We are concerned about the white supremacist-organized domestic terrorist threat facing the United States. And we say to members of Congress, enough is enough. It is time to do something about it.

These organized domestic terrorists and their leaders operate through dozens of groups known to law enforcement agencies as white nationalists, white supremacists, white separatists, alt-Reich Nation, Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads and Christian Identity, which represent a direct threat to our national security.   

The American people must never tolerate any groups hiding behind the First Amendment, Second Amendment or any law to intimidate, kill or injure American citizens based on the removal of a Confederate battle flag or statue of a Confederate monument.

The American people must be reminded that the foundation of bigotry, hate crimes, political or judicial bias, white supremacy and racial segregation and the denial of equal protection under the law to people of African ancestry and citizenship in the United States rests upon the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on March 6, 1857, in Scott v. Sandford, written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a white supremacist. In that decision, the court said that current or former slaves and their descendants had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

On April 4, 1967, as the war in Vietnam was reaching its full fury, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And he said, “Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”

It is our hope, and the hope of the vast majority of the American people, that Congress will hear the cries for corrective justice and for peace from people of good will in this nation and all over the world.

The state of our union requires Congress to make it a priority to enforce RICO laws, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, against these arms-carrying, white supremacist- organized corrupt domestic terrorist hate-crime groups whose leaders, members and associates continue to engage in inhumane acts of violence and bigotry.

We must enforce RICO laws against these groups without delay.

ROY L. PERRY-BEY

Hampton

The writer is director of Civil Rights for the United Front for Justice.