- Well for many of us, the idea of white supremacy is something that exists in history books.

It might be dismissed as something that could happen in other places in different times.

Groups of neo-Nazis consider the Northwest home, and their message never seems to change with time.

(TV static) (bus engine rumbling) - Good morning.

- Good morning.

(gentle music) - There was a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when this neighborhood was a center for racist skinheads.

So to talk more about the history of hate crimes, we will have our next guest presenter, Dr.

Randall Blazak.

Randall.

- Thank you, Shyle.

In November 1988, there was this intersection of three stories.

The story of an Ethiopian immigrant, the rise of this new hate group, East Side White Pride and this white supremacist group, Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance.

And it all came together and ended in the death of Mulugeta Seraw.

It all happens right in this spot where I'm standing.

Mulugeta, who's trying to stop the fight, has his back to Mieske, and that's when he's struck by the baseball bat.

- [Reporter] The crime took place here on Southeast 31st, early Sunday morning.

Three Black men, all from Ethiopia, were sitting in this car, talking.

When one left to head for his apartment, another car pulled up.

Three young white men jumped out and began beating him.

Police say Mieske, Brewster and Strasser are members of East Side White Pride, the most violent group of skinheads in Portland.

- Just less than a year or two before his death, we'd offer exhibit 48.

- I saw it as a central event from which many things radiated out.

This individual death becomes an opportunity to talk about many aspects of Oregon history, of American history, of the white supremacist movement.

- There started becoming a large anti-racist movement in Portland after Mulugeta Seraw, and that is still here today.

(crowd cheering) (music) (soldiers chanting) (people chanting) - Hi.

- Nice to see you again.

It's always nice to see you.

- Do you know about this book?

It's interviews with people who were in the streets fighting against the neo-Nazi skinheads.

Look at you.

- Wow.

See that?

Thank you very much.

That's unexpected, yeah.

(laughs) - Wow.

Mulugeta was a young man who started out on a farm in Ethiopia who went through a terrible time in the civil wars and came here to better himself, to learn, to participate in life in a free and happy way.

- Yeah.

(speaking in Ethiopian language) - And Mulugeta did help, you know, cooking.

- He said he was a good cook.

- Oh, yeah, he was a good cook.

Thank you, nice to see you again.

(somber music) - [Terry] Portland was a city with a small town feel.

There was a lot of blue collar workers that worked in the cities.

The major activity in Portland was on the south side of Burnside.

- [Jason] Portland in the '80s was definitely grimy and gritty.

- [Tom] It was gritty, but it was fun.

You know, it was old Portland.

- [Jason] Downtown was very vibrant.

- [China] It was a good vibe, it was just much sleepier.

- I started going to Portland more for a couple of things.

One would be skateboarding.

- Skating down on the waterfront or in Paranoid Park or Four Courts.

(punk music) - Paranoid Park was one of the places that we used to hang out at, and that's just like down the street from the Galleria.

- The Galleria was fun.

I remember getting chased out by some ladies that thought we were smoking weed in there, and they didn't know the difference between a clove cigarette and marijuana.

(laughs) - [China] Kids are looking for a place to hang out.

- And I'd go to the square, then I'd go here, then I'd go there, until I found my people.

And then I'm like, "Hey, there you are!"

And then we'd start hanging out.

I moved out when I think I was 16.

I would stay at friends' houses.

We found abandoned buildings.

Slept in a park a few times.

You know, not getting along with my parents.

But in Hillsboro, I just didn't fit in.

And I'd go to school, I was getting bullied left and right, versus I go down to Portland and I've got dozens and dozens of friends and now I've got like some community.

- I've actually been in this home school, religious home school, but I kept running away.

So I was kind of escaping that.

- Living in the suburbs, it was somewhere that I just didn't want to be in a lot of ways and didn't feel comfortable.

I was always in trouble and looking for something else.

And so yeah, every chance we got, we were like, let's catch the bus and go in and just get lost.

(upbeat punk music) - [China] It really drew me in, 'cause it was, like, all kinds of different kids there.

- [Tom] You had the punks, you had the goths, you had the skaters.

