Sandpoint Groups Working To Stamp Out Hate Racist Mailings Spark Broad Effort To Constructively Respond To Attack

Racist mailings and white supremacist visitors at a recent human rights meeting here have spurred community efforts to combat hate.

“People are starting to get angry, and we want to diffuse it constructively,” said Gretchen Albrecht-Hellar, chairman of the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force.

The immediate plan by human rights advocates, business leaders and politicians is to have Emergency Hate Response Kits ready and available to citizens the next time racist mailings blanket the area.

The kits will include suggestions of how to respond, bumper stickers and window posters supporting human rights, copies of human rights booklets, cards designed by Sandpoint children and a list of the 10 best ways to turn racist literature into something other than its intended purpose.

A communitywide contest will be announced Tuesday to come up with the 10 best uses for the literature.

Albrecht-Hellar said she has never seen such widespread and well-financed hate literature campaigns as the two that recently invaded Bonner County and Kootenai County homes.

The first mailing came out two months ago and consisted of an anti-Semitic booklet and 6-foot-long poster that asserts the superiority of whites. The second mailing included videotapes of an interview with Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler.

Both mailings went to thousands of households in Kootenai and Bonner counties. Two wealthy Sandpoint men - Carl E. Story and R. Vincent Bertollini - are behind the mailings.

Since then, the posters and booklets have been found on windshields of churchgoers in Sandpoint. And early last week, two men distributed an anti-Semitic comic book to Sandpoint students. The book was published by Michael Hoffman II of Coeur d’Alene, who publishes a Web site and literature claiming the Holocaust is a myth.

The literature helped pack the room at the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force meeting last week. But to the dismay of human rights advocates, Butler, Hoffman and Bertollini also attended the meeting.

“The meeting scared me to my bones,” said Sandpoint Mayor David Sawyer. “The intense conviction Hoffman and Bertollini display make it clear that this is not an issue we’re going to debate with these folks.”

Sawyer met with other community leaders afterward, who decided to embark on a long-term effort to counteract the white supremacist efforts. Sawyer also met with Bill Wassmuth of the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment to pledge his active support for the cause.

“There’s a lot at stake here,” Sawyer said. “It’s more than image. It’s more than an abrasive act that happens every once in a while. It’s the quality of the atmosphere of this town that’s going to be called into question.

“I don’t like having people in our Community Hall dressed like Nazi soldiers.”

Also jumping into the fray are Frederic and Cynthia Wiedemann, who moved to Sandpoint about a year ago. The two run a nonprofit foundation called the Unifying Fields Foundation, which is dedicated to building a sense of connectedness in communities.

“It’s easy for our community to hate the haters,” Frederic Wiedemann said. “How do we have a community that in some way has compassion for that, but not stand for it?”

The emergency kits are just the beginning of a concerted effort to find a way to prevent racism from festering and growing in the area, human rights advocates said.

“The real work is going to be long-term,” Wiedemann said.