dedication to British Oi! music, black Doc Martens boots and a ferocious appetite for violence -- against blacks, gays and Jews. Sometimes the fury...
...Geraldo. It also captured the attention of onetime Klansman Tom Metzger, head of White Aryan Resistance, California's best-known hate group. Metzger, whose well-developed philosophy includes the expulsion of America's Latinos and Asians and the creation of separatist black and white states, recruited successfully among skinhead groups in the West and Midwest. Too successfully, perhaps. On the last night of a visit by a WAR lieutenant, three Portland, Oregon, skins beat an Ethiopian student named Mulugeta Seraw to death. The case drew national attention, and the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama successfully sued Metzger, winning...