- [China] There were rocker kids.

- At some point, we started noticing the skins, and a lot of those guys were Nazis.

- [China] There was a lot of tension.

It was dangerous.

It was dangerous there.

- Hell yeah, there's at least a dozen fights a day.

- Sometimes people come down here looking for trouble, and if they want to look for it, it's probably down here.

- [China] And, you know, people had drug addictions.

- Everybody gets high, dude.

- And I remember hearing, like, people saying the N-word, and he was like, "Not you, your nose isn't big."

And I remember, to be honest, I remember like, "Yeah."

And then I'm like, "Wait, who's he talking about?"

Like, "What?"

I got so angry when I kind of, like, realized, you're talking on my dad, my family, and, like, I'd always been angry, but the pieces started to fall into place why I was angry, what I was angry about.

- [Jason] I felt like we were trying to decolonize our lives.

We were trying to find something that wasn't this mainstream aesthetic or reality, and finding punk, that was the place.

That was the place we wanted to be.

Probably the first local punk band I saw was Poison Idea.

It was life-changing.

I was like, "Ah, this is what I've been looking for."

(music) - About all you guys who start something, but you can't finish it.

- I think I started listening to punk rock music after my cousin turned me on to it.

Gave me a mixtape with a bunch of punk music, and I was like, "Wow, this is cool."

(music) ♪ In my dream of death, you were there, the perfect crime ♪ ♪ Take my final breath, noose pulls tight, a perfect fit ♪ ♪ Swallow me with your mistrust ♪ ♪ There's a monster in my mirror ♪ ♪ Drag me through hell and misery, but I smash that mirror ♪ ♪ (screams) ♪ We get really rowdy, let off steam there, jumping off the stage, getting in the pit, and just having, really, just a good time.

- There was like Napalm Beach, The Wipers, Dead Moon.

(music) - The Obituaries with Monica Nelson.

(music) - And it was just kind of like a raw, real sound.

It just matched my vibe that I was feeling as a young woman.

(crowd shouting) - A lot of skinheads started popping into the punk clubs.

And if it was an aggressive punk show, there was gonna be a mosh pit.

And you would generally see skinheads at those shows.

- I think what made neo-Nazis target the punk scene was the aggression.

It was still largely young, white, angry men, so the constituency was right.

- I didn't think Hitler was cool.

I'd never been taught that in my life, but I know that these kids did seem to think that he was cool.

- My grandfather fought in the Battle of the Bulge, 10th Armored Division, like I knew Nazis were bad, so I wasn't trying to hang out with any Nazis.

- It was weird because, you know, these were all people that were in the scene.

Many of us knew each other well, so, you know, you'd go to a show and you'd see all the people you knew, people that we went to night school with or you know, you skated with, and one day you were all friends, and the next day you were like, what is happening?

- [Vocalist] Put your braces together and your boots on your feet and give me some of that old moon stomping!

- [Terry] The whole skinhead movement came out of the UK.

- [Jason] The skinhead culture came from Jamaican immigrants, mixing with working class English kids.

- [Tom] Skinhead, like, literally grew out of Black culture.

It wouldn't even exist without reggae music.

- [Jason] It definitely took a working class vibe, thus the style of dress, but also the Jamaican immigrants brought their own dignified influence to it.

- You know, that was in the '60s and then later in the '70s, you know, the punk and the Oi and all that stuff started kind of coming into it.

- [Terry] They liked punk and ska.

- Most of the girls had bangs.

And the girls pretty much wore what the guys did.

They might have a kilt.

- It was really, I think, then, in the '70s, when the first Nazi skinheads started appearing.

- [Terry] Because all of a sudden, there was a fraction of the skinheads that became neo-Nazis.

- I wear these boots because they're comfortable, and if someone's gonna hurt me, I'm gonna hurt them twice as bad when I kick 'em with these.

- Nothing about 'em was skinheads.

They were basically like heavy metal dudes that shaved their heads, but we would never give 'em the respect of calling 'em skinhead, because they weren't.

They stole that.

So, you know, we just called them boneheads.

