In 1987, three men were murdered in an adult bookstore in Shelby, North Carolina. Despite efforts by Mab Segrest and others, the three Neo-Nazi men accused of the murders were declared not guilty by a jury. Segrest writes:
A few days later, the editor of the Shelby Star ran “An Open Letter to Mab Segrest,” responding to my critical comments in the press. It articulated the unstated assumptions we had battled in trying to elicit a public response. Tom O’Neal, the Star’s editor, felt that I had linked the murder to “some inherent hate and prejudice” within the Shelby community. He protested that the kind of violence at the Shelby III was alien to the community. But people carried their beliefs “deep within”and did not need to go on record with them, any more than they needed to “proclaim our belief in the goodness of spring rains.”
Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor, page 171
In response, Segrest wrote a letter of her own:
The reason you do not have an active White Patriot Party in Shelby now is that many people across the state, myself included, worked very hard for much of this decade to bring that activity to an end. We did not stand around explaining we weren’t complicit in that hatred—we weren’t. We just saw an urgent job that needed to be done, and we set to work to do it. We have learned in this work that ignoring the Klan and Nazi groups (as you seem to suggest), that a cold shoulder, is not enough. Many members of hate groups hurt people thinking that they have the approval of the general public and of their communities. Silence, to them, implies consent.
Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor, page 171
This is a familiar note: in response to evidence that a community includes people who espouse a white supremacist ideology, white people will often tear themselves in knots claiming they cannot or should not be accountable for their neighbor’s beliefs. This notion presumes that ideas are but gossamer, unpleasant perhaps but unable to cause any harm. But violent beliefs beget violence in more than word. Too often white people are more concerned with seeming to be just and good than with doing the work to create the conditions for that justice.