BY JOHN STUDER
CHICAGO - A three-day racist shooting spree in Illinois and
Indiana over the July 4 weekend left Ricky Byrdsong, a former
Northwestern University basketball coach who was African-
American, and Won-Joon Yoon, a south Korean student at Indiana
University in Bloomington, dead. Nine others were wounded in
four other attacks. All the shootings were done from a passing
car.
The wounded victims included six Orthodox Jews shot in Chicago; a Black pastor in Decatur, Illinois; another African- American crossing the street in the Illinois capital, Springfield; and a graduate student at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, of Taiwanese descent.
Authorities charge that the shootings were committed by Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, a 21-year-old ultrarightist, who reportedly shot himself while struggling with police when caught in downstate Illinois July 5.
Smith was a member of the World Church of the Creator, an ultra-right, racist group whose credo is "Rahowa," which stands for "racial holy war," aimed at expelling all Blacks, Latinos, and Jews from the United States. Smith, from a middle-class suburban family, was proclaimed the "creator of the year" for the racist and anti-Semitic group in 1998 because he distributed the most ultraright propaganda and recruited the most members.
Last November, 500 people marched in Bloomington, Indiana, where Smith was in college, to protest his racist activities.
In the weeks before the shooting spree, Smith had purchased two handguns from an unlicensed gun dealer in Pekin, Illinois, outside Peoria.
The guns were found in his car when he died. Local and national political figures have promoted the need to pass new laws restricting political rights under the name of banning "hate crimes" and restricting access to guns.