- When I first became aware of it, it was probably in April of 1988.

I was watching a public affairs program on Channel 2 called Town Hall.

- How would you characterize racism in Oregon?

- I'd say it's definitely a case of lack of cultural or racial diversity.

There are not a lot of minorities in this state.

- So the only total solution to racial problems is total geographic separation.

Any other way will never work.

- You guys can laugh all you want about it, but complete separation is the only way.

- I just thought, "Who in the world is this?"

And I decided to figure out who they were and called the people at Town Hall and they were able to put me in touch with one of the members of the group, which was called Preservation of the White Aryan Race.

People were pretty shocked, definitely, by the article, and in part, that's because photographer Lisa Stone took just really striking photographs.

My impression of them was that they didn't see much of a future for themselves, and they were angry about that.

And they were looking for somebody to blame.

But they were all very young, 18, 19, if that.

And so, you know, they were also very naive.

They believed, of course, that minorities and Jews were the ones that were responsible for the situations that they found themselves in.

And the answer was that white people should get together and reassert themselves.

- [Metzger] There's a lot of similarities ... - [Film narrator] This is Tom Metzger, a Klan organizer who avoids cross burnings in favor of recruiting meetings like this one in Long Beach, California.

- [Metzger] This is the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

- I think the first thing to know about Tom Metzger is his long history in various aspects of the racist movement.

- He was, you know, kind of a crafty guy, but he came across as more folksy.

He started a number of his own organizations, the final version being the White Aryan Resistance.

And his son, John, shared his beliefs and was sort of the president of the youth arm.

He published a newspaper.

- He had a very important niche in the movement through his Race and Reason TV shows.

- What are skinheads?

- You're looking at 'em.

- You're looking at 'em.

- You're looking at 'em.

- They call you Nazis all the time and you're terrible racists and all that.

- Yeah.

- What do you say to that?

- Sieg heil to that.

(Metzger laughing) - Because he was using the media, that was one of the things that brought him to the attention of these national talk shows.

- Meet the man who has already been broadcasting his message of white supremacy, Tom Metzger, Former Grand Dragon of the KKK, head of the White Aryan Resistance and host of the Race and Reason cable program.

- Our guests that you'll meet today are truly hate-filled.

We're fighting a civil war between our own people.

Racially conscious white people need to preserve their heritage and culture.

- They had enormous audiences.

They were the greatest showcases for the skinheads.

- The 20 million people who are watching this show today, many of them were not aware that this is even going on.

- [Elinor] And they were violent.

(crowd shouting) - That kind of stuff hadn't been on national television before.

- You could see a direct correlation with when those talk shows were having the Nazis on, you started seeing more of them.

- [Terry] There was tension in the city.

There was tension in the clubs because of these skinheads.

- Late '87 and '88, there were full-on white supremacist skinheads at shows.

Everyone thought they were idiots, but for the most part, nobody said anything 'cause you'd get your teeth kicked in.

- The question really is, where did these skinheads pick this stuff up?

And I really do think that some of this stuff came up almost organically within that weird hardcore music scene.

- We started seeing a lot more skinheads coming into the store.

They were asking for bands out there around the world that were professing the message of Adolf Hitler.

- Was this homegrown hate or did it come from outside?

And it's a little bit of both.

- It's because we're seeing a new movement happening in this whole white supremacy, neo-Nazi skinhead movement nationwide, and that is these young men are joining forces with some of the old line white supremacy groups.

- I think a great deal of the initiative came from these individuals themselves.

- We're just people who wanna stick up for white rights and white power and pretty much what we stand for is our race.

- You know, some of them are just in it just for the lifestyle and just for the action and the excitement.

- And at the same time a real attraction to Nazi, white supremacist ideology.

That's what seemed to unite them.

That's what formed their bands of brotherhood.

That's what they believed in.

- It is connected.

It's not separate incidents.

It's not like suddenly racism just popped out of nowhere, it's always been there, sometimes below the surface, but it's always there for us that feel it.

- [Eric] Terrible things happened.

People of color just walking down the streets of Portland, physically assaulted.

- Was at the old Pine Street.

