Alabama congressional candidate said tied to racist group
BEN EVANS
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A man running for Congress in Alabama pleaded guilty in 1999 to carrying a gun at a Ku Klux Klan rally and is described by an organization that monitors hate groups as having been a member of the white-supremacist National Alliance.

Mark Edwin Layfield, 54, of Auburn, is running as an independent for Alabama's 3rd U.S. House District, currently held by Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Saks.

According to court records, he received a suspended sentence of 180 days in jail and paid a $500 fine plus court costs after being charged with possession of a firearm at the Klan demonstration in Fort Payne, an annual event dubbed "Klan Jam." The judge in the case also barred Layfield from returning to Fort Payne.

Layfield did not return telphone calls or an e-mail from The Associated Press on Wednesday. But in an interview with the Montgomery Advertiser, he did not deny or confirm his membership in the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group that claims white Europeans have evolved further than other races.

"Why would you even ask such a question?," Layfield told the Advertiser when asked about his membership in the group. "It's not illegal to be in the NAACP. It's not illegal for them to reject my membership. Why would you not ask a question about that?'"

The National Alliance's deceased founder, William Pierce, wrote the race-war novel "The Turner Diaries," which depicts the bombing of an FBI building and inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. He advocated killing America's Jews by sending them in cattle cars to the bottoms of abandoned coal mines, said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups.

"This group is about as bad as they get," Potok said, adding that its members have been involved in various violent racial incidents since it was founded in 1974.

The Montgomery-based law center, which first pointed out Layfield's background Tuesday, has known of Layfield's activities for years but did not realize he was running for Congress until hearing a radio interview with Layfield.

"He's a local Nazi, well-known to us," Potok said. "The only surprise was to find that he was actually running in a congressional race."

Layfield, who has not previously run for office, has not advocated a white-supremacist agenda in interviews or on his Web site.

But he does advocate some positions similar to those of the National Alliance. He said in a recent interview that one of his top priorities would be to pull troops out of Iraq and put them on the Mexican border to block immigrants from entering the United States.

On its Web site, the National Alliance is selling magnets and stickers calling for the same position. The Web site also lists Layfield's candidacy in the table of contents of a newsletter available for sale.

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