Louis Beam

Louis Ray Beam, Jr. (born 1946) is an American white nationalist. After high-school, he joined the United States Army and served as a helicopter door-gunner in Vietnam.[1] He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.[2] Once he returned to the U.S. he became a Klansman, leading a maritime[3] Louisiana KKK element against government help to Vietnamese immigrant fishermen.[4] He was also the leader of the Texas Emergency Reserve, a militia that was disbanded by the courts in 1982 as a result of a lawsuit filed under Texas anti-militia law by the Southern Poverty Law Center[5]. The lawsuit was brought by SPLC after the militia harassed Vietnamese fishermen during the 1981 fishing season. Beam was using Camp Puller near Houston to train militia in 1980, including children as young as 8 years old, in armed guerrilla tactics; the camp was shut down after publicity led to protests, and parents complaining that they were not aware of the children's activities at the camp[6]. The Boy Scouts Council of Houston rejected a charter request from the troop at Camp Puller[7]. Videotape shown during the shrimper hearing had Beam saying, "We're going to assume authority in this country."[8] He was later acquitted in a separate case of conspiring to overthrow the government[5]. He moved to Idaho afterwards. He became active with Aryan Nations in the early 1980s.[9] He is considered to be the first important proponent of the strategy of leaderless resistance.[10][11]

References
  1. Gardell, Mattias (2003). Gods of the blood: the pagan revival and white separatism. Duke University Press. p. 350. ISBN 978-0-8223-3071-4.
  2. Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report Summer 2002 http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=86 Archived 2014-08-11 at the Wayback Machine
  3. Dees M. & Corcoran J. Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat (1997) photo with caption
  4. Wade, Wyn Craig (1998). The fiery cross: the Ku Klux Klan in America. Oxford University Press US. p. 393. ISBN 978-0-19-512357-9.
  5. 1969-, Gallaher, Carolyn (2003). On the fault line : race, class, and the American patriot movement. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0742519732. OCLC 50554807.CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  6. "PARAMILITARY CAMP IS CLOSED BY OWNER; Lethal Training for Klan Members Stirs a Strong Public Protest". Retrieved 2017-08-14.
  7. "Woman Asserts Scouts Planned to Hunt Aliens". Retrieved 2017-08-14.
  8. Ap (1981-05-13). "Around the Nation; Videotapes of Klan Leader Shown at Shrimper Hearing". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-08-14.
  9. Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2003). Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. NYU Press. p. 233. ISBN 978-0-8147-3155-0.
  10. Laqueur, Walter (2000). The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction. Oxford University Press US. p. 110. ISBN 978-0-19-514064-4.
  11. "US Domestic Terrorism: Ku Klux Klan". www.historycommons.org. Retrieved 2018-02-19.


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