President Decries Hate Crime ‘Poison’ Clinton Denounces Killings By Skinheads, Meets Officer’s Widow
President Clinton Saturday denounced a recent series of hate crimes connected to white skinheads in this traditionally tolerant mountain city, saying they demonstrate the need for “removing the poison that breeds them from all our hearts.”
Taking a break from a fund-raising visit, Clinton addressed a spate of incidents that captured national attention after a 19-year-old man with shaved scalp admitted in a television interview that he killed a West African immigrant because he was black and “didn’t belong where he was at.” That incident followed several other confrontations, including a shootout that killed a police officer.
“We must not - and I know the people of Denver will not - tolerate acts of violence that are fed by hate against people of another color,” Clinton said. “And we must not tolerate violence and hatred targeted against police officers, the people who put their lives on the line for us every day.”
Clinton said the Denver episodes “are painful illustrations of … why we have to do more to combat acts like this” and cited his yearlong campaign for racial reconciliation as one means toward that end.
The race initiative came under heavy criticism from House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and other conservatives this week after the president’s advisory board conducted a meeting on higher education without inviting any opponents of racial preferences because, as panel chairman John Hope Franklin said, they had nothing to contribute to the discussion.
To open up the debate, White House aides said Saturday that they have recruited a leading critic of affirmative action to participate in Clinton’s first town hall meeting on race in Akron, Ohio, on Dec. 3. Abigail Thernstrom, co-author of “America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible,” will be one of three writers who will make presentations before the meeting is opened to a free-form discussion with about 90 Akron residents.
White House communications director Ann F. Lewis said she invited Thernstrom Friday because “we really want to hear people with a variety of views.” By happenstance, Thernstrom already had submitted an opinion piece that was published in Saturday’s New York Times, castigating Franklin and the White House for seeking “to stifle debate.”
“I’m delighted and honored to be invited,” Thernstrom said Saturday by telephone from her home in Lexington, Mass. “It’s absolutely essential to have a variety of views, and I certainly represent variety. … I don’t want to simply mend affirmative action. I want to end it.”
Clinton stopped in Denver and later flew to Seattle on his way to Vancouver for an Asian economic summit. During his two domestic visits, he was the featured attraction at four Democratic fund-raisers expected to raise $1.1 million.
While in Denver, Clinton met briefly with Anna VanderJagt, the widow of a police officer slain last week by a skinhead, who then committed suicide. The city’s turmoil deepened with the random shooting death Tuesday of Oumar Dia, 38, a native of Mauritania who was waiting at a bus stop. The gunman then shot and paralyzed a white nurse who rushed to try to help Dia.
“I don’t like some blacks,” the arrested suspect, Nathan Thill, said in a jail house interview that shocked the city.
“I guess it’s sort of a thing that I love my own people and I’d like to see a place where just we could be.”
White House officials said the Justice Department has opened an investigation under civil rights statutes into Dia’s death and a separate investigation under domestic anti-terrorism laws into skinhead activities more generally in Denver.