Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 9

MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 1993 DETROIT FREE PRESS SA in Racist i torching haunts the nation Black victim angry young CRAIG FUJIIDetroit Free Press Above: Another sign warning blacks to stay out of Vidor, Texas, supposedly came down a few years ago. Right: Former Mayor Larry Hunter says attitudes have changed and that residents would accept a black family in their midst. But Ku Klux Klan members from elsewhere descended upon the town to fight efforts to desegregate a housing project last summer. i 4 A CO i Changing times run Klan out of town X. Ml CRAIG FUJIIDetroit Free Press Albert Harrison gazes over the balcony of his Port Arthur, Texas, apartment.

He was hired to direct the desegregation of the public housing development in Vidor. By Frank brum and Constance CPrater Free Press Staff Writers 7 AMPA, Fla. For several interminable minutes, ChrisIiJ-pher Wilson watched in borror as his two abductors fried, failed, then tried again tb set him on fire. J' There was nowhere to run. OnVpf the men held a gun to him.

There was no point in screaming1. His abductors had forced him to drive into a rural area of cow pastures orange groves and empty fields where no one would hear his cries. So Wilson, 31, stood mute and still outside the car, his shirt drenched in gasoline. The two white men had fold him: "You're a nigger and you're' going to die." Now, on the misty first morning of the New Year, they set about the ghoulish task of making him bun)' According to police reports; 'and accounts Wilson has given detectives', his girlfriend and his mother, his abductors lit match after match, but winked out in the breeze. Frustrated, they took out a white disposable cigarette lighter.

They shoved Wilson into the back of his car, away from any wind. They splashed the seat with fuel. They lit it. Flames roared up. Then they shut the car door, walked slowly to a van in which a third man was waiting, and drove off.

This hate crime was so brutal, ft riveted the nation. It also served" as a graphic example of a shift in the kinds of people who perpetrate racial violence in America today. Despite the misspelled, unpunC-tuated note that Wilson's alleged attackers left at the scene "one tes nigger more to go KKK" they1 did not belong to the Ku Klux Klan or any other hate group, police said. P-atVuar tVia tVtrexa mart nrracraA mA charged with the attempted murder were acting on their own young, poor, disenfranchised day laborers with a bottled rage unleashed by booze and drugs. Amazingly, Wilson saved himself.

His chest ablaze, he climbed out of the car, rolled on the ground to smothej-the flames, and stumbled down a deserted rural road where he found, help at an isolated house. Police cars sped to the scene, then ambulances, then a helicopter that carried Wilson 30 miles back to Tampa, where surgeons grafted new; skin over some of the burns that covered 40 percent of his body, mostly around his chest, arms and back. He will almost certainly live, though he will never be the same. Neither, perhaps, will many Residents of the Tampa area. In the attack on Wilson, who was abducted from a quiet suburban shopping center as he bought a newspaper, they came to know the details of one of the most vicious hate crimes in recent memory.

And in the days and weeks that followed it, they were haunted by this glimpse of a racial hatred that still seethes in some Americans, despite decades of struggle to vanquish it. "I had flashbacks of 'Mississippi said Leslie Williams, 29, a black man who lives in the affluent, mostly white suburban area' from which Wilson was abducted. "I've never known anything like this. just heard stories from my mother and my grandmother." He shook his head in disgust and wondered aloud if things would ever get better, if his three children, ages 2 to 8, could hope to inherit a world with less bigotry and enmity between races. "It's just so hard to comprehend," he said.

"We're about to bust the, year 2000. And instead of going forward, we seem to be going backward" Alyson Bowden, 35, a black schoolteacher who also lives in the Williams' abduction, echoed that, feel- "g- Two years ago her son, whobad just entered college, had his jaw and four teeth shattered by a gang of bat-wielding white teenagers who saw'him with a light-skinned black girl. Bowden tried to dismiss it as a 'freak occurrence, because she prefers npt to see rampant racial hatred in the lybrld. She prefers not to feel threatened. But news of Wilson's abduction forced her to re-examine her thinking and surrender to fear.

