Leonard Zeskind, a nationally-known expert on the white nationalist movement and founder of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, died last week. He was 75 years old.
Zeskind died peacefully at his Kansas City home on Tuesday, April 15, after a long battle with cancer, said Devin Burghart, the institute’s president and executive director.
Long a part of the national conversation on the dangerous rise of racist and anti-government groups, his 2009 book, “Blood and Politics,” was among of hundreds of titles banned by the U.S. Naval Academy library in an anti-diversity push.
“While he was touched to be included among such important banned writers, as always with Leonard, he never made it about him,” Burghart said. “For decades, Leonard had passionately warned of the white nationalist march from the margins to the mainstream.”
Zeskind said he became socially conscious during the mid-1960s during the Black freedom movement, when civil rights were on the national agenda, according to a 2009 interview. He became focused on the idea that, “white people should focus on organizing other white people to oppose racism.”
“As a grassroots activist that idea stayed with me,” he said. “In 1970, I started doing anti-racist work with impoverished working class young white people who had previously been at odds with poor black people living virtually in the same neighborhood.”
By the 1990s, Zeskind decided that what most people believed about white supremacy groups was inaccurate, so he began investigating, ultimately attending gatherings of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist and anti-government groups.
“For a good Jewish boy, I’ve gone to more Klan rallies, neo-Nazi events and posse comitatus things than anybody should have to do,” Zeskind said with a laugh.
What Zeskind found during his research was a single movement, with a much more sophisticated structure, he said during a 2009 interview. It was, he said, “organized around the notion that the power of whites to control government and social policy has already been overthrown by people of color and Jews, rather unlike the Klan of the 1960s which sought to defend a system of racial apartheid in the South.”
“These white-ists are not just a bunch of uneducated bumpkins down on their economic luck,” Zeskind said. “Instead, they are demographically much like the rest of white Americans, working class and middle class with a significant stratum of middle class professionals—professors, lawyers, chiropractors, etc.—as their leaders.”
During a 2018 speech at a town hall organized by U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton of Washington, D.C., Zeskind said President Donald Trump did not cause the recent rise in white supremacy, but that he plays a role in it.
“White supremacy and white privilege have been dominant elements of our society from the beginning,” Zeskind said. “It breeds a whole set of behaviors in people and it should be deeply and widely discussed in every level of our society.”
The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which Zeskind formed in 1983, will maintain Zeskind’s voluminous archives and plans to release an anthology of his writings later this year, titled “The Zeskind Reader,” Burghart said.
In Zeskind’s final days, Burghart said he talked not just about his inclusion on the Trump Administration’s list of banned books, but about “the ongoing efforts to erase civil rights, the trampling on the 14th Amendment, and the illegal maneuvers to ship innocent people off to foreign prison camps.”
“Rather than be pessimistic,” Burghart said, “he reminded me of a mantra he told me one of the first times we met over three decades ago: ‘Fighting fascism can be fun, and this is a great time to get to work and organize.’”
