One of the US’ largest neo-Nazi groups appears to have an unlikely new leader: a black advocate who has vowed to dismantle it.
Court documents filed on Thursday suggest that James Hart Stern wants to use his new position as director and president of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) to undermine the Detroit-based group’s defense against a lawsuit.
The NSM is one of several extremist groups sued over bloodshed at a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Stern’s filing asks a federal court in Virginia to issue a judgement against the group before one of the lawsuits goes to trial.
Stern in January replaced Jeff Schoep as the group’s leader, Michigan corporate records show.
However, the records and court documents say nothing about how or why Stern got the position.
His feat invited comparisons to the recent Spike Lee movie BlacKkKlansman, in which a black police officer infiltrates a branch of the Ku Klux Klan.
Matthew Heimbach, a leading white nationalist figure who briefly served as the NSM’s community outreach director last year, said that Schoep and other group leaders have been at odds with rank-and-file members over its direction.
Some members “essentially want it to remain a politically impotent white supremacist gang” and resisted ideological changes advocated by Schoep, Heimbach said.
Schoep’s apparent departure and Stern’s installation as its leader probably spell the end of the group in its current form, he added.
Schoep was 21 when he took control of the group in 1994 and renamed it the National Socialist Movement, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“I think it’s kind of a sad obit for one of the longest-running white nationalist organizations,” said Heimbach, who estimated it had about 40 active, dues-paying members last year.
The group has drawn much larger crowds at rallies.
NSM members used to attend rallies and protests in full Nazi uniforms, including at a march in Toledo, Ohio, that sparked a riot in 2005.
More recently, Schoep tried to rebrand the group and appeal to a new generation of racists and anti-Semites by getting rid of such overt displays of Nazi symbols.
It appeared that Stern had been trying for at least two years to disrupt the group.
A message posted on his Web site said he would be meeting with Schoep in February 2017 “to sign a proclamation acknowledging the NSM denouncing being a white supremacist group.”
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