It Takes a Village to Raise a Racist

Shortly after white supremacist James von Brunn's fatal shooting attack this spring at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., his 32-year-old son issued a statement to ABC News in which he denounced his father's ideology and described the devastating impact it had had on his family.

"My father's beliefs have been a constant source of verbal and mental abuse my family has had to suffer with for many years," he said. "His views consumed him, and in doing so, not only destroyed his life, but destroyed our family and ruined our lives as well."

Erik von Brunn's repudiation of his father's bigotry runs counter to the conventional wisdom that virulent racists will produce children like themselves. Indeed, the movement has its share of parent-child notables, including neo-Nazi leaders Tom and John Metzger, white supremacists Don and Derek Black, and Klan/skinhead organizers Ron and Steven Edwards. But the younger von Brunn is hardly alone in rejecting a parent's beliefs — and experts say that's no surprise.

"Overall, there's not a lot of evidence that, at least in the long term, kids get their prejudice from their parents," said Charles Stangor, who runs the Laboratory for the Study of Social Stereotyping and Prejudice at the University of Maryland. "I would call it more of a community effect than a parental effect. The community fosters tolerance or prejudice."

That community includes peers and other adults, such as teachers, coaches and clergy, said Frances Aboud, a psychology professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who studies the development of racial prejudice in children. "There are so many other influences in a child's life [besides parents], particularly once they start kindergarten."

Children of racial extremists may have to contend with other effects of their parents' bigotry, Aboud said. "I think [they] probably become sensitive to that type of adult; other kids might not be aware that there's that kind of extreme emotional hate toward people," she said. "[Children of racial extremists] might have lived with more fear. They might have felt vulnerable themselves to that kind of hate: What if I cross my parents in some way — am I going to get that hate directed at me?"

To take a closer look at the experience of growing up in a climate of hate, the Intelligence Report spoke with three people whose fathers were deeply involved in racial extremism: the co-founder of a civil rights group who drove her father to Klan meetings when she was a teenager in Arkansas in the 1960s; a former nurse whose father was among the most powerful Klan leaders during the civil rights movement; and a teenager who had to cast aside his entire way of thinking about the world after renouncing his white nationalist father.

Their stories reveal how they developed their own views about race and sense of identity. They also show how bigotry's ill effects often extend beyond its intended targets.

As the daughter of the Arkansas Klansman said: "We are all victims of this type of hate."

Taking on the Klan
One summer night in 1965, 12-year-old Carolyn Wagner watched as Klansmen bound a young black man to a tree in her father's field, accused him of violating the "sundown" rules in nearby Booneville, Ark., that forbade blacks from staying in town after dark, and lashed him a few times with a bullwhip as he cried out in pain and fear.

It was no different from beatings at other Klan gatherings her father had attended, but what happened next remains vivid in her memory: the Klansmen decided to tie the man to the railroad tracks below the pasture. When they were done, they ambled back to the field to discuss crops and politics. Wagner, a reluctant witness to her father's Klan meetings, couldn't stand it anymore. She stole down to the tracks, used a knife she kept in her boot to slash the rope that bound the man, and told him he could follow the tracks to Fort Smith, the nearest large town.

"That was a turning point," recalled Wagner, now 56 and living in Tulsa, Okla. "I felt like I had made a difference when I was able to cut that man free. I realized I can make a choice to be a passive observer or I can become involved to diminish the harm that they're doing. And that's what I did from that night on, and that's what I'm still doing."

After years working for civil rights and children's organizations, Wagner co-founded Families United Against Hate, a nonprofit group that helps people affected by bias incidents. Her experience growing up with a father in the Klan made her determined and fearless in her fight against hate. "That image of my dad and those men, and even the smells, are still with me, and they'll always be with me. And it was very important that my children never know the world I knew when I was growing up."

It was a world where Wagner's father, Edward Greenwood, and his acquaintances gathered at least once a month at each other's farms for Klan meetings, often bringing their children and grandkids. Because her father, then in his late 50s, couldn't see well enough to drive at night, Wagner ferried him to meetings in a 1951 Chevy pickup. (Back then in rural Arkansas, it wasn't unusual for children as young as 12 to drive on country roads.) The men — including lawyers, judges, cops and pastors — would begin their gatherings with a prayer and eschew alcohol. "They felt like they were doing God's work," Wagner said.