Some guy comes up trying to recruit me.

Are you down for your cause?

You down for your race?

And he spun around and cut me across the nose and got me in the cheekbone.

And I was like, "What is happening?

"What are you doing?"

And, "You said you're a N-word lover, you're a Jew lover."

And then sure enough, there was probably 10 to 12 of them.

They were just, all of a sudden, they were on me.

- So there was a show and that was at Pine Street.

And I went in and right away there was just like a lot of skinhead, there was that energy.

It was so thick you could cut it.

But at one point, the show just got like out of hand.

And so there was like a mob of skinheads out in the front and they were like chanting, "Send the N-word out."

And they were talking about me.

And so there's a group of people that were like, "We gotta get you out."

So I got into the car.

These guys are out there chanting.

They realize I'm in the car.

They had bats.

They broke out the two back windows.

The guy in the front driving, he got punched and his car wouldn't start, right?

So they're like beating, like trying to get at me.

I wasn't touched, okay?

Finally the car started and we drove away and the guys' bodies are like flying off the car and we drove away.

We got, you know, we went across Burnside and we got away.

But I'm sure they would have killed me.

This is a week before they killed Mulugeta Seraw.

- [Elinor] East Side White Pride had had an uncharacteristically politically active day.

- [Elden] Dave Mazzella, who was a agent of John and Tom Metzger of the White Aryan Resistance, had been working with the East Side White Pride.

- They had gone downtown and had distributed some white power leaflets.

And that gives a slightly misleading sense of their state of mind because they were also drinking the whole time.

And some of them ended up at an apartment right around the corner from where Mulugeta Seraw lived.

Mulugeta's evening consisted of going out to a farewell party for another Ethiopian who was returning home.

- When the get-together ended, the skinheads left the apartment, and Mulugeta Seraw had been at a party with some of his friends, and they were in front of where Mulugeta lived.

- It was a difficult narrative to develop because there were so many people involved.

There were three couples in the skinhead car, each with different stories about what had happened.

- There's some conflicting testimony.

The version I'm gonna give you is what I believe we proved to the jury, which was that Kyle Brewster looked up the street and said, "There's some," and he used the N-word, "Let's go fuck 'em up."

They got in the car.

There was three skinheads and their girlfriends.

The car was driven so that it was nose-to-nose with the car of the Ethiopians.

Racial epithets came out of the car.

Brewster, Strasser and Mieske got out of the car, Mieske with the baseball bat.

Mayhem ensued and Mulugeta Seraw was brutally murdered by Mieske with the baseball bat.

According to the testimony in the trial, Mieske actually picked the baseball bat up over his head like he was chopping wood and came down at least two times on Mulugeta's head, fatally fracturing his skull.

- When we left, I looked at him after, after he'd been kicked a couple times, after, you know, he got hit.

And I looked back down at him before we left, and he was still breathing.

So I said, I figure, well, okay.

Because I had a feeling, you know, we kind of beat this guy up a little too much.

But everything just happened so fast, you know?

And when we left, I was like, I told everybody, "God, I hope he don't die."

They said, "No, he ain't gonna die."

And about the next afternoon, I was watching football, and I heard he died.

And then it's, like, you know, public outrage.

(phone ringing) (somber music) (relative sobbing) (music) (people chattering) - The first reports were shocked and horrified.

There was disbelief that such a thing could happen in Portland.

- It happened so close to the store.

It was within a half a mile from the store.

I think people started looking over their shoulder a little bit more.

When death was involved, it really brought an issue to the forefront.

That issue being neo-Nazism, a lot of the people that lived in Portland had no idea that this scene was even going on.

- Portland has always taken the view, at least during my lifetime here, that we're this liberal bastion of civility.

It's kind of a fiction.

After Mulugeta Seraw was murdered, pretty promptly the Portland police arrested Brewster and Mieske and Strasser.

They never went to trial, they pled guilty.

- [Elinor] Ken Mieske was a well-known figure in the Portland counterculture.

- Ken Mieske was, in fact, this person known as Ken Death who had been in a film made by Gus Van Sant called "Ken Death Gets Out of Jail."

