Derek Black of Stormfront may sue Florida Republicans to gain committeeman seat.

madfloridian

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Tue Jan-05-10 10:54 PM
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Derek Black of Stormfront may sue Florida Republicans to gain committeeman seat.

He won an election for committeeman in Palm Beach County last year. They distanced themselves from him as a party. It appears they were not quite aware of his connections to a former KKK Grand Wizard of the KKK, his father, Don Black.

Now he is back and talking about legal ramifications.

The background:

Florida Republicans distance from new committeeman, Stormfront, son of former grand wizard

From December last year:

THE NEW YORK TIMES / JOHN RICKSEN Palm Beach County Republican Chairman Sid Dinerstein, left, and other GOP leaders are trying to distance the party from Derek Black, right, without stirring up a conflict that would draw more publicity.

WEST PALM BEACH - Officially, the Republican Party of Palm Beach County rejected Derek Black's recent election as a committeeman because he failed to sign a loyalty oath.

But such technicalities hardly explain how a minuscule election -- Black won 167 of 287 votes -- has attracted the attention of hate groups nationwide, and opponents like the Anti-Defamation League. This, rather, seems to reflect heightened sensitivity to issues of race in the age of Obama, and the intrusive power of history.

Black is more than just a 19-year-old college student with a taste for politics. He is also the son of Don Black, a former national grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. At age 11, he contributed a "kids page" to his father's "white nationalist" Web site, Stormfront.org, where the message boards disparage nonwhites. The younger Black denies being a white supremacist.

"I am a white person who is concerned about discrimination against white people," he said in an interview at a local Starbucks. And yet, Black, speaking softly, wearing a hat, boots and a sport coat, could not identify a single ideological difference with his father or the KKK, nor could he bring himself to agree with the tenet that all men, regardless of race, are equal.

Well, he's renewing his efforts to be part of the Republican Executive Committee in Palm Beach County.

Son of ex-KKK grand wizard renews effort to join Palm Beach County GOP

The son of a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard is renewing his effort to be seated on the Palm Beach County Republican Executive Committee.

Derek Black, now 20, won a 2008 election to one of 111 executive committee seats. But the party disallowed the election because Black hadn�t signed a party loyalty oath on time.

Now Black is disputing that decision and citing a court ruling on a similar dispute in Miami-Dade.

The Aug. 26 ruling by the 3rd District Court of Appeals upheld a lower court�s order that the Miami-Dade GOP seat 19 people who won elections but were disqualified by the loyalty oath requirement. The appeals court said the Miami-Dade GOP hadn�t given the candidates adequate notice of a new deadline for the loyalty oath.

There was an interesting article about Black at Details Magazine in 2009.

Derek Black: The Future of White Power

He's more comfortable talking about ideology than pop culture, though, especially as it relates to recent political changes. "He's a big marker," Black says of the new president. "I don't expect in four years to be living in a wasteland of burning tires and homeless people, but for me Obama is one step away."

The Southern Poverty Law Center says that Obama's rise to power energized racial extremists (it estimates that the number of active hate groups nationwide rose from 888 in 2007 to 926 the following year). One of the engines driving this surge is Stormfront, which Mark Potok, the director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project, calls "without question the most important white-nationalist website in the world." The site has added around 80 members a day over the past two years and now claims to have more than 160,000. "One hundred and twenty thousand people used Stormfront in the first 24 hours after Obama was elected," Black says. "The site crashed."

Last August, Black defeated his opponent for the county committee seat�a middle-aged, Cuban-American community activist�by a vote of 167 to 121. His campaign materials made no mention of his family history or his affiliation with Stormfront. The committee chairman learned of Black's background after the election, then refused to seat him, justifying the decision on the grounds that Black hadn't signed a loyalty oath pledging to avoid conduct that might harm the party's reputation. "The biggest support I got during that time was from older Cuban men," Black says. They evidently weren't aware of his position on immigration�he wants to ban it, except for Europeans. Does Black think he would have won if he'd been open about his background? "There are all kinds of statements I could have made that wouldn't have been beneficial," he says. Even if the party is refusing to seat him, Derek Black already talks like a politician.

I would say the Palm Beach County Republicans have a difficult situation on their hands.