On this MLK Day, we should remember the people who in 1989 wanted to take MLK's name off a Portland street, but for totally not-racist reasons!

On Walter Huss's lifelong hatred of MLK, the many "totally not racist" Oregonians who enabled it, and the small group of antifascist activists and researchers who told the truth about it

Walter Huss was obsessed with MLK, Jr, and not in a good way. From the 1960s into the 1990s, he compiled three thick folders of “oppo research” on King that happens to be stored in Box 2 of his archive at the U of O, the same box that contains two thick folders labeled “Jews.”

One of the creepier documents in his MLK folder is this flier from a neo-Nazi organization that was active in the Portland area in the late 1980s and early 1990s

One of Walter Huss’s earliest projects as a right wing political organizer was focused on preventing MLK, Jr. from speaking in Portland in November 1961. Huss coordinated a massive letter writing campaign urging Oregon’s Republican, pro-civil rights governor Mark Hatfield and Portland Mayor Terry Schrunk to NOT appear on stage with King. Here is a small sampling of the hundreds of letters Hatfield received, many of which contained virtually identical wording that had been suggested by Walter Huss on his daily radio show and in an anti-MLK flier he circulated throughout the state. [All screenshots below are from the Mark Hatfield Papers held at Willamette University in Salem, OR.]

“This protest has nothing to do with the color of the man.” I know nothing about W.R. Norte, and perhaps that is indeed a true statement. But I do know a lot about Walter Huss and Billy James Hargis who organized this anti-MLK letter writing campaign, and I can assure you that “the color of the man” had EVERYTHING to do with their actions. Both were white supremacists, and both had close ties with people who were not just white supremacists who wanted Black people to be second class citizens in the US, but were also white nationalists who wanted to actively deport Black Americans to Africa. I will just note here that Walter Huss’s parents were immigrants who got to this country a few hundred years after the arrival of the ancestors of most Black Americans who were alive in 1961. And yet Huss felt it to be his duty as a good “Christian American” to work for a day when his Black fellow citizens would be deported back to Africa so people like him could have the country to themselves.

Ultimately Governor Hatfield took the counsel of the state’s more moderate religious leaders and did appear on stage with MLK in November 1961. But Walter Huss, who ran (unsuccessfully) against Hatfield in the GOP Senatorial primary in 1966 and was an obsessive hater of Hatfield his entire life, never forgot Hatfield’s “traitorous” support for MLK and the broader civil rights movement. The inaugural edition of Huss’s newspaper devoted almost half of its content to a critical “exposure” of the Hatfield/MLK relationship.

And just so there’s no mistaking Huss’s white supremacist logic for opposing MLK, here’s a piece he ran in his August 1962 newspaper. Huss expressed his loathing of multi-racial democracy in the idiom of Christian anti-Communism, but that didn’t make it any less white supremacist.

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Fast forward to November 1988 when neo-Nazi skinheads murdered an Ethiopian immigrant named Mulugeta Seraw outside Seraw’s SE Portland apartment, 8 blocks from Huss’s house. Partially in response to that racist murder, in April 1989 Portland’s city council renamed Union Avenue on the city’s east side “Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.” You’ll never guess who immediately kicked into action to organize a massive movement AGAINST the creation of MLK Blvd…Walter and Rosalie Huss. Their “Save Union Av.” campaign framed the issue as one of political procedure, claiming that MLK or race had nothing to do with it. Rather, they said, this was just about whether the five member city council had the right to change street names like this.

Rosalie was the point person on the “Save Union Av” campaign, and that perhaps explains why it was one of the most successful campaigns of Walter’s political career. From what I’ve garnered from Walter’s archive (in which we only get glimpses of Rosalie as a subject in her own right), Rosalie seems to have been a far more strategic and effective organizer than Walter. Rosalie organized an army comprised largely of white retirees who managed to place “Save Union Av” petitions on the counters of virtually every business in Portland in late 1989 and early 1990. She ultimately got over 50,000 signatures, >10% of Portland’s total population. The petition called for a citywide referendum on renaming Union Av. They collected far more than enough signatures to make that happen. Ultimately however, a judge ruled that it was not appropriate for the city to hold a referendum on something as minor as renaming one street. Despite the movement’s ultimate failure, when The Oregonian conducted a poll on the issue in January 1990, >60% of Portlanders agreed that MLK’s name should be removed from Union Av. So while the Husses lost the war in a court of law, they achieved quite a victory in the court of public opinion.

Below is the coverage from the city’s excellent, free weekly paper. In contrast to how most Portland press outlets depicted the “Save Union Av” movement as a colorblind, populist “anti-city hall” campaign, the Willamette Week minced no words about the Husses’ racist motivations.

Walter’s archive contains hundreds of photocopies of the checks they received to support their anti-MLK effort. Most of them were for 5 or 10 dollars from lower middle class white people who lived on the far east side of the city, and a few were for a few hundred dollars from Portland businesses. But the Husses also received (and kept!) a significant number of replies to their petition that took the form of “take me off your mailing list you racist POS.”

This person carefully cut the petition they received into pieces, stuffed it into the envelope, and sent it back to the Husses. Why Walter kept it, we’ll never know. Perhaps it was an emblem of just how hated and persecuted the true children of Christ, like Walter and Rosalie, would always be in this fallen world.

One of the best stories I’ve heard about Walter Huss’s reputation in Portland came from a woman who attended a talk I gave last year. She and her husband were progressives who lived in Portland from the 70s into the 90s. She told me that whenever they got into an argument about something, like whose turn it was to take out the trash, one spouse would threateningly say to the other “if you don’t do this then I’m going to send a donation to Walter Huss!”

