On May 20, at the Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati, Ohio a group of ministers and civil rights activists held a press conference to announce their efforts to enlist major league baseball owners in the fight for criminal justice reform and to support the Black Lives Matter effort. A grouping of white men, led by Robert Ransdell, tried to break up the press conference by yelling into bull horns and carry signs against diversity.
Ransdell lives across the Ohio River in Kentucky, where he ran a deeply anti-Semitic political campaign under the slogan “With Jews We Lose.” Robert Ransdell is deeply involved in a fight among white nationalists for control of the remains of the National Alliance and its compound in West Virginia, led at one time by William Pierce.
After Pierce’s death in 2002, a former boxer named Erich Gliebe was appointed chairman. Gliebe quickly ran the Alliance into the ground. One group of former chapter leaders, including Ransdell, constituted themselves as the National Alliance Reform & Restoration Group (NARRG). They filed suit against Gliebe, seeking to topple him from the leadership and gain control over the National Alliance’s name and properties. Last October, however, Gliebe stepped down and handed the chairman’s title to Will Williams, put the organizational remains in the hands of a small group of former National Alliance staffers. The NARRG lawsuit goes on for now, however, and the battle for control continues.
NARRG recently named Ransdell to “initiate the restart of organizational and business activity from the national office property” in West Virginia, if—a big if—NARRG wins its lawsuit.
It should be noted that Ransdell and the others on both sides of the National Alliance spat are not like the former segregationists and Klansmen of the 1960’s era. Instead of recreating old line white supremacy, they want to create a whites-only territory in North America—killing and expelling people of color, Jews, and white people who want to live in a just and equal multi-racial society. It is the difference between Jefferson David and Adolf Hitler.
The Cincinnati ministers and others pressing the Black Lives Matter campaign will continue undeterred, however, seeking full civil rights and equality before the law.