And that seemed pretty extraordinarily strange.

- Kyle Brewster was the homecoming king of Grant High School and was somebody who I didn't know personally, I didn't know his family at the time, but I did know people who knew him.

So it was a neighborhood feeling.

I actually remember very vividly that when Strasser got arrested, everybody was agog.

So, it's right here, these skinheads are right here.

- A new line had been crossed that what we had been experiencing on the margins, this terrorizing of us by neo-Nazis, had now moved into the mainstream.

- It was like after Mulugeta Seraw when I was just like, whoa, you know, whoa, we can't, yeah, we gotta do something.

- They're not gonna terrorize us.

And I think that that was a shift where we got like, we're about to get organized and start looking for them.

(punk music) The SHARPs were specifically anti-racist.

- The SHARP means Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice.

I think there might've been probably close to a dozen when I kind of was like, yeah, I'm ready to do it.

I remember people talking about getting the meetings together and I heard someone say "A.R.A."

Anti-Racist Action grew to be a nationwide and even international grouping of anti-racist activists.

A.R.A.

and SHARP were working together in the music scene to confront and combat the white supremacists.

- Like we'd always fight side by side, you know, when we'd go for the Nazis.

(punk music) - Shortly after that first A.R.A grouping, the next show we decided we're gonna go, we're gonna be there.

We talked to the club and we got the club to agree to not allow any of the white supremacists in.

We were out front and definitely kept a lot away from the show.

And that happened for about three shows in a row that they would show up and there'd be confrontations.

And after those three shows, they didn't show up much.

It was interesting how effective it was.

- I came up in the punk scene thinking that the way you dealt with neo-Nazis was they were physically violent, so you be physically violent.

And that was that, right?

I didn't realize that it was also an opportunity to build community.

So the Coalition for Human Dignity worked with lots of different communities, including the punk community, the gay and lesbian community.

We did research, looking through newspapers, right, and clips, subscribing to hate group publications, and attending hate group meetings.

And we made that research available to everyone.

We did lots of interviews with the media.

- The murder proved to be a boost for neo-Nazi skinhead activity in Portland and led to the forming of the Coalition for Human Dignity.

Today that group released a report on white supremacists in Oregon.

- So that citizens can be empowered, you must first know your enemy before you can defeat him or before you can adequately deal with him.

- CHD was doing what the government and leaders in civil society refused to do, which was to actually protect and stand by their actual communities and the most vulnerable.

- Oh boy, once I joined to the SHARPs, life got really fun 'cause I have my adrenaline, like I like to fight.

I liked the adrenaline of like, we're gonna go get, like, the build up, like we all gather up and they're like, they're over there and then going and just that you're having like the fear and the adrenaline and but the excitement and then running in and just let's go, you know?

But also then I had this different type of community where we're hanging out all the time and it was even more tight knit.

If you knew somebody was in trouble, we were dropping everything we could to get there.

- Then we were driving and we saw some skinheads at this gas station on Burnside.

And I was like, "Stop, let me out."

So I got out and I went up to these guys.

And so what happened, and I was like, "Are you White Pride?"

"Yup."

And I slapped him.

"Are you White Pride?"

"Yup."

Slapped him.

"Are you White Pride?"

Slapped him.

And then I got back in the van.

They didn't do, they didn't respond and like drove off.

- CHD was getting intel and then people would show up where they worked and we'd get them fired.

We'd find out where they lived and we'd get them evicted from their apartments.

- But I think that was an important tactic and it was also a tactic that tried to balance with the physical violence that was happening.

There was definitely a period where the intensity got really thick.

There would often be large battles out in the streets, and occasionally homes would be attacked.

Guns were often seen and fortunately not often used.

- It was very much gang warfare.

I don't know any other way to sugarcoat it.

- And then as you grow up, like how do you function?

Like I think I couldn't even, I think I couldn't go to school because I'd been so busy, like, fighting.

- It changed my life.

I don't sit with my back to the door.

- There were definitely times I wasn't ready for it, especially when I was much younger.

I had to grow up a lot.

