Beth Rickey collapsed and died alone on a motel room floor in Santa Fe on Friday night, a pitcher of ice tea in her hands. She was just 53. She had been ill for 13 years, mostly with a mysterious virus she had picked up on a church mission trip to Mexico. Debilitated, she had run through her life savings. Philanthropic help was on the way, but not in time.
It was a sad end for one of the bravest women you could ever meet. There had been a time, back in the early 1990s, when journalists and academicians, Jewish leaders and evangelicals, conservative and liberal, all proclaimed her a heroine. They were right.
Beth Rickey, perhaps more than any single person, helped stop the meteoric political rise of neo-Nazi David Duke. People today may forget what a political force Duke had become in Louisiana back then. With three weeks remaining in the 1991 race for governor, Duke had been in a statistical dead heat in the polls against ethically challenged former three-term governor Edwin Edwards. And Duke had the momentum.
What Duke could never escape, though, was all the evidence that he truly was a neo-Nazi, rather than what he claimed to be: a next-generation Reaganite conservative with a long-ago tawdry Ku Klux Klan past that he had thoroughly put behind him. Much of that evidence was unearthed by Beth Rickey.
<snip>
Duke won that state legislatve election in 1989 by a scant 227 votes, a 1 percent margin. Ms. Rickey didn't quit. She secretly followed him to a national Populist Party (neo-Nazi) convention in Chicago to which he had said he would not go, and she audiotaped him making a racist speech.
She publicized the recording. Then she arranged for private eyes to visit Duke's home-district legislative office, where they found him selling Nazi books. She publicized that. She was a member of the Republican State Central Committee, so she introduced a resolution to censure Duke.
<snip>
At the end of 1989, Ms. Rickey and two liberal academicians along with a moderate evangelical minister decided that it would take a concentrated organization to defeat Duke. It is hard to believe, unless you were there, just how effective Duke was at manipulating the media. He was telegenic and glib, with a preternatural ability to turn any hostile interview to his advantage while hitting populist hot buttons again and again. And Louisiana was a poor state, with a poor educational system. Demagoguery worked. It would take savvy planning to stop him.
Ms. Rickey and the others called a meeting of a broad spectrum of activists, and then another. At the second meeting, on a cold and wet November evening, they elected a highly diverse, 10-person board. It featured Ms. Rickey and another Republican, liberal scholars, Jewish activists, Christian ministers and others. At the third meeting, they named it the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism. LCARN's research, political ads and publicity efforts against Duke eventually garnered international acclaim. The organization hounded Duke at every step. And finally, just in the nick of time in 1991, Duke's balloon popped. Edwards ended up winning by a monumental landslide, 61.2 percent to 38.8 percent. Duke never recovered politically, and years later he ended up in jail for tax fraud and mail fraud.
<snip>
She ended up destitute in Santa Fe, 900 miles from home. At about 3:30 Friday afternoon, a wonderful social worker told her on the phone that she definitely would find help. An hour later, the social worker found a philanthropist willing to step in. The philanthropist immediately phoned Ms. Rickey's number, but reached only voice mail.
Back in 1989 through 1991, though, when it made a huge difference to a state gone haywire, Beth more than answered the call.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/15/beth-what-can-we-do/RIP Ms. Rickey. :patriot:
She had more balls than the entire Congress combined. They are cowards and enablers of hate. She did more in her life
than all of those jackasses put together. I'll bet she would have been doing something about teabaggers if she could.
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