ADL Releases Backgrounder On White Supremacist Kansas Jewish Community Shooter Frazier Glenn Miller

NEW YORK, April 14, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The shooter arrested in the killing of three individuals outside the Jewish institutions in Overland Park, Kansas is a white supremacist with a long history of promoting anti-Semitism and racism, according to a backgrounder released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

The suspect, identified by police as Frazier Cross, but who is also known as Frazier Glenn Miller (or simply Glenn Miller), is a white supremacist from southwest Missouri with a career in hatred and white supremacy that has spanned more than three decades.  In the early 1980s, Glenn Miller was one of the more notorious white supremacists in the U.S., but he eventually ran afoul of both the federal government and members of his own movement and has spent the last decade at the periphery of the white supremacist movement.

"The shooting at the Kansas Jewish community centers is a sad and tragic event which reminds us where the spread of anti-Semitism and racism can lead," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.  "We recently issued a report which indicated that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States had fallen precipitously over the past few years.  So the statistics are good, and then you wake up in the morning and three people are dead because someone believed them to be Jews."

ADL has reissued a security bulletin to synagogues and Jewish communal institutions across the United States urging them to review their security plans for the Passover holiday, which begins at sundown tonight.

Backgrounder: Frazier Glenn Miller

Originally from North Carolina, Frazier Glenn Miller began his career as a neo-Nazi in the mid-1970s, but soon switched to the Ku Klux Klan.  He was present at an infamous shooting of left-wing activists by white supremacists in Greensboro in 1979 that left five dead, but was never charged with a crime.

By 1980, Miller had formed his own Klan group, the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (later changed to the White Patriot Party), a large regional Klan group that drew notoriety for its paramilitary training exercises.  Members of the group committed several hate crimes against African-Americans during the decade, while its second-in-command was convicted of a plot to purchase stolen weapons, ostensibly to target a civil rights organization.  During this period, Miller was one of the more notorious white supremacists in the U.S.

The activities of Miller and his group eventually led to a federal court order prohibiting its paramilitary training.  Rather than obey the order, Miller went underground with several followers in 1987 after issuing a "Declaration of War" that called for the "blood of our enemies [to] flood the streets."  Federal agents soon arrested Miller hiding out in the Ozarks in Missouri on charges related to his "Declaration" and explosives violations. 

Miller eventually pleaded guilty to possession of a hand grenade and received a five-year sentence. He also agreed to testify against other prominent white supremacists in a sedition trial in Arkansas in 1988—this latter decision earned him the enmity of the majority of the white supremacist movement, which now considered him a traitor to the movement.

After getting out of prison in 1990, Miller moved to Iowa (later to Missouri) and became a truck driver.  Largely ostracized by white supremacists, he laid low until the end of the decade, when he self-published his autobiography (A White Man Speaks Out).  This marked a return to activism; by the early 2000s, Miller began purchasing advertising space in local newspapers in Missouri for racist and anti-Semitic screeds, followed by his own attempts to publish a "white-friendly" newspaper called The European-American. 

In 2004, Miller allied with fellow Missouri white supremacist Alex Linder to produce a more grandiose white supremacist newspaper that they dubbed The Aryan Alternative.  Only a couple of issues were published, but they were printed in large numbers, which were distributed by various white supremacists for years.  Miller also tried running for office, receiving only two votes in his 2010 attempt at a U.S. Senate seat in Missouri.

Throughout the 2000s, Miller actively promoted his racist and anti-Semitic views online, but remained hampered by the hostility with which most of the white supremacist movement continued to view him.  In the years prior to the Overland Park attacks, Miller was a perennial but peripheral figure within the world of white supremacy.

EDITORS NOTE: ADL experts on white supremacy and extremism in America are available for interviews upon request.  Contact ADL Media Relations at (212) 885-7755 or [email protected].  After hours/weekend: (917) 544-2342.

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SOURCE Anti-Defamation League