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Kamilah Kashanie (KK): Welcome back to a new season of the StoryCorps Podcast from NPR. I’m Kamilah Kashanie.
For the next 8 weeks, we’ll be bringing you stories about living with different kinds of stigma…
Julie Sanders (JS): I have a handful of friends and that’s it. I’ve kept everyone else kind of back and I think that’s what people do when they have a deep secret that they don’t want anyone to know about.
Stigmas come from all sorts of places… maybe it’s something we’re born with… or maybe it comes from a long-held regret… or a mistake that can’t be fixed…
JS: My story and my past is very shocking, and I don’t expect everyone to accept it either.
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Carrying a burden of any kind can be deeply personal… and it’s something we’ve all felt it to a degree…
…in this episode… we’re leaning into something that’s always been in the fabric of our country… but lately… it’s been more and more visible:
The belief that white people are superior to those of other races… and how some people are turning to violence to maintain white supremacy…
And talking about stuff like this isn’t always easy…
JS: I was super nervous… you know, could I cancel? Reschedule? I’d been hanging on to that secret for 25 years, and once it’s out there, it’s out there.
That’s Julie Sanders. She was involved in a violent, racist attack one night when she was a teenager…
We first aired Julie’s story on NPR a decade ago… and people had wildly different reactions…
A lot of listeners said she didn’t deserve forgiveness… because she signed her own fate that night…
But, surprisingly, the majority thought that it took courage for Julie to own up to her past…and it inspired many of them to do the same…
JS: A lot of people did reach out and felt like they could talk about some things that had happened to them, things that had shamed them in the past.
You know, I’d like to think it’s just that somebody felt like they weren’t going to be judged by me.
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Julie felt like she needed to share her story to try and prevent others from going down the path she did…
…a path that many find themselves on when they’re young…
Michele Lefkowith (ML): You know, I come from a very traumatic childhood. There was abuse and violence happening in my household.
GT: I had a rough childhood. But it was all behind doors. And I never really felt like I fit in anywhere.
JS: I was on a search for people who wanted me around. My parents didn’t. And, there was nothing about me that felt special.
KK: In this episode, we’ll hear from three women in Oregon… In the late 80s, they were all trying to find a place they belonged…
We’ll start with Michele Lefkowith…
She was born and raised in Oregon, in a working class family…
She grew up in the projects… and her childhood was violent…
Michele Lefkowith (ML): I was so in conflict all the time. And actually a blessing and a curse, I learned how to be a pretty good scrapper back then.
KK: Michelle learned how to fight for herself… which would be helpful for her later… when she started to fight for others…
In her 20s, she got married and had two daughters…
She started working as a parking enforcement officer in Eugene, Oregon… to take care of them…
One day… during her lunch break… she went to an event to hear people speak about the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
She had on her uniform – so she kinda looked like a cop…and it almost stopped her from meeting someone who would change her life…
ML: Tell me about the scene when we first met.
Eric Ward (EW): I had read this really radical poem because I was going to tell Eugene what was what. And then all of a sudden… I see someone in uniform…
KK: That’s Eric Ward… back then he was a college student…
EW: All of my interactions with law enforcement, to that point, particularly in Oregon, had not been, you know, good ones. They’d been racial profiling. And so I’m immediately, like, on alert. But you didn’t give me a hard time. I remember you shouting out, ‘Hey, I really loved your poem. You really moved me.’
KK: But they didn’t connect again until Michele faced a threat to her children…
EW: You called me one day and you told me the most terrifying story.
ML: Yeah. I still was very protective of my daughters, so I would take them to school. I never let them walk to school during that period of time. One day I went to pick them up and I remember getting there early and I looked out on the playground and there was like this six foot three, 260 pound guy in a black bomber jacket playing basketball. He had the typical kind of uniform that a lot of the Nazis that we were seeing around. And so I immediately went in to the principal and said, ‘This guy needs to get off. Do you know what he is?’ And the principal’s like, ‘He’s not really hurting anything.’
And it was then that I got my daughters in the truck and I said, ‘Get down on the floorboard’, followed the guy home. And believe you me, I was nervous. I didn’t know, you know, what I was doing. I was just acting on impulse. And it turns out he lived one block from my house with five other Nazis. And when they rolled down their mini blinds, they all had swastikas on the mini blinds.
Talking to some other neighbors, apparently, they’d had cross burnings there and they had these white power parties. And after that, I started to pay attention, and… what I saw was really scary.
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KK: A murder in Portland, not far from Michele, kicked off what she would be was facing in her neighborhood in the early 90s…
ML: After Mulugetta Seraw’s murder in 1988, we saw an abundance of these Nazi skinheads in all of our towns. There was no place to feel safe.
KK: One of the most notorious white supremacist gangs in Portland was called East Side White Pride.
JS: So when I met these friends, it didn’t matter if I was pretty or funny. None of that mattered. They liked me because I was white.
KK: That’s Julie Sanders again… she was 16 when she first started hanging out with skinheads from East Side White Pride.
JS: Every weekend, we drank and then drove around, looking for a fight. And on nights they didn’t have anyone to beat up, I was the target — even being almost choked to death by my boyfriend.