- Very strange trend since the murder of Mulugeta Seraw.

In many communities, it has been shown that incidents will drop off after this kind of a shocking murder, but something different happened in this case, and there actually was an increase in the number of racial harassment incidents that you'd seen.

Is that true?

- Some of the increases are because of our ability to record them better, but there definitely is an increase of hate crimes in the Northwest, as there is around the country.

- After Mieske and Brewster were arrested, Metzger picked up their cause.

He had a telephone number you could dial and then get your racial message of the day kind of a thing.

(phone ringing) - He said on one of those messages that the skinheads had done a civic duty by what they did to Mulugeta Seraw.

- Mulugeta Seraw's uncle filed the civil suit in Multnomah County Circuit Court on behalf of the Seraw family.

In the trial itself, Mulugeta Seraw was, his family was represented by Morris Dees.

- Skinheads are deadlier today than they've ever been.

- [Reporter] Dees, Founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, concentrates his efforts on civil rights issues and has won similar cases against the Ku Klux Klan.

- [Jim] And then a Portland attorney, Elden Rosenthal, and they were both excellent attorneys.

- I became a lawyer because I wanted to participate in maintaining the rule of law, and the reason that I felt that way in part was because of my family's history.

And we're fortunate to have photographs here on both my mother's side and my father's side.

In my family, the Holocaust was a topic that was often discussed.

My mother's parents left Russia just before World War I to get away from virulent and often fatal anti-Semitism.

This is my dad here as a kid, and that my dad and his family got out of Germany in the late 1930s just before World War II broke out.

And I thought to myself, I became a lawyer because I wanted to make a difference, and this must be the reason I became a lawyer, because I get a chance now to not only stop some neo-Nazis, but in a way to get back a little bit at these forces that had so ruptured my family.

And Morris and I just hit it off right away.

There wasn't any question about it.

Then he asked me to be co-counsel.

It's still incredible when I think about it.

The presiding judge in Multnomah County was Don Londer.

It was part of his job to rule on pretrial motions.

Metzger found out that Londer was Jewish.

That really got under Metzger's skin.

He didn't think he could get a fair shake from a Jewish judge.

And then Londer turned to his docket clerk and said, who is the next available judge?

She rummaged through some papers and said, "Well, Ancer Haggerty."

Well, I had known Ancer Haggerty during my entire career, and he was the only Black trial judge in Oregon at the time.

- Seraw versus Metzger, et al.

- [Elden] We put on all this evidence of this hatred that the Metzgers put out about African-Americans.

- John Metzger, are you ready to proceed?

- Yes.

- And Mr.

Metzger, are you ready to say it?

- Yes, your honor.

(music) - A classic confrontation between free speech and civil rights may be in the works in a Portland courtroom this month.

Tom Metzger and his son John, avowed white supremacists, are being sued in connection with the murder of an Ethiopian man in Portland in 1988.

Did the Metzgers' directives for violence caused the murder of Mulugeta Seraw?

Were the Metzgers' actions protected by the First Amendment right of free speech?

It's important to remember that this is a civil, not a criminal action.

However, as our background report indicates, what the Metzgers are, what they believe, what they represent, is at the heart of the trial.

- [Reporter] On the opening day of the trial, skinheads, onlookers and Metzger supporters gathered outside the courtroom amid heavy security as police sought to prevent any acts of violence.

- I had 24/7 police bodyguard protection.

There were sharpshooters on the roof of the Multnomah County Courthouse.

There was a metal detector in front of the courtroom, which was a big deal at that time.

- It was crazy outside the courthouse during the trial.

- [Group] No Jews, no gays, no mongrel USA!

- This town was just on fire.

There were so many of us at the courthouse every day opposing teams.

- The so-called Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, or SHARP, have become Metzger rivals.

And they're closely watching his group's movement to the Northwest.

- They're trying to turn this into the so-called white states.

- [Reporter] Once inside, observers faced further security measures before being seated to watch opening arguments led by Morris Dees, representing the Seraw estate.

- So he set about training these young skinheads to go out and do violence.