As she left: a supermarket one recent suddenly felt nervous and asked the if CRAIG FUJIIDetroit Free Press Joshua Modine, 1 4, adjusts the volume of rap music that he and his friend Timmy Spoonemore, 16, enjoy at the Vidor housing project this month. The 74-unit development remains all white. Tired of stigma, white enclave tries to open up BY LORI MONTGOMERY Free Press Staff Writer IDOR, Texas Nobody can say 11 for sure when the sign came ljf down. But as recently as 10 1 I years ago, the sign was posted alongside the highway on the south side of town: "Nigger, don't let the sun set on you in Vidor." "There was a time when it got dark, you wouldn't find a colored person in this town. They'd hang them," Herbert King, 62, said last week at Gary's Coffee Shop, rumored to be a hangout of the Ku Klux Klan.

But, King added, "Times has changed" in this rural, white enclave near the Louisiana border. After it was announced last August that four black families would move to an all-white Vidor housing project as part of a federal plan to desegregate public housing in east Texas, rival Klans swarmed from Waco and Houston, burning crosses and rallying to keep Vidor white. To widespread amazement, townsfolk did not fetch robes from their own closets. Vidor whose racist history recently moved one Texas Klan leader to call it "sort of like our Vatican" instead drove the Klan out. In an unprecedented display, nearly 2,000 of Vidor's 12,000 residents gathered in November to hear 17 preachers denounce what one called "outside forces promoting hatred and strife and racism." Eighteen business and property owners signed letters asking police to prevent Klan members from trespassing on their land.

A Klan petition to unseat Mayor Ruth Woods, a supporter of the integration plan, failed to muster the 300 needed signatures to get it on a ballot. Today, Woods will become the first Vidor mayor to address a rally in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "We are sick and tired of that constant stigma of the past," Woods said. "I feel with every ounce in me that an individual has a right to choose wherever they want to live without being intimidated or harassed." Meanwhile, in a move that could deal a knock-out blow to the two Texas Klans, the Texas Commission on Human Rights is investigating threats against Vidor residents in the nation's first effort to prosecute a Klan for violating fair-housing laws.

"The people in Vidor was guilty of extreme racism years ago," said the Rev. Bill Harland, 63, of the Old Faith Chapel, who helped organize the November rally. "But the vast majority of people in Vidor don't want that reputation anymore." Worries of trouble No one, to be sure, expects Vidor to become a happy model of integration j- any time soon. The black families who were supposed to move to town haven't. The 74-unit housing complex, as well as the town, remain all white.

Many observers still fear that blacks, if they come, will face trouble. But virtually everyone even old-time Vidor Klansmen agrees that any violence wouM come from outsid- LA. TEXAS Beaumont Houston tcS Brazo )f Ba 7 Mexico suddenly be victims of that hatred," he said. "Any blacks that come out here are going to have to have a real open mind." Harrison described some of the early calls he received from nervous Vidorians: Were the black families on welfare? Were their kids teenagers, or just little ones? Did they use drugs? "One young lady asked were they going to be taught housekeeping," Harrison said. "I said, 'Now, wait a minute.

What kind of house you live in? If I come over there right now, am I going to find dirty dishes in your "I told her, These people are everyday people like everybody Raised among racists Intellectually, most Vidorians know that. But many have been so steeped in the culture of Jim Crow that they struggle to believe it in their hearts. As a child in Beaumont, Harland was whipped by his mother for calling a black woman a "lady" and shaking her hand in public. "I had a grandmother that raised me and I loved her and she was a good lady, but she taught me to be a racist. And she was wrong," Harland said.

Last October, TV talk-show host Phil Donahue aired an episode about Vidor. Many townspeople were perturbed that a racist woman from the project represented their town. But they were shocked by another guest, a Muslim separatist who argued against integration. Since the Klan rallies, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has been unable to find any volunteers for the Vidor complex.