KK: Julie was dating one of the leaders at the time… a guy named Ken Mieske– he was known around town as “Ken Death.” He had a Nazi shrine in his bedroom and he had a reputation for having an explosive temper.
…One night in 1988…Julie piled into a car with Ken and some other people. And something went down as they were driving around the city…
JS: And in the car was three Black guys. And a fight erupted. My boyfriend grabbed the bat.
KK: Ken brutally attacked one of the men in the car…Mulugeta Seraw, a student at Portland Community College. The fight happened just steps from his apartment and he died from his injuries.
JS: He was born in Ethiopia and had a son. But we just saw Black.
KK: His son, Henock, was actually adopted by a lawyer named James McElroy who worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center…who was very involved in this case.
We reached out to James McElroy to ask if the family wanted to record a remembrance of Mulugeta… we didn’t hear back…
Ken Death eventually admitted to the killing. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison…
Mulugetta’s death sparked something in Michele – the “parking enforcement officer” we heard from earlier… She wanted to do something about the hate she was seeing in her community…
And her new friend Eric had a few ideas…
EW: I had just launched this project called Communities Against Hate. It was such a broad coalition of folks. We didn’t agree on everything. We weren’t trying to find agreement on everything. We just knew bigotry didn’t have a place.
I remember how nervous you were.
ML: Yeah, here I was all of a sudden, by the seat of my pants, reaching out to youth, talking to cops. There was another defining moment where neo-Nazi skinheads came in the middle of the night and shot up our synagogue.
KK: No one was killed in this hate crime…
But if you’ve ever seen a Marvel movie… this would be the inciting incident in her superhero origin story….
ML: And I think that was the turning point for the rage that I felt.The stress of having live your life in a totally different way, and be cautious, and watch your back, and do a bomb sweep of your car. And again, a lot of it was just based on this was the right thing for me to do.
KK: So she went undercover to infiltrate white supremacist groups… and take them down from the inside…
ML: I used to get a thrill out of being in the bushes with a high powered camera and taking down license plates. That’s one of the first kind of things that I did.
EW: We weren’t the only two investigating these meetings. But you were a woman. You were Jewish. I was Black. It was different. So how did you interact with skinheads?
ML: I went to the white supremacist meetings once a month. And, you know, was there specifically to know who was there, what was being said. And just to gather human intelligence.
I don’t know if I just have a knack to be able to talk a certain way that attracts these people. But, you know, I managed to get them to open up to me. Traditionally it worked. I mean, I got a lot of intel by letting them go full reign on what their beliefs were. You know, just being myself and not trying to be judgmental. It built a level of trust, but it took a long time.
KK: And because she was building trust with these young racist skinheads…sometimes they actually chose to leave their gangs behind.
ML: There was a young girl. She was 14 years old. She was kicked out of her house and homeless. And she used to go to the punk rock shows. And these guys would prey upon these young punkers. You know, they offered her a place to stay, cigarettes to smoke, beer to drink. And they didn’t start propagandizing her or indoctrinating her into an ideology until she felt safe and powerful hanging out with these guys. But I think it took her a night out when these big, burly guys she was with took out a knife pick and attacked this young Latino kid. There was a part of her that saw this as ‘This isn’t quite exactly what I want to be doing.’
KK: One of the main hangout spots for skinheads was punk rock and ska shows…
And this is where Michele met “G” Taylor… an anti-racist skinhead…
Yeah, I know that sounds confusing… but there were kids from the punk scene who fought back against neo-Nazis… literally… with their fists…
GT: At that time, we were fighting more and more and more. So it was really good when I finally met you, Michele, because the majority of people that I was around were punks and skins, and very alternative people. And then in comes this lady that did not look like she belonged around us. And I remember just being a little baffled, like, why is this person here? I remember thinking, I don’t know if this person knows what they’re getting into, so this could be a problem.
ML: Well, I didn’t know. [Laughs]
GT: Because.
ML: Till it was too late.
I was a middle-aged woman coming into this scene, but at very first sight, I felt like I was with my people.
KK: But G still worried about Michele’s safety… because she was putting her neck on the line by dismantling racist skinheads groups… and building bridges with the anti-racist ones…
ML: With the fascist neo-Nazi skinheads. I realized in a guttural sense what kind of a threat they pose to my community, my kids. But there was another subculture of what were called “Sharp Skins”.
KK: G was just one of many “Sharp Skins” – or the “Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice” – and they actively opposed white hate groups…
And while Sharp Skins looked and dressed a lot like the racist ones… and they had similar upbringings… Michele could feel a major difference…
ML: I felt a connection to them. They come from a working class ethic. You know, they want to get the bad guy, which I really related to.
KK: After the break, G shares how Michele helped her stop the bad guys… a different way…
Stay with us.
