A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America

Skinhead Nation

On a fall night in 1988, on a street in Portland, Oregon, there was a band of three young skinheads (Ken Mieske, Kyle Brewster, and Steve Strasser). There was a murder, an Ethiopian man named Mulageta Seraw. Was it a racially motivated crime, or was it a street fight? You might be surprised what side Elinor Langer, a terrifically unabashed liberal and the author of the biography Josephine Herbst, comes down on. In this probing, transfixing book, the result of a tireless decade-and-a-half of research, Langer explores the Nazi-aligned skinhead movement in Portland and the culture that created it. (The infamous 1988 skinhead brawl on Geraldo — the best-rated episode of a talk show ever, until Oprah's diet show — didn't help. And sure, David Duke lost, but he did receive 11,000 votes.) The most gripping part of Langer's narrative is the tumultuous and terrible life of Ken Mieske (a.k.a ("Ken Death"), the nineteen-year-old skinhead who dealt Seraw the fatal blow. In the end, A Hundred Little Hitlers finds no easy answer to the truly horrible question, Where, exactly, did they come from?

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