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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Supremacist dreams of taking over tiny town

Leith, N.D., mobilizes to thwart Aryan haven

Craig Cobb sits on a picnic bench Monday in an undeveloped park in Leith, N.D., where he would someday like to hold a white power music festival. (Associated Press)
Blake Nicholson Associated Press

LEITH, N.D. – In a tree-fringed grassy lot with a lone picnic bench in the tiny North Dakota farming town of Leith, Craig Cobb sees the perfect venue for a white power music festival.

Across a gravel intersection between two abandoned buildings, he envisions a park – perhaps with a swimming pool – dedicated to a neo-Nazi and white supremacist activist. He pictures the town decorated with fluttering flags and banners bearing the swastika – the symbol of Nazism.

“They would have to be approved by the town council, of course,” Cobb said, gazing out over Leith’s sparse downtown from his overgrown, weed-infested front yard.

Cobb, 61, a self-described white supremacist, has purchased about a dozen lots in the community about 60 miles southwest of Bismarck. Over the past year he has invited fellow white supremacists to move there and help him to transform the town of 16 people into a white enclave. No one has come.

Still, the community is mobilizing to fight out of fear that Cobb could succeed, and the mayor has vowed to do whatever it takes to ensure Cobb’s dream remains just that.

Last week, while news of Cobb’s plan was being splashed across the front pages of the Bismarck Tribune and the (Fargo) Forum, about two dozen people – mostly residents of Leith and concerned friends from neighboring towns – showed up for an impromptu meeting in nearby Carson.

Cobb spends his days in his ramshackle home, posting online comments advocating for white supremacists to join his settlement.

“I only need 17 people,” he said. “You have to have a majority to win an election. If we get 22 we’ve got a landslide.”

Cobb’s neighbors across a back alley are Sherrill Harper, who is white, and her husband Bobby, who is black. Bobby Harper, a 52-year-old welder, said he has spoken to Cobb only once, and that Cobb’s plans don’t bother him much.

“The most extreme thing you can do is hate another man because of the color of his skin, (but) I don’t think we should get too excited,” he said. “I believe right will prevail.”

Officials are considering enforcing health codes and ordinances relating to the upkeep of Cobb’s run-down property. A proposal to disband Leith’s government and turn over control to the county is even on the table.

“He would still own his property,” said Mayor Ryan Schock, a 38-year-old farmer and lifelong Leith resident. “But … he can’t control the city if there’s no city government.”

No decisions have been made, but the six-member town council that usually convenes once a month might call a special meeting to discuss the matter soon, Schock said.

Ryan Lenz, a writer with the Alabama-based civil rights nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, said his organization has long tracked Cobb, who is wanted in Canada for willfully promoting hatred in Vancouver in 2010 via a blog.

“It’s a pipe dream for white nationalists to have an entire area in which their neighbors are Aryan,” Lenz said.

That’s hard to achieve, Lenz said, but Cobb has made strides because he has gobbled up land – even transferring some to Tom Metzger, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and founder of the White Aryan Resistance.

That doesn’t mean he’s any closer to enacting his plan. Metzger said he likes Cobb but that declared plans for white enclaves never work and that he will not be joining Cobb in Leith.

Cobb, a native of Missouri, fled prosecution in Canada and chased the promise of high-paying jobs in the booming western North Dakota oil fields. He said he was fired from a job because of a dispute with a co-worker and that he lost a job with a Fargo-based paving company after media coverage of his settlement plans.

Deputy North Dakota Attorney General Tom Trenbeath said authorities are aware of Cobb, and the Grant County Sheriff’s Office has increased patrols in the area.