In the wake of the ugly news from Charlottesville, Va., and the further exposure of Donald Trump’s utter moral bankruptcy, the “energized” far right is going on tour. San Francisco and Berkeley are on its agenda.
We don’t have a Confederate statue to rally around, although a flag once flew in front of City Hall for a few weeks in 1964. For the hatemongers, coming here is all about confrontation on what the so-called alt-right, which we can just call white supremacists, sees as ground zero of everything they detest — the latest being the sacking of Google-memo writer James Damore.
The news of emboldened racists brought two people to mind for me. One is my father-in-law, who fought the Nazis in Italy, and now at 94 would be happy to tell you about the battle to take Riva Ridge.
Our domestic racist legacies are well documented and obviously unresolved, but at least there’s this: America laid down a marker in the 1940s that should never be forgotten or minimized. At moments — at our best — we have come together to fight these hate-spewers.
Because I’m constantly seeing national issues through a San Francisco lens, the second person I have in mind is Bob Heick.
That’s him pictured below, on the right, in a 1988 photo shoot for a Sassy magazine story about American neo-Nazis. (The guy on the left is Boyd Rice, a musician whose racist/fascist cred has been a matter of debate for decades.)
Are you one of those people who, upon meeting a native San Franciscan, say something like, “Wow, there aren’t many of you around”? Well, meet Bob Heick. One of this town’s native sons was one of the nation’s most notorious hatemongers during the 1980s, and he was hanging around schools and organizing marches down Haight Street.
That’s right: 30 years ago, white supremacists marched down Haight Street. A few years earlier, I met the guy responsible.
In 1980, I was a skinny, bushy-haired sixth grader at Herbert Hoover Middle School, which overlooks West Portal and part of the Sunset. I was in the yard one day with a friend I’d grown up with in the Haight. He knew this guy named Bob, and we started talking. Bob seemed a lot older than we were, which likely meant he was trespassing on school grounds.
Bob wore steel-toed boots and Ben Davis work pants and jacket — construction clothes, but also the uniform of the WPODs. They took their name from “White Punks on Dope,” a song about rich, spoiled kids by the local rock band the Tubes. The Tubes were satiric art weirdos, nuance that perhaps was lost on the WPODs, who were racists, anti-Semites, and also native San Franciscans.
Bob asked me if I was a Jew boy; the answer was yes. Perhaps not that day, but generally, I “passed” — I was into AC/DC and Black Sabbath and disdained soul. That was the extent of my tribal affiliations, although I had friends who dressed the part, and whose older brothers did too. But Bob was in a different league.
I never saw Heick after that day, but he soon became one of America’s highest-profile haters. He founded the racist American Front organization, an offshoot of the city’s punk and skinhead scene. The growing racism of the scene prompted “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” by the Bay Area’s Dead Kennedys, which is back in play as a hashtag.
https://twitter.com/Bananakin_Solo/status/896546111447552001
Editor’s note: For an intimate account of the local punk scene, including the divisions between racist and antiracist skinheads, check out Gimme Something Better by Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor.
Heick reached out to other hate groups across the nation, tying up at one point with the White Aryan Resistance, whose leader Tom Metzger was a former California Ku Klux Klan “grand dragon” and saw early on the potential of recruiting racist skinheads into larger organizations.
Like now, Haight Street was then a magnet for marginalized street kids. It was also a center of skinhead activity. The grassy slope of Buena Vista Park facing Haight was their turf. Heick liked to recruit there, passing out leaflets. He also had it out for the Bound Together anarchist bookstore; he reportedly kicked in the front window. A few years later, the store was firebombed.
Heick organized a “White Workers Day” march down Haight in 1988, and skinheads attacked interracial couples and gay men at that year’s Haight Street Fair, according to an antifascist newsletter at the time. (Bystanders fought back and only skinheads were injured, it reported.)
Later that same year, Heick was one of the racist youth on the infamous episode from Geraldo Rivera’s talk show, in which a brawl broke out and Rivera ended up with a broken nose. (Rivera, who called the Nazi youth “roaches,” refused to press charges. He is now a Donald Trump supporter on Fox News.)
With Metzger, Heick also organized an “Aryan Woodstock” concert in Napa in 1989 that fizzled out when a judge barred music at the gathering (but not the gathering itself — which attracted only a fraction of the attendees that Heick and Metzger had touted in the run-up.)
The trail gets threadbare from there. Heick recorded music under the name Robert X. Patriot that’s still around, but otherwise stayed out of the press. The Frisc’s query to the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the nation’s preeminent watchdogs of hate groups, came up cold. Nothing on Heick.
It’s not even clear if he’s still alive — although a 2006 obituary in the Sacramento Bee, a snippet of which is available here, seems to match his name and birthplace.
Looking back at my random meeting with Heick one day in 1980, I remember the “Jew boy” comment but little else. I wish I could report that I told him to fuck off, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t. It makes me all the more thankful that here, and in many other places across the country, protesters are showing up to counter the racism and anti-Semitism, and as we’ve just seen in Charlottesville, are risking life and limb.
Joey Gibson, the organizer of the planned August 26 rally at Crissy Field in San Francisco, says his Patriot Prayer group isn’t racist. It’s worth noting that the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that at his rally in Seattle Sunday, with the Charlottesville violence fresh in everyone’s minds, Gibson was far more explicit than Donald Trump in denouncing hate groups. “Fuck white supremacists! Fuck Neo-Nazis!” he yelled to the crowd.
We’ll see. If indeed the march goes on — by no means guaranteed, given the groundswell of opposition already under way — it will be a tightrope moment for San Francisco. Perhaps the best plan of action is to do what the best responders did after Google employee James Damore published his now-infamous memo about his company’s “ideological echo chamber.” Counter with better arguments. Like this one, this one, and this one. And however extreme the message from the white supremacists, be ready to respond to it by all means, including peace, grace, and humility.
Meanwhile, acknowledging San Francisco’s history — whether it’s a Chinatown pogrom, the expulsion of Japanese-Americans during World War II, postwar “urban renewal” (which James Baldwin famously described as “Negro removal”), or native-born Nazism — is important too.