"The fact that the Klan came and did their dance on the steps there, blacks are still apprehensive about moving to Vidor," said Carlos Ren-teria, HUD's desegregation coordinator. Unless Vidor can woo some black families or prove that nothing about the town is stopping them from coming, "there may be some repercussions," Renteria said. HUD could, for example, withhold federal housing funds. In the meantime, Mayor Woods is just pleased that she was able to rally her town to the occasion. If blacks want to move to Vidor, "welcome to them," she said.

"We'll do everything in our power to Fe that they blend in." agent, remembers when the Klan shot up his house because they thought he was trying to rent Vidor property to a black family. "I've had more damned misery from the damned Klan," he said last week. Because of such incidents, no one would speak out against the Klan for a long, long time. But the housing-project hoopla may finally have shown Vidor that it has little to fear. Klans make a stand For three months last fall, the Knights of the KKK from Waco and the White Camelia Knights of the KKK from' Cleveland, a Houston suburb, burned crosses, sold souvenirs and tried to recruit new members in Vidor.

The White Camelias wandered around in robes with a petition to oust Mayor Woods. The state says the Klans also threatened residents who support integration including Woods and a project resident whose grandchildren are black. But after the prayer rally, both groups left town. Within days, the state human rights commission launched an investigation into whether the Klans used intimidation to thwart fair housing laws, a violation that carries civil penalties of up to $50,000. In other states, civil judgments have forced extremist groups out of business.

The Klans declared victory in keeping "the Negroes from moving to Vidor," but few in town expect it to remain all-white. Last week at the coffee shop, with three self-described Klansmen listening, Herbert King said he wouldn't mind black neighbors. "All people are the same," King said. "You have so much hate between whites and blacks that wouldn't even be there if people weren't told that they hate each other." "Nowadays, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, they're racist. And they just make me appreciate the hell out of Martin Luther King," added Beaux, 66, who wouldn't give his last can't make nobody do nothing through bloodshed.

The only way to go about it is through peaceful means." Harrison, the desegregation director, said some Vidorians fear integration because they think blacks will try to make them atone for historical sins. "They're afraid that the hatred they pranced in the past, that they'll ers, not from Vidor residents. "Hell, we are at least half civilized," said Bud Simmons, 58, a lifelong Vidor Klansman. "If the government moved them in here and they wasn't fooling with nobody, I'd be the first one down here to fire a shot if somebody tried to burn them out." Most Vidorians seem quietly proud of the progress that allows them finally to say, "Integrate. We don't care." "The community has said, 'Look, we're not a Klan town anymore, and we don't want the Klan to dictate to this city how we should said Barbara Harberg, Houston director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

"I think that's a very important message to come out of all this." Rebuking its past It seems an astonishing anachronism, but rebuking the Klan in Vidor is no small thing. Throughout the piney woods of east Texas and especially in Vidor, on the southern edge of a wild, prehistoric forest known as the Big Thicket people always have been more Southern than Western, and the Klan once ruled the land. Vidor, in particular, was known as a fortress of white supremacy. Klan-watch, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, reports that seven competing Klans were active in Vidor at least through the 1950s. The town was home to several grand dragons, the highest statewide Klan official; the last died just four years ago.

On Main Street, the Klan maintained a very public headquarters as late atVie 1970s. In the 1950s, cross KRT Detroit Free Press es were burned on the lawns of two black families who dared to buy homes. As recently as 10 years ago, the Klan ran a military training camp in the area, and cross-burnings were a regular part of high-school football festivities. Just across the Neches River in Beaumont, residents remember Vidor-ian Klan raids on black neighborhoods. "The only thing I knew when I was coming up was those guys in robes and sheets they were known for lynching and hanging blacks," said Albert Harrison, 45, a black man who was hired last summer by local housing authorities to direct the federally ordered desegregation program.

Blacks were not the Klan's only victims. When he was on the school board in the early 1970s, Harland found a cross on his own lawn after he refused to let the Klan enter a burning-cross float in the homecoming parade. Houseman, 82, a real estate security guard to accompany her tocher car. "It's like a reawakening," she said. "It's like I've been in the dark, thinking the world was a nicer place than it is." See FLORrJ, Page 10A.