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A robust antifascist movement emerged in Portland in the late 80s and early 90s to combat the rising far right which was comprised of violent neo-Nazi skinheads like the people who murdered Mulugeta Seraw, as well as the middle aged sweater-vest wearing white supremacist and anti-LGBTQ “Christian patriots” like Walter and Rosalie Huss who were untroubled by that racist murder and would pour tons of energy into symbolic battles like taking MLK’s name off a city street. In hindsight, it’s notable how clear-eyed these antifascist activists and researchers were about the nature of Walter and Rosalie Huss’s politics. This collective oral history of that movement is very much worth reading.

Where Portland’s leaders in both the media and government hesitated to identify the anti-MLK Blvd movement as “racist,” that relatively small group of antifascist activists had no such reservations. Now that Walter Huss’s archive is open to the public, we now know, for example, that at the same time he was organizing to take MLK’s name off of a street in Portland as a colorblind populist “fighting city hall,” he was carefully reading and annotating David Duke’s publication “The National Association for the Advancement of White People” and sending Duke donations and letters containing dating advice.

Huss’s highlighting on an article in one of the many editions of the National Association for the Advancement of White People newsletter he received in 1989-90.

Whereas most white Portlanders regarded Walter Huss as a fairly harmless kook who adhered to anachronistically “old fashioned” ideas about God and society, the antifascist researchers who carefully analyzed his history and his connections with the wider world of white supremacist activism knew better. Thus, they were not surprised when in February 1990 Walter and Rosalie Huss had dinner at the MLK Blvd. Sizzlers with Richard Barrett, one of the nation’s most notorious and violent white nationalist activists who had come to Portland to meet with his protégés in the city’s neo-Nazi skinhead movement and offer his immoral support for the anti-MLK Blvd movement.

Below is the article on that Barrett episode that appeared in The Oregonian, one of the few times that newspaper explicitly mentioned the role racism played in the anti-MLK Blvd movement. And note how they, in the name of fairness, print Walter Huss’s false claim that “There’s no racism in this campaign at all.”

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We are living in an era when prominent voices on the right are carrying forward Walter Huss’s life work of pushing back on the canonical place that MLK, Jr. has come to inhabit in our national memory since 1986 when a federal holiday was created in his name.

A link to that article that appeared in Wired Magazine last week.

Pizzagate Jack, an editor at Human Events which was one of Ronald Reagan and Walter Huss’s favorite sources of news from the 1960s through the 1980s, was apparently inspired by Trump’s recent Hitlerian rhetoric to go full “the Civil Rights Act was when ‘the wokes’ stabbed white Americans in the back.” I predict that future historians may refer to this era as the WhineMore Republic.

In any democratic society, historical memory will always be contested. I’d be the last person to express nostalgic affection for the National Review’s annual “colorblind” paean to the one MLK quote every white conservative knows about “the content of our character” vs “the color of our skin.” But despite its political limitations, that flattened conservative depiction of MLK at least gave lip service to the idea that the US is and should continue to be a multi-racial democracy, and that we should honor the activists from our past who worked to create a more racially just nation. Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, and other activists on the MAGA right are trying to “take down” MLK as part of their broader project to create an America that is more explicitly committed to white supremacy and Christian supremacy, all in the name of fighting off the supposedly existential, globalist threat of the radical left. Sounds eerily like what Walter Huss was up to back in the day, no?

And just as Walter Huss was able to find a couple people of color to participate in his movement to convince white moderates and the mainstream media of his “colorblindness,” Kirk and Posobiec also try to sell themselves as non-racists and non-theocrats who are merely trying to raise awareness about the existential threat to America posed by “the trans agenda,” or “radical Islam,” or “cultural Marxism,” or “CRT,” or [fill in the blank with the moral panic du jour].

One thing we can learn from the success of Huss’s “populist” and “totally not racist” attack on MLK’s memory in 1989-90 is that such appeals can often attract support from white people who do not necessarily share Huss’s rabid and hateful commitment to white supremacy, but who nonetheless contribute their signatures, a few dollars, and their votes to white supremacist movements like Huss’s in the name of “fighting city hall” or “not kowtowing to the dictates of the liberal media,” or “combatting the dangerous un-American extremism of the radical left.”

In an age when many large media outlets are soft-pedaling the threat that Trumpism poses to multi-racial democracy and religious pluralism, we need more accurate Willamette Week ca. 1990 reporting and less both-sides-ing Oregonian ca. 1990 reporting. We also need more clear-eyed, big picture research and reporting like that facilitated by the antifascist activists of the late 80s and early 90s who accurately identified “Christian Patriots” like Walter and Rosalie Huss not as dying vestiges of an irrelevant illiberal tradition, but as precursors of an increasingly illiberal form of “conservatism” that was gathering strength in the “America First” Christian Nationalist Buchanan brigades, the weirdo Libertarian Ron Paul types, and the right wing paramilitary types in the “survivalist” movement.

Those “populist,” far right, conspiracy-obsessed “culture war” movements were gaining momentum on the right edge of the GOP in that era, and it is those movements that created the seedbed in which Trump’s candidacy took root and grew in 2015-6.

Hindsight is always 20/20 of course…but if historical hindsight is of any use, it should be to help us understand more clearly where we are today, how we got here, and what people in the past have to teach us about how best to respond to our current situation.