"When Kim Langford went home for lunch on Tuesday, December 1, she found two sheets of paper, rolled up and wrapped in a rubber band, on the front lawn of her home on Lexington Avenue.

“I picked it up, thinking it was a flyer for gutter cleaning or something,” says Langford.

Instead, the flyers proclaimed that the United States invaded Iraq to satisfy Israel, and exhorted readers to “deport these arrogant Jews.”

“I was shocked,” says Langford. She says the flyers appeared in many of her neighbors’ yards, too, and were probably put there overnight. “Everyone on the street is shocked,” she says.

The flyers came from members of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group based in Hillsboro, West Virginia, with a Virginia outpost in Achilles, a small town in Gloucester County. According to its website, http://www.natall.com, the group believes that white people have evolved higher mental faculties than non-whites, and the group advocates creating a “white living space” by a “racial cleansing of the land.”

Shaun Walker, the chief operating officer for the National Alliance, says the flyers on Lexington Avenue came from Alliance members in Charlottesville, who distributed between 1,500 and 2,000 similar flyers along the I-64 corridor around the city.

“We have members in that area who want to spread the message to their neighbors,” says Walker, declining to provide their names.

“There’s no authorized spokesman in Charlottesville,” Walker says. “But there are a few strong candidates. When the time is right, we will authorize them and they can do interviews themselves.”

Charlottesville Police Sergeant Stephen Upman says the department received a report of “anti-Jewish” flyers around Hill Street and Robertson Avenue. Upman says the report was forwarded to police investigators. “How they’ll go with it, I can’t tell you,” he says.

Jon Zug, the City’s Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney and a member of Congregation Beth Israel, the city’s only synagogue, says that the First Amendment protects inflammatory or hateful speech. There are limits, however—obscene language, threats to specific people, or attempting to incite a riot is against the law.

After being told about the flyers, Zug, who had not seen them himself, says “it certainly steps over what I would consider the moral line, but what you’ve described to me doesn’t step over the legal line.”

While the ideology governing the National Alliance, as outlined on its website, seems almost comical in its aims—a society, for example, where people dance waltzes and jigs “but never to undulate or jerk to negroid jazz or rock rhythms”—the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization dedicated to stopping defamation of Jews, has linked the National Alliance to violent crime.

According to the ADL’s website (www.adl.org), the National Alliance was founded in 1974 by William Pierce, who died in 2002. The ADL claims Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was inspired by Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries; the ADL also links Alliance members with other killings and attempted bombings.

The National Alliance also distributes racist music through Pierce’s record label, Resistance Records. The ADL claims the National Alliance membership has grown 50 percent in the past six years to 1,500, mostly through literature distributed by more than 35 cells in 30 states, including Virginia.

Langford says she thinks Alliance members put flyers in most of the yards in her neighborhood. “I guess it’s not surprising,” she says, “but I’m shocked this stuff is in Charlottesville.” (John Borgmeyer, C-Ville Weekly, December 7, 2004)

For related article, see National Alliance Distributes Anti-King Fliers.