White Patriot Party

The prosecution of members of the White Patriot Party (WPP), a paramilitary white supremacist group, helped bring to light links between white supremacist groups and the U.S. military, most notably the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

In 1985, Frazier Glenn Miller, a former Green Beret at Fort Bragg and leader of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (CKKKK), signed a consent agreement to settle a civil rights suit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Among other things, Miller agreed to disband the CKKKK's paramilitary army and training camps, which he had used to train Klansmen in armed combat. Miller then changed the name of the CKKKK to the White Patriot Party and continued to run training camps in rural North Carolina, in violation of both state law and the 1985 court order.

The WPP, like other Klan offshoots of the time, firmly embraced the tenets of Christian Identity, a fiercely anti-Semitic, racist, and homophobic Christian fundamentalist sect. WPP planned to take over several North Carolina counties, thus creating a southern homeland for white Christians by the early 1990s.

At its height, Miller claimed the WPP had over 2,500 members, though organizations such as the Klanwatch Project in Montgomery, Alabama, estimated membership at 700 to 800. Many of these members were active-duty Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and active-duty soldiers from Fort Bragg. Several of these military personnel assisted at the WPP paramilitary camps, training local civilians, many of them former Klan members, in combat and the use of weapons. The WPP also staged marches in cities throughout North Carolina, in which WPP members wore combat fatigues and berets, carried large Confederate flags, and displayed Nazi paraphernalia.

While several members of the WPP were convicted for conspiring to assault blacks in Florida in 1985, the most significant cases brought against the group involved the military. In 1986, Klanwatch identified 10 Marines as WPP members and demanded an investigation by the Department of Defense. Three Marines, including the former WPP member Richard L. Pounder, were eventually discharged for refusing to dissociate from the group.

On January 8, 1987, Miller, his second-in-command, Stephen S. Miller (no relation to Frazier Glenn Miller), Robert Jackson, Tony Wydra, and two others were indicted on charges of conspiring to obtain weapons stolen from a military installation to equip and sustain the WPP's paramilitary force. Robert Norton Jones, a former Fort Bragg marine who was serving a four-year sentence for attempting to purchase stolen military weapons, told the court that he was paid $50,000 to supply the WPP with arms stolen from Fort Bragg and other military institutions. The stolen goods, which Miller supplied to the WPP and other Klan groups in the area, included 13 LAW antitank missiles, rifles, CS anti-riot gas, TNT, C-4 plastic explosives, and 10 Claymore mines. The army eventually recovered over 20 blocks of the C-4 explosives and nearly 14,000 rounds of ammunition from the Klan. Miller served three years in a federal prison for the crime. Since his release, he has made several attempts to run for Congress in Missouri.

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