by Philip St. Raymond
WHITE SEPARATIST and attorney Richard Barrett (pictured) of rural Pearl, Mississippi was found murdered — stabbed, beaten, and burned over 35% of his body — yesterday in his Rankin County home.
Authorities have arrested a 23-year-old black ex-convict, Vincent McGee, for the killing. McGee was one of Barrett’s neighbors, and had done yard work for him. Barrett was last seen walking over to McGee’s residence to pay him.
After questioning of other neighbors brought him under suspicion, McGee (pictured, left) was found at a mobile home on Holmes Avenue in Pearl. He had been released from Parchman State Penitentiary in February after serving five years for assaulting two Rankin County officers and grand larceny.
District Attorney Michael Guest stated “He should have remained in prison until December of this year, but because of jail overcrowding and other issues he was released.”
Barrett, a New York City native who moved to Mississippi in 1966, made national headlines when he successfully sued for the right of southerners to march and carry the Confederate flag in a controversial protest in Forsyth County, Georgia during the 1980s. Barrett operated what he called the “Nationalist Movement” from an office in nearby Learned, Mississippi, where he also ran a school for young skinheads. He was a graduate of Rutgers University but reportedly returned his diploma in 1966 to protest the New Left activities of professor Eugene Genovese.
He was also an unsuccessful candidate for public office on several occasions. Barrett was known for his numerous conflicts with other rightists. His nationalist.org online newsletter is littered with attacks on other separatists, written in a breezy, journalistic style. Don Black of the Florida-based “Stormfront White Nationalist Community” called him a “pathological liar and nutcase always trying to claim importance.” Barrett once wrote that his name would “be written in lightning across the pages of American history.”
There is heavy irony in Richard Barrett’s story.
Irony on the one hand because, according to one of his former associates, Dannie Hawkins, Barrett — who was very critical of Jews — had a Jewish father he refused to acknowledge.
And more irony still because in the very last article Barrett wrote for his site, he had said that the recent killing of white separatist Eugene Terreblanche in South Africa by black farm workers pointed up the “peril [of] reliance upon the labor of the descendants of African slaves.” Barrett also obliquely criticized some of his own followers for refusing to relocate to “beef up security at Nationalist Headquarters.”
“He should have remained in prison until December of this year, but because of jail overcrowding and other issues he was released,” said Rankin/Madison Counties District Attorney Michael Guest.”
The 13% doing what they are oh-so well-known for for doing.