Casey Michel is a recent Master’s graduate from Columbia University’s Harriman Institute. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and Slate, and he can be followed on Twitter at @cjcmichel.

Much of the national debate over racism in the aftermath of last month’s mass murder in Charleston, S.C., has focused on the South and its strange and sometimes jarring nostalgia for the Confederacy. And yet tucked away in the Pacific Northwest of the United States is a vicious group that most people have never heard of but the nation’s most virulent online racists know well (among them, accused South Carolina murderer Dylann Roof, who wrote about the group in his now-infamous “manifesto”).

The group is called the Northwest Front and its final solution to the race "problem," if you will, is to expel non-white people from the Pacific Northwest and to establish a mono-racial republic there.


Racism knows no region, it’s safe to say. While the Pacific Northwest can abstain from the debate on the removal of traitorous colors from the Capitol grounds—Oregon was the last state in the Union before the Civil War’s outbreak, after all—the region bears a racial legacy tinted by an ignorance, a decades-old vision of minority-free lands, as stark as any in the United States.

To be sure, the Northwest Front represents a fringe campaign, a minority of a minority seeking to expunge the Pacific Northwest of any color but white. According to Harold Covington, the group’s leader, the union of Washington State, Oregon, Idaho and western Montana would be “kind of like the white version of Israel. I don’t see why the Jews are the only people on Earth that get their own country and everyone else has to be diverse.” Covington knows precisely what he’s gone in for: “Of course it’s racism. What’s wrong with racism? It’s the purist form of patriotism.”

Numbers on the Northwest Front are hard to come by—the group does without formal membership—but the Southern Poverty Law Center maintains Northwest Front as one of the foremost white nationalist groups in the region. The group’s reach has as much to do with its push as it does with its leader, Covington. While no direct connection between Roof and Covington has yet emerged, aside from Roof’s broadsides about Northwest Front, circumstance and parallel motivations twin the two.

In 1972, while a member of the U.S. Army, Covington wormed his way into his first neo-Nazi organization. He soon found himself in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (a nation whose colors Roof, coincidentally, didn’t hesitate to sport). While there, Covington managed to start both the Rhodesian White People’s Party and the South African Friends of the Movement. But Covington quickly outstayed his welcome, and his screeching anti-Semitism soon saw him deported from one of the most racist regimes extant.

Not long thereafter, however, Covington set his sights more domestically—and tapped into a vein of racial stratification long overlooked within the U.S. For Covington, the Pacific Northwest could prove the well-spring for the white supremacists’ dreams. An independent ethnie. A Rhodesia regained.

But don’t think Covington’s claims—that he can flip the vertiginous Northwest into an autarkic ethno-state—are novel. Rather, Covington tapped into a racist longing that has long festered in this part of the country, a tide of American history that’s never been properly addressed. From its earliest American outset, the Pacific Northwest was long meant to be a land for the white caste. “Whites Only” writ large.

Look at Oregon, for instance. As Walidah Imarisha of Portland State University’s Black Studies Department told me, “Oregon was founded as a state, as a territory, as a white homeland. Folks who answered that call wanted to build their perfect white society.” And not in the same vein of a three-fifths-clause South, where black Americans would be tolerated, if in servitude. Oregon would be different. While the state remained in the Union—and actually proved pivotal to Abraham Lincoln’s nomination on the Republican ticket—Oregon’s founders mentioned racial unity in the state's original documents. To wit, the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Act allowed free land to whites alone. And during an 1857 vote on the constitution’s formulation, some 83 percent of participants voted to prohibit “free negroes” from living or working in the state. Chief Justice George Williams, who later served as attorney general for President Ulysses Grant, summed the sentiment, lobbying voters to “consecrate Oregon to the use of the white man, and exclude the negro, Chinaman, and every race of that character.” According to one researcher, Oregon was “the only state ever admitted with a black exclusion clause in its constitution.” There’s a reason, growing up in Portland, that my seventh-grade teacher informed us Oregon was often considered the most racist state west of the Mississippi.

Remarkably, such laws remained in force in Oregon until 1926, allowing a white population to steer a demographic legacy apart from other parts of the country. At one point, Oregon boasted the highest per-capita membership in the Ku Klux Klan. For good measure, Oregon failed to ratify the 15th Amendment, allowing African-Americans the right to vote, until 1959; the state also didn’t formally ratify the 14th Amendment, allowing equal protection under the law, until 1973. “Oregon was a Klan state—it was as prejudiced as South Carolina, so there was very little difference other than geographic difference,” Otto Rutherford, one of the state’s leading civil rights activists, said. Despite its current trappings of progress and tolerance, mid-20 th century Portland, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting, “was still considered the most segregated and prejudiced city on the West Coast.” Today, not only does Portland remain the whitest major metropolitan area in the country, but the city managed to slough its remaining African-American population even further in the 21 st century, dropping from 6.6 percent in 2000 to 6.3 percent in 2010. Seattle’s decline has proven even steeper, with the city’s black population sagging from 8.4 percent to 7.9 percent in just 10 years, with no end to the drop in sight.

All through it, Oregon—and the Pacific Northwest more broadly—remained a bastion of white supremacist visions of isolation and conformity. Trends peaked in the mid-1980s with Richard Butler, founder of the Aryan Nations, helping to push the idea of the Northwest Territorial Imperative, of a piece with Covington’s recent push. Butler’s compound in northern Idaho eventually fizzled, but his dream, tied directly to the region’s days of primordial statehood, has continued.

Indeed, the Pacific Northwest was recently the site of an attempted white supremacist bombing that could well have outpaced the carnage unleashed in Boston a few years ago. In early 2011, Kevin Harpham planted a backpack tangled in wire, fishing weights, and rat poison along the route of Spokane’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. Fortunately, sanitation workers spotted the device before detonation. A few weeks later, after Harpham’s white supremacist screeds came to light, officers camouflaged as road workers–and using a backhoe to pin his car–grabbed Harpham. But not all domestic terrorists in the region, operating under the auspices of white supremacy, are caught prior to their crime. A white supremacist and his girlfriend out of Washington State recently murdered a black man alongside a separate 19-year-old, the latter of whom they “thought … was Jewish.”

No ties have come to light between any of the criminals and Covington, nor between Covington and Roof—though it is worth noting that the Northwest Front was apparently recently recruiting in South Carolina. But Covington chose his swath of America for a reason. Not only does the region’s white supremacist legacy—legal and otherwise—linger, but check the latest Census figures. Washington State’s population remains only 4 percent black. Oregon? Two percent. Idaho? Eight-tenths of a percent. Montana? Six-tenths of a percent.

For the accused South Carolina killer, apparently, the Northwest Front’s goals were too meek. “I think this idea is beyond stupid,” Roof wrote in his presumed manifesto. “Why should I for example, give up the beauty and history of my state to go to the Norhthwest? (sic)”

But other racists have, and they will continue to do so. And we shouldn’t forget about them.