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washingtonpost.com
Neo-Nazis Call Off D.C. March
Anti-Nazi ralliers arrive at Lafayette Park to protest the neo-Nazi march that did not happen. (Craig Cola — WPNI)
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 7, 1999; Page B1
New From The Post
City and federal police staged a massive show of force in the nation's capital today for a renegade neo-Nazi demonstration that never materialized.
More than 2,400 D.C. police officers and at least 300 U.S. Park Police officers cordoned off a 20-square-block area around the White House and Lafayette Square in preparation of an afternoon march by the American Nationalist Party, a group formed by a 21-year-old South Carolina college student and self-styled race leader.
Although the group's founder, David Wolfgang Hawke, told D.C. police to expect 150 to 300 demonstrators, only four showed up at a staging area prepared by police.
"They decided, at the location where we were going to pick them up and transport them down here by bus, to call off the march," Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey told a throng of reporters at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. "Only a couple showed up. They immediately determined they weren't going to go through with it."
Ramsey said he would call on the city's corporation counsel to explore suing the party, formerly known as the Knights of Freedom, to recover an estimated $1 million-plus cost of mobilizing for the march and anticipated counter-demonstrations.
However, counter-demonstrators, gathering at the northern edge of Lafayette Square, celebrated upon hearing of the march's demise.
"Ho, ho, ho, the Nazis didn't show!" a group of 200 college-aged students chanted, as their comrades blew whistles and banged on drums of tin and plastic barrells.
A few feet away, the International Socialist Organization carried a red bed banner that read, "Unite to Fight the Nazi Right," while a more militant group took credit for intimidating the neo-Nazis with the threat of a violent clash.
"Apparently it's the Nazis who buckled. They weren't willing to risk their lives to march down Pennsylvania Avenue," said a bearded man with a bullhorn, who hailed the power of the "anger and rage of working people [against the] ruling class." |