- [Reporter] As defendants in the case, the Metzgers have chosen the unusual tactic of being their own attorneys.

- They said they could not find anybody who was willing to represent them.

And I don't know how hard they really tried.

The Metzgers, I think, knew that this was gonna get extensive media coverage.

- The fourth affirmative... As a trial lawyer, you plan what exhibit number one is going to be.

This exhibit one is stapled together two documents.

an envelope and a letter.

I'd like you to look at the envelope first and tell us please who the letter was addressed to.

- Yes, this envelope is addressed to Ken Death.

- So this was a letter written by John Metzger addressed to the East Side White Pride and Dave Mazzella brought it with him to Portland when he came.

And it's a letter of introduction.

It starts off, "I wanted to drop a line "and let you know we would like to open up communication "with your group."

- "You'll get a feel of how we work when you meet Dave Mazzella and Mike Gagnon soon.

We work with any pro-white, anti-drug, white group as long as they do not talk.

Racial Regards, John Metzger."

- Can I show that exhibit to the jury, just quickly, your honor.

- You may, you can pass to 'em as well.

- Thank you, your honor.

So we used this exhibit to begin the process of educating the jury as to the relationship between the Metzgers and what happened in Portland.

- Raise your right hand.

You solemnly swear that the testimony you're about to give will be the whole truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God.

- Yes, I do.

- Please be seated.

State your full name and spell your last name.

- Full name is Alan David Mazzella.

- In November 1988, Dave, when Mr.

Seraw was killed, were you the vice president of the WAR's youth division?

- Yes, I was.

- In that capacity, did Tom and John Metzger instruct you to teach skinhead recruits to commit violent acts against Blacks and Jews and other minorities?

- Yes, he did.

- Did these instructions include the commission of physical violence?

- Yes, they did.

Were you sent to Portland by Tom and John Metzger in October 1988 to organize East Side White Pride in the work of the group called POWAR or POWAR?

- Yes, I was.

- Now, David, while you were in Portland, did you teach and direct East Side White Pride members to commit violent acts against Blacks and other minorities in the Portland area?

- Yes, I did several times, as a matter of fact.

- Please be seated.

State your full name and spell your last for the court.

- [Elden] I would say for a non-lawyer, he did a pretty good job.

But he's not a lawyer.

- Thomas Metzger.

- The oddest thing that he did was when he took the witness stand to testify on his own behalf.

- Mr.

Metzger, do you train anyone in weapons, knives or baseball bat violence?

And the answer is no.

Mr.

Metzger, are your primary weapons ideas, newspapers and television production?

Yes.

- Well, he had multiple defenses.

I mean, the first defense was, I was a thousand miles away, I had nothing to do with it, my son had nothing to do with it, Dave Mazzella is lying through his teeth.

- I've got a little problem, and had a little problem during the trial, with Dave Mazzella, who was the primary witness.

I believe he committed perjury during the trial.

- I didn't feel right about everything I've done in my life.

And I did a lot of bad things, a lot of evil things.

And I wanted to come clean.

- And as it turned out, he had in fact moved to Southern Oregon and started up another racist skinhead organization in Medford before the trial.

- Dave Mazzella was of that element and it was worrisome to us, but there's no other way to break into a criminal conspiracy than to have one of the conspirators decide to tell what happened.

- There is no meeting of the minds in this case between Dave Mazzella and Tom Metzger and John Metzger.

Now if you could show that to me, the reason I have no problem talking to you is because I'm telling you the truth.

- His second defense was, this was just a fight between some white guys and some Black guys.

There was nothing premeditated about it, and somebody happened to die, too bad.

- So a fight broke out, same kind of a fight that could happen to young people anyplace, your kids.

90% of the time it has nothing to do with race.

That night, if those people in the car had been white, my belief, it would have been just as big a fight.

- You know, a brawl that got out of hand is mutual fighting.

That is not what happened here.

These skinheads saw Mulugeta Seraw, they saw the other two Ethiopian men, they were looking for trouble, they instigated it, they had a weapon.

Mulugeta Seraw did not have a weapon.

He didn't start a fight.

- Mr.

