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Aryan Nations moves to Alabama
HAYDEN, Idaho — The neo-Nazi Aryan Nations has moved its headquarters to Alabama.
After the Sept. 8 death of founder Richard Butler at age 86, the group’s post office box moved from Hayden to one in Lincoln, Ala., according to the group’s Web site.
A four-member “leadership council” will be named to succeed Butler, a plan worked out at last summer’s Aryan World Congress in northern Idaho, said Laslo Patterson of Talladega, Ala.
It is the first time in 30 years that Aryan Nations has not been headquartered in the Idaho Panhandle.
“Our new post office box is not in your back yard anymore, but the Aryan Nations still is,” said Jonathan Williams, Aryan Nations communications director in Atlanta.
Butler’s suburban home in Hayden became the group’s headquarters in 2000 after his 20-acre compound, built in the mid-1970s, was sold in a bankruptcy sale to partially satisfy a $6.3 million civil judgment.
Butler repeatedly vowed the Aryan Nations headquarters would never leave Idaho.
Patterson wouldn’t say if he would be one of the four new leaders or if he was picking up the organization’s mail at the post office in Lincoln, near his home.
Lincoln is about 80 miles from Montgomery, Ala., home of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the human rights group whose lawsuit bankrupted Aryan Nations.
“There’s no hidden agenda there,” Patterson said when asked why Aryan Nations was so close to the SPLC. “I just think people in the Southeast United States are more geared to the Christian Identity movement than elsewhere.”
The Aryan Nations embraced a Christian Identity religious belief that white people are the true children of God, while Jews are descendants of Satan, and nonwhites are “mud people” without souls.
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