Immigrants Targeted: Extremist Rhetoric Moves into the Mainstream
Groups:
Choose Black America
FAIR-Cultivated Offshoots To both broaden the demographic of its movement and cultivate a grassroots following, the Washington D.C.-based Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has created front groups that work together, often in concert with border vigilante groups, to broadcast a xenophobic message. At the same time, the groups serve as a defense against charges of racism. Choose Black America In May 2006, FAIR founded Choose Black America (CBA), which describes itself as a “Black oriented - Black led organization and movement in the United States that is resisting illegal immigration and amnesty to citizens of foreign countries illegally within ours.” CBA’s leader, Ted Hayes, is an anti-immigrant activist with ties to the Minutemen. The Minutemenare a loose network of local chapters around the country, whose primary goal is to keep undocumented immigrants from Mexico out of the United States. The more extreme Minutemen chapters advocate patrols of the Mexican-American border by armed volunteers.
Hayes also leads the anti-immigrant Crispus Attucks Brigade, a group that Hayes made a CBA direct “subsidiary.” The Crispus Attucks Brigade describes itself as an “American Black US citizens patriotic organization in the ideological insurgency against the invasion and illegal colonization of the United States of America.” (Crispus Attucks was a black American and reportedly among the first people killed in the American Revolutionary War, during the 1770 Boston Massacre.) Hayes and the Minutemen have worked in conjunction to stage anti-immigrant events, with members of both groups sharing a stage.
Another member of CBA is Terry Anderson, who also has ties to several figures in the anti-immigrant movement. During his speech at the anti-immigrant “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” a series of anti-immigrant events in Washington, D.C., that brought together several members of Congress, anti-immigration groups, media figures, border vigilante groups, and citizen activists from around the country in April 2007, Anderson complained that a child in an American public school is a “victim” because teachers have to “spend extra time with some little brat that’s illiterate in two languages.”
Anderson hosts The Terry Anderson Show, an anti-immigrant radio program, on which he has interviewed Minuteman leader Jim Gilchrist; Glenn Spencer, leader of the virulently anti-Hispanic border vigilante group American Border Patrol, who has claimed that the Mexican government is “sponsoring the invasion of the United States with hostile intent,” and Peter Brimelow, who runs the racist VDare Website, which publishes racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant articles authored by extremists. Anderson has himself appeared three times on The Political Cesspool, a Tennessee-based radio show hosted by white supremacist James Edwards that routinely features neo-Nazis and white supremacists as guests.
Featured Video: "Terry Anderson Speech, Dustin Inman Rally"
This video, shared on YouTube, presents anti-immigrant activist and Choose Black America member Terry Anderson speaking at a rally during the anti-immigrant Hold Their Feet to the Fire events in Washing ton, D.C., in April 2007.
Please click on minutes 3:44 – 2:40 for highlights of Terry Anderson’s speech.
Hayes also leads the anti-immigrant Crispus Attucks Brigade, a group that Hayes made a CBA direct “subsidiary.” The Crispus Attucks Brigade describes itself as an “American Black US citizens patriotic organization in the ideological insurgency against the invasion and illegal colonization of the United States of America.” (Crispus Attucks was a black American and reportedly among the first people killed in the American Revolutionary War, during the 1770 Boston Massacre.) Hayes and the Minutemen have worked in conjunction to stage anti-immigrant events, with members of both groups sharing a stage.