Metzger, the plaintiffs yesterday went through very selectively many items in cartoons in your newspaper, do you believe everything you have published is protected by the First Amendment?

Yes, I do, or I wouldn't be publishing it.

- And his third defense was, I have the right under the First Amendment to say the things that I say and to believe the things that I believe.

- As a reporter, I was a little concerned about that, because what seemed to be happening was that you're putting somebody on trial for their political beliefs.

- Here was a defendant, here's Metzger, whose life is really built on newspapers and radio broadcasts and words.

- The answer that Dees presented early on was, it's not just the beliefs, there were actions taken.

Tom Metzger sent Dave Mazzella to Portland to organize these skinheads for them to do just the very thing they did.

- The right of free speech is not absolute.

It does not allow a person to prepare a group for violent action and spur it on to such action in the immediate or near future.

- We felt it was important in presenting our case to let the jury know a little bit about Mulugeta.

And was Mulugeta Seraw one of your sons?

(translator translating) - Yes.

And we were able to bring his father to Portland to testify with a translator.

Is there anything that you would like to tell this court and jury about your son?

(Seraw Tekuneh speaking in Ethiopian language) - What I want to convey is that all my hope was on my son because I was counting on him that he would come here, benefit from the educational system, become a professional, to come back home and pursue a professional career and help me and help my kids.

- We presented a mountain of evidence to the jury, supporting Mazzella's inside testimony about what was going on.

- And the baseball bat that was swung, that hit Mulugeta Seraw in the head, started in Fallbrook, California.

- And by the end of the trial, there really was no question in my mind that we were going to win.

The only question was what the amount of money would be.

- A jury in Portland, Oregon has sent a message to the leader of a white supremacist group.

You pay for inciting racial violence.

The jury has ordered Tom Metzger, his son and their White Aryan Resistance group, to pay $12.5 million to the family of a Black man murdered by neo-Nazi skinheads.

- It was an 11 to 1 verdict and they basically gave us the amount of money we asked for, which was $12.5 million.

That's a lot of money today, but I'll tell you back in 1990, that was a hell of a lot of money.

- I do believe it was just, but it is also kind of a frontier law kind of thing that there's a bad guy in town and the town kind of rises up and drives him out of town.

- I still don't think that there's a winning to this.

It's an ongoing.

- I don't think stopping Metzger stopped anything.

- The white racist movement, the white separatist movement will not be stopped in the puny town of Portland.

We're too deep, we're embedded now, don't you understand?

We're in your colleges, we're in your armies, we're in your police forces.

Stopping Tom Metzger is not gonna change what's gonna happen in this country now.

I just did my little bit along the way.

Like your great salmon.

I've got up there and laid the eggs and now if I die, no problem.

- It wasn't stopped.

It grew and it is growing.

- White revolution!

- What's the solution?

- White revolution!

- These are members of a white supremacist group called the American Front, which moved its national headquarters to Portland last year.

- A rally today by right-wing extremists has Portland in a state of emergency.

Members of the so-called Proud Boys lined up for a picture, chanting "Back the Blue" while doing a white power salute.

- They are so close to power now.

- Which is why our civic institutions need to be strong.

It's why the rule of law needs to be sustained.

And it's why the task of combating racism and sexism is every generation's obligation and duty.

(somber music) - The far-right, the extreme right that used to be underground has been saying for 40 years that we need to get mainstream.

(upbeat music) Crowd: No hate, no fear.

- We set the bar for what happens here in Portland.

I mean, we really brought it.

- I feel really good about what we did.

We changed the face of the city.

(crowd chanting) - White nationalism, it's a reaction, not a revolution.

It's a reaction to the gains we have made as a society.

(people chattering) - Everyday democracy means showing up for your neighbor, whether we choose to be human beings, whether we choose to lead into the values that our parents, our churches, our synagogues, our mosques have raised us with kindness.

(congregants singing) Extending a hand to help someone up off the ground.

(kids chattering) Those are the things that we need to lean into.

Mulugeta Seraw is not just a story of death.

He is a story of how a community comes together and holds itself, even in the hardest times.

(orchestral music