When Alexis Charles Newton set off toward home late one night in July 1988, the 33-year-old Black man couldn’t have known he’d end up recounting the evening in detail to a courtroom later that fall. Sure, he had seen the bands of young white men with shaved heads, swastika tattoos and combat boots stomping around Dallas’ Lee Park that summer. But Newton had kept his distance. He had made it home safely every time before, and nothing about that night seemed to suggest a different outcome.
Newton grew up nearby, and as a boy, he swam in the public pool at the park. Later, as an adult, he jogged its trails. Even in his thirties, he sometimes met his friends there for football games, to toss a baseball or to throw a Frisbee. He’d attended concerts at the park. It was his neighborhood.
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What is the Biden administration going to do about it?
Illustration by Deena So Oteh
In late October of 2020, Lance Corporal Joseph Mercurio, a Marine with the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, hit “send” on an Instagram comment: “The Jewish religion is that of Satan,” he wrote responding to a photograph of me. His username on Instagram, “joe88mercurio,” incorporated a known neo-Nazi code: 88 stands for “Heil Hitler,” as “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.
In his bio, he stated his affiliation with the Marines: “USMC 0331,” a numerical designation indicating that he was responsible for handling machine guns in direct combat. Below it, he included a quote from an interview with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer “There is no equality in nature, there’s difference” and a quote from the white supremacist band Skrewdriver, from a song lauding Nazi troops in World War II as the “forces of light” in a “holy war.”
White supremacists and other extremist groups have long targeted current and former members of the military for recruitment, experts say, prizing their training, access to weapons and leadership skills.