Louis Beam
Louis Ray Beam, Jr. (b. 20 August 1946 in Lake Jackson, Texas) is an American White Fascist. He served two tours of duty as a helicopter gunner in Vietnam and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. While a member of the Ku Klux Klan he organized the Texas Emergency Reserve to fight Vietnamese fishermen in Galveston Bay. He later formulates his strategy of "Leaderless Resistance".
Life
Beam grew up in the 1950s in Lake Jackson, Texas, south of Houston. After an 18-month tour of duty with the United States Armed Forces in Vietnam, for which he awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Beam returned home in 1968 and joined the Texas branch of Robert Shelton's United Klans of America (UKA), under the leadership of Texas Grand Dragon Frank Converse.
In 1976, Beam apparently shifted his Klan allegiance from the UKA to David Duke's fledgling Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and later became a Grand Titan in Texas. He graduated from the University of Houston in 1977. During 1978 and 1979, he worked to recruit members of United States Army in Fort Hood in Texas. Beam started a paramilitary group, Texas Emergency Reserve, mainly made up of Klansmen. They were involved in confrontations between Vietnamese shrimp fishermen and European American fishermen in Galveston Bay.
On 24 April 1987, Beam and 13 others were indicted by the federal government, they were accused of participating in "a seditious conspiracy between July 1983 and March 1985 to overthrow the government." Beam went to Mexico and spent five months on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list. Beam was captured in Mexico and turned over to United States government. Beam represented himself at the trial, with the assistance of Kirk Lyons. After seven weeks of testimony and 20 hours of deliberations, the jury acquitted Beam, and his co-defendants on all charges on April 7, 1988.
Beam then started publishing The Seditionist. In the magazine's first issue, Beam stated the neeeded for a "New Right," to "the creation of a national state for the white man, an Aryan republic within the borders of the present occupied country."
Leaderless Resistance
In the February 1992 issue of The Seditionist,[1] Beam advocated the formation of small, autonomous underground groups driven by ideology rather than by the directions of leaders and membership organizations. The concept is also sometimes called the "lone wolf" theory. Beam gave credit idea to Colonel Ulius Amoss, who in the early 1960s, proposed the strategy for defense against a Communist takeover of America. "the purpose of Leaderless Resistance is [now] to defeat state tyranny... Like the fog which forms when conditions are right and disappears when they are not, so must the resistance to tyranny be."
See also
- Inter-Klan Newsletter
- Glenn Miller
- George Dietz
- Lineage of American Fascist organizations and individuals
- Fort Smith Sedition Trial