“November 13 marks the 29th anniversary of the murder of Mulugeta Seraw. Seraw, an Ethiopian immigrant, was killed in 1988 when a gang of Nazi skinheads crushed his head with a baseball bat on a small side street in Portland, Oregon. His death became the best known of dozens of murders that were part of the last popular wave of organized racist groups before the current resurgence of white supremacy driven by the “alt-right.”

A federally funded study says that almost 450 people have been killed by the far right since 1990 — and this is likely a conservative number. White supremacists don’t just desire a racist future in which people of color, Muslims, Jews and other historically oppressed groups are exterminated or expelled: They work actively to make it happen. And even without having the governmental power to do this explicitly, far-right activists have committed a continuous series of murders, bombings and assaults.

Seraw’s death was just one of at least 40 murders by Nazi skinheads between 1988 and 1996 — a number that doesn’t include murders by other racist factions, like the Ku Klux Klan.

However, for those of us who came of age in the punk rock scene or lived in Portland, it was Seraw’s senseless death that we recall the most. The city was shocked by the violence, even though it had come to be one of the centers of the Nazi skinhead scene, which in 1988 had exploded in a wave of popularity.”

Read the full article at Truthout