MIDROLL (:30)
XPROMO (:15)
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KK: Before the break, Michele was telling us her badass story of infiltrating white supremacist groups thirty years ago…
Along the way, she met other people that were fighting to keep Nazis out of Oregon towns… like the Sharp Skins…
Michele had a special bond with one Sharp skinhead who she knew as “Geni” [Jenny] back in the early 90s… Geni goes by “G” Taylor today…
Here’s her story…
GT: I had a father that was an intellectual, but also a racist. And it wasn’t until I had moved to Eugene to go to college that I started living a life outside of these people that had controlled me for so long. And I met these people and like, listen to this music that was just… it was like finding your soul, finally. You have a family you’re born with. And then you have the family you’re meant to be with. And they were the family that I was meant to be with. It was… I’m getting a little emotional. They liked me and they cared about me. And I did them too.
KK: At this point, G’s story has some parallels to Julie’s at the top of the episode… but where they go in opposite directions… is in who they hung out with… and how they carried themselves…
G was a fighter… and she’d throwdown with neo-Nazis… directly in the street…
She was tough… and she looked the part…
It came with a high cost socially… but G always remembered what… and who… she was fighting for…
GT: I was going up in an elevator and I was with a friend of mine. He was also a punk. And on his flight jacket, he had a patch that was an anti-Nazi patch, but it had the swastika on it. There’s this old gentleman on the elevator with us, and he saw that patch and he looked at my friend and he said, ‘Are you a Nazi? What is this?’ And he was really upset. And my friend was like, ‘No, no, that’s completely the opposite of what I’m for.’ And we were kind of shocked because we were scary looking people and we were used to people not wanting to talk to us. And he just looked at us and he pulled up his sleeve and he had the number tattoo on his forearm. And that really made me realize that when we’re fighting racism, like whether it’s me just going up against a Nazi skinhead or something like that, it’s not just for my friends. It’s for people… like that gentleman.
KK: G never shied away from a fight with racists…
But because of her training, Michele was there to show G how much farther anti-racist work could go…
GT: I got to know you better. I just remember really having an overwhelmingly amount of respect for you because you listened. And it was non-judgmental. It wasn’t like, ‘Well, why would you do that?’ You asked what was happening with me, like dealing with racist skinheads.
ML: You know, the folks that were in the scene. I look to them as family. They had my back. Their strategies may not have been the same as mine, but they were willing to be open to some of the ideas of undoing racism.
GT: I mean, I didn’t even realize that there were people that were doing things like what you did until I met you and then met Eric.
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KK: And G’s never forgotten the role Michele played in changing her life…
She got the chance to help honor her at an event celebrating Michele’s work…
G: I got asked to do the introduction speech for you. Here I am dressed as this little tiny skinhead girl standing in front of all of these, like civil rights activists and things, and I’m trying to introduce this person that is so important to me, like so pivotal in my life. And I said like one word, and then I burst into tears and I could not finish it. Eric Ward had to finish reading my speech for me. But I remember the first line. It was: ‘Michele Lefkowith is a tiger. And she will never step down. She will always fight for you. She will never let go.’
KK: Now back to Julie… you can’t help but wonder how different her life would have been if she’d had a different community to support her…
During her recording, she had a chance to leave a message to her younger self…
JS: I had really low self esteem so I would tell myself ‘I will protect you and I will love you and I will care for you.’ That to me is the most important thing, to let somebody know they’re loved and they’re smart and important.
KK:…and even though she left East Side White Pride behind a long time ago… it still hasn’t left her…
JS: After the murder, I ended up going to a girls reformatory. And I spent a lot of years just hiding from it even, you know, when it would creep up on me in the middle of the night.
It really didn’t seem like a reality until I hit 20 and had my own son. And I think that I certainly have raised my kids different. All three of my kids are confident, care about other people. You know, my sixteen year old protects a cross dresser at school. And when my kids do something like that, it really makes me feel like I am kind of changing that cycle.
But I just still feel like not a good person. And I don’t forgive myself.
KK: Michele helped make communities safer…
…and toward the end of her StoryCorps conversation… she looked back on her legacy…
ML: Yeah, I’m really proud. It’s not the end all to be all. And, you know, they get out of jail sometimes, eventually. But I put a lot of people away.
EW: I’m curious. Any disappointments?
ML: I guess my disappointments are more in the current day and age. There was one point in time when white nationalism was a fringe movement, but now there have been times in my retirement I felt like, ‘Wait, is this all for naught?’ And all that time that I work to try to convince a broad spectrum of our communities the danger, the threat, and… Oh. I don’t see things getting better. I’m scared.
EW: It’s not easy having to fake 30 years of courage, right?
ML: Well, everybody thought I was a badass.
WE: Yeah, well, you are.
ML: Yeah, we were.
WE: But we were scared. We were really scared by what we saw coming. But you kept pushing anyway. And I am still hopeful, as frightened as I am.
KK: That’s all for this episode of the StoryCorps podcast.
It was produced by Jarrod Sport, who is our senior producer, and edited by Jasmyn Morris – who’s consulting on this season. Our technical director is Jarrett Floyd, who also composed our theme song. Our lead producer is Eleanor Vassili. Our associate producer is Max Jungreis. Our fact-checker is Erica Anderson.
To see what music we used in the episode… go to StoryCorps.org… where you can also check out original artwork created for this season by artist Lyne Lucine
For the StoryCorps podcast, I’m Kamilah Kashanie. Catch you next week.
