Richard Barrett (lawyer)

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Barrett at a rally in Jena, Louisiana, September 2007.

Richard Barrett (born 1943) is an American lawyer, white nationalist and self-proclaimed leader in the nationalist Skinhead movement. Barrett is a speaker and editor of the All The Way monthly newsletter. He is general counsel of the Nationalist Movement, which he founded in Mississippi.

Barrett was born in New York City, and according to his biography, he writes that his family moved away to avoid the influx of Jewish and Puerto Rican immigrants. He graduated from Rutgers University, later returning his diploma to a Marxist professor Eugene Genovese, following infantry service in the Vietnam War. He graduated from Memphis State University Law School in 1974.

In 1968, Barrett served as executive director of the South Carolina branch of the American Independent Party, on behalf of George C. Wallace's presidential bid. He organized and chaired Youth for Wallace, and in 1969 he organized and chaired the National Youth Alliance (which later transformed into the National Alliance). In 1976, he was chairman of Democrats for Reagan, and in 1977 he served as judge-advocate of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

In 1982, Barrett published The Commission, a memoir advocating the resettlement of "those who were once citizens" to "Puerto Rico, Mexico, Israel, the Orient and Africa." Contending that non-whites, especially blacks, were inferior: "The Negro race... possess[es] no creativity of its own [and] pulls the vitality away from civilization." He advocated sterilization and abortions of the "unfit."

In 1992, Barrett argued the case of Forsyth County, Georgia v. The Nationalist Movement before the United States Supreme Court. In 2004, Barrett organized a booth at the Mississippi State Fair for the public to shake hands with Edgar Ray Killen and sign a petition of support. Killen, who did not appear, was later convicted of manslaughter for his role in the 1964 Ku Klux Klan-led murders of three civil rights activists. In an interview, Barrett predicted that the nation would rally around Killen.[1]