Man arrested in death of Miss. white supremacist

By MARIA BURNHAM and HOLBROOK MOHR (AP) – 1 hour ago

PEARL, Miss. — A white supremacist lawyer with a knack for publicity was found stabbed to death in a burning house Thursday, and Mississippi authorities later arrested a suspect in the death.

Rankin County Sheriff Ronnie Pennington said Richard Barrett's body was found about 7:45 a.m. after residents reported seeing smoke coming from his house in a rural area outside a suburb of Jackson, Miss. Pennington told The Associated Press a man was arrested in the death, declining to elaborate.

Barrett, a New York City native and Vietnam War veteran, moved to Mississippi in 1966. Soon after, he began traveling the country to promote anti-black and anti-immigrant views, and founded a supremacist group called the Nationalist Movement.

One expert on hate groups said that Barrett was well known for his news conferences and protests in places having racial strife, but that he had mustered little real clout in the white power movement.

"Richard Barrett was a guy who ran around the country essentially pulling off publicity stunts," said Mark Potok, who monitors hate groups for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. "He really never amounted to any kind of leader in the white supremacist movement."

Barrett attracted about 50 supporters to his 2008 rally in protest of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in the Louisiana town of Jena, where six black teenagers were charged with beating a white classmate. Years earlier, he sued over a ban on Confederate flags at University of Mississippi football games.

His modest, one-story brick home with white columns and shutters sits off a winding rural road outside the Jackson suburb of Pearl. Yellow police tape was stretched across the yard Thursday, and investigators worked on the scene late into the afternoon.

Authorities executed a search warrant at a neighbor's house where Barrett, 67, was last seen. Barrett's visit to the neighbor's home was "work related," the sheriff said, without elaborating.

When asked if Barrett was killed by someone else, Pennington said: "Absolutely, based on the condition of the body." Pennington also said there was fire damage inside Barrett's home.

Barrett operated the Nationalist Movement from an office in the small rural town of Learned, Miss., about 20 miles southwest of Jackson, where he also ran a school for skinheads.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barrett told The Associated Press he believed there would be a revolution in the United States if Barack Obama were elected as the first black president.

"Instead of this so-called 'civil rights bill,' for example, that says you have to give preferences to minorities, I think the American people are going — once they see the 'Obamanation' — they're going to demand a tweaking of that and say, 'You have to put majority into office,'" Barrett said.

Charles Evers of Jackson, the brother of Medgar Evers, a Mississippi NAACP leader assassinated in Jackson in 1963, said Thursday he has long thought that Barrett didn't really believe the things he said, but it was a way to entice people to donate money to his cause.

"I think it was just a way he had to live," Evers said. "He made a living talking all that racist talk."

Evers said the men talked often, though he wouldn't quite describe it as a friendship.

"I hate to see Richard go like that, and I hope that a black person didn't do it," Evers said. "That's just reverse hate."

In 1994, Barrett spearheaded an unsuccessful movement to get then-Gov. Kirk Fordice to pardon Byron de la Beckwith, who was convicted for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers.

Ten years later, Barrett was rebuffed in efforts to place a booth at the Mississippi State Fair to feature reputed Ku Klux Klan figure Edgar Ray Killen. Killen was later convicted of manslaughter in the June 21, 1964, deaths of a black man and two white men who had been working to register black voters near Philadelphia, Miss.

Barrett claimed in 2008 that the Nationalist Movement had members in 36 states, but he wouldn't reveal how many members were involved. In the 2008 interview, he compared today's skinheads to the minutemen of the American revolution.

"The revolution, if you will, in 1776 brought the 13 colonies together against the king. And the same thing can happen now against Martin Luther King, with the 50 states," Barrett said, referring to an Obama presidency.

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