Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a four-part series on racism at NIU. Today’s analysis looks at the activities of hate groups on campus and profiles an individual activist in the hate movement.

Racial tensions at NIU serve as a lightning rod to individuals and groups hoping to exploit the situation to the advantage of their personal agendas.

Groups trying to influence students range from J. B. Stoner’s Crusade Against Corruption to controversial speakers such as Louis Farrakhan and Professor Griff to local students or residents spreading the gospel of disunity and hate.

Within the last couple of years NIU has seen several Stoner flyers crop up on campus, the latest towards the end of the spring semester called on the U.S. to sink all boats carrying Haitian refugees because it was a Jewish attempt to weaken America.

NIU also has seen a paid advertisement in The Northern Star which claimed the Holocaust never happened and a newsletter distributed in parking lots from “The Talon Euro-American Alliance” stating, “We Aryans … know that the Zionist Jews and their goy (sic) stooges are the enemies of the Aryan.”

Controversial speakers bring messages that are perceived as hostile by some groups. A campus visit by Louis Farrakhan back in 1990 generated a fierce response from the Hillel Jewish Organization. Professor Griff, who visited NIU over the summer, charged the government with infecting African-Americans with AIDS to control their population and creating UPC symbols to someday ration food to African-Americans.

In addition to all that, the university routinely receives mail from individuals, although their reason for doing so is unclear. Among this group is Mark Margoian, who calls himself “God’s true prophet for the end of the world” and has written, “The Jews are and have been so enmeshed in the lies of the Devil for 6,000 years that they won’t even know that they have been devoured by the niggars (sic) and will bow down and worship the niggars and become willing slaves.”

In addition to outside groups, within the last couple of years there have been individuals at NIU that have played the hate game.

A typical example is of a student in the residence halls who put up a sign on his window that stated “Kill All Fags.” Another such example was swastikas painted on the rooms where Jewish students lived.

An extreme example of hate mongering at NIU was that of student Erik Engel’s “poetry” book distributed through campus. In his “book,” actually a bunch of photocopied pages folded into a book, Engel wrote such things as, “Satan is a nigger and that is why God kicked him out of heaven,” to quote one of the more benign phrases of the book.

Yet this is all protected speech.

“Unless you direct it (the slurs) at a specific person it is protected speech,” said Larry Bolles, director of the University Judicial Office. “You don’t want it in the university community, but depending on how you use it, it’s protected.”

NIU Legal Counsel George Shur said, “Such speech is protected unless there is an overt threat which can be taken seriously by an objectionable person. Free speech depends so much on the situation.”

Shur believes that some of these groups, such as the Crusade Against Corruption, have contact people in certain areas who will distribute the material. He also said every time there was an outbreak of racial tensions at NIU, the campus would be flooded with Stoner’s flyers, signaling that somebody or some group was informing Stoner on the status of tensions on campus.

In terms of campus-wide distribution, nobody has sent more material to NIU than Stoner.

“I’ve said before that periodically Mr. Stoner comes out from under his rock and his material shows up on Campus, and I believe that very much,” Shur said.

Indeed Stoner’s material has surfaced at NIU about once a year.

A typical Stoner piece of literature is like the flyer entitled “White Power” which showed up on campus a few years back and stated, among other things, “Praise God for AIDS … AIDS is a disease of jews (sic) and negroids (sic) that also exterminates sodomites.”

Such racist activities are nothing new to Stoner, whose full name is Jesse Benjamin Stoner. He has devoted his entire life to hate groups.

He began his career in the 1940s as an organizer for the Ku Klux Klan and began his own “Anti-Jewish Party.” In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he said he wanted to “make being a Jew a crime, punishable by death.”

In 1959 he teamed up with another key player in the hate movement, Edwards Fields, and together they formed the National States Party (NSRP). The NSRP was involved in violence in several states, including Florida, where a mob attacked Civil Rights demonstrators in St. Augustine.

In 1969 Stoner was one of the lawyers representing James Earl Ray in his appeal of his conviction for murdering Martin Luther King Jr. Ray’s brother later served as Stoner’s bodyguard. He has since been disbarred.

Throughout the years, Stoner ran for several state-wide offices, his best showing being his candidacy for Georgia’s Lt. Governorship. He received 71,000 votes and placed fourth in the election out of nine candidates. He also polled 40,000 votes in the 1972 senatorial races by campaigning on the slogan, “You cannot have law and order and niggers too … vote white.”

In the 1978 Democratic primary for governor, Stoner finished third, and Fields bragged that it had been done by campaigning openly against “Jews, communists and black savages.”

Asked about his racist views, Stoner has admitted openly that he doesn’t like Blacks or Jews, “and God doesn’t either.”

In 1977 an Alabama grand jury indicted Stoner for the 1958 bombing of Rev. Fred Shuttleworth’s Bethel Baptist Church, a Black church in Birmingham. After several losing appeals he became a fugitive for three months. Eventually Stoner turned himself into Luke Johnson, a television reporter, because he was afraid the government was going to assassinate him.

“I was not a criminal,” Stoner claimed, “I was a white political prisoner.”

He served only three and a half years of his ten year sentence, and was released in December 1986, when he once again started his racist activities.

It appears Stoner might be more involved in DeKalb’s hate movement than is readily apparent.

Bolles, who is an African-American, related the following story: A few years back he received harassing phone calls and letters from an unknown person. Eventually the police caught the harasser, a chemist with a Ph. D., and as they searched his house they found extremely large amounts of Stoner material.

Although this is all very disturbing to many people, the constitution guarantees people the right to air their beliefs with minimal interference.

Bolles summed up the extent of his options, “We’re not going to act on what people say unless it’s legal for us to do so… and there’s reason to believe someone’s safety is in danger.”