‘Diversity is our strength,’ says rights group leader

    Satwant Singh Kaleka, Paramjit Kaur, Suveg Singh Khattra, Prakash Singh, Ranjit Singh, and Sita Singh.

   “It’s important that we don’t think of them as the six Sikhs who were killed at the temple,” but “that we remember their names and their loved ones.”

   That’s part of the message Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., shared with approximately 300 people attending the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee’s 42nd Annual Awards Luncheon on Dec. 6.

   The event, which took place at Milwaukee’s Italian Community Center, honors community members and groups whose work supports the Interfaith Conference’s mission of “upholding the dignity of every person and the solidarity of the human community.”

   This year, the ICGM honored the Sikh community, which lost six of its members to a gunman at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek on Aug. 5.

     The shooter, Wade Michael Page, had been identified as a white supremacist by Cohen’s organization, which monitors hate groups and extremists as part of its civil rights work.

   On the grounds of the SPLC in Montgomery is the Civil Rights Memorial. Designed by Maya Lin, it is a circular slab of black granite. The names of 40 people killed between 1954 and 1968 are carved into the granite, with an empty space left between two of those names.

   “What that space signifies is that the Civil Rights movement didn’t begin with [the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court racial segregation case] Brown vs. the Board of Education, and it didn’t end with [Rev. Dr. Martin Luther] King’s assassination [in 1968]. It signifies that there will be other martyrs to the movement, other people whose deaths will hopefully galvanize the rest of us to action,” Cohen said.

   Page, the temple shooter, had no ties to any one hate group. He was well enough known on the racist music scene to have attracted SPLC attention.

   Three months before the Oak Creek shooting, Cohen said, SPLC released “Understanding the Threat,” a 12-minute video documentary for law enforcement officers about racist skinheads. It included an image of Page.

   “No one could have predicted that he would be the one to pull the trigger,” he said, “but we could predict that someone like him would do it.”

   That’s because of the many factors behind a 70 percent increase in hate groups between 2000 and today, the single most important is a national demographic shift.

   “When the Interfaith Conference was first founded [in 1970],” he said, “less than 1 in 5 people [in the U.S.] were non-white. Today, that is growing. Diversity is our strength, but some people are not happy about it. There are a lot of angry white people out there looking for answers.”

   That there aren’t many hate groups in Wisconsin doesn’t mean there aren’t people with hate in their hearts, Cohen said.

   On a neo-Nazi site called Stormfront, which boasts more than 250,000 registered users — active participants who provide input and content — a person from Sullivan, Wis., reached out to find other like-minded haters. The responses, said Cohen, covered more than 39 pages.

   Cohen said the growth in radical anti-government groups has “skyrocketed” since President Barack Obama — seen by many of their members as a “secret Kenyan Muslim representing the forces stealing our country” — was elected in 2008.

   While specifically citing elements within the Tea Party conservative movement, Cohen said racist rhetoric has also come from mainstream political leaders — for example, former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, who in a conference call on July 17 said he wished Obama would “learn how to be an American.”

   These people and groups have also sought to keep the public angry about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S. Since then, attacks on members of the Sikh community have increased, as have attacks on Muslim individuals and houses of worship.

   Cohen cited a 2007 study by Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam, who found that trust between neighbors decreases as diversity increases. The lesson in that, Cohen said, is clear.

   “We have to convince one another to come out of our shells and engage one another in our churches, our homes, our communities,” he said.

   Toward that end, the SPLC has developed a curriculum called “Teaching Tolerance,” which is taught in many Wisconsin schools.

   Tikkun Ha Ir of Milwaukee received the Interfaith Conference’s Rev. Herbert Huebschmann Urban Ministry Award for its Surplus Garden Harvest Project, which has provided 12,000 pounds of fresh produce to food banks, pantries and shelters.

   Elana Kahn-Oren, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, presented the award to Rea Katz, the organization’s president.

   "Tikkun Ha-Ir has sought to change the landscape of social justice work in the Jewish community by bringing together the separate, often overlapping efforts," Kahn-Oren said in her introduction to the presentation. "It intentionally built itself through synagogues and existing programs, to avoid creating a redundancy and competition. Under the leadership of volunteer president Rea Katz and director Judy Baruch, Tikkun Ha-Ir has had the radical effort of creating a united effort — across denominations and based firmly on Jewish teachings — to help repair the world."

   Dr. Francine Feinberg received the Mark Rohlfing Memorial Award. Feinberg is the founder and former executive director of Meta House, which is one of the first programs in the U.S. to allow women struggling with drug and alcohol addiction to live with their children while rebuilding their lives. 

   Amy Waldman is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and coordinator of the ACCESS Program for Displaced Homemakers at the Milwaukee Area Technical College.