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Biography: Oscar Benjamin Liddell
Part 2
by Chris Oakley
By 1986 the Brotherhood of White Unity had grown sufficiently large that it was starting to show up on the FBI’s hate group radar on a semi-regular basis. Oscar Benjamin Liddell took considerable pride in having helped make that possible; in the nine-plus years since he first joined the BWU, the organization had swelled vastly beyond its West Virginia roots to the point where it could count members in nine Southern states and was even starting to make some minor inroads north of the Mason-Dixon Line. In November of 1986 Liddell traveled to western Pennsylvania to personally oversee the establishment of that state’s first BWU chapter-- an event that drew bitter protests from Philadelphia’s African-American and Jewish communities and questions from the FBI’s Philadelphia office about whether a new domestic terrorism threat was arising to take the place of the MOVE organization which had been destroyed in a controversial police raid the year before.
The Pennsylvania State Police had their own concerns about the Brotherhood; about two months before the establishment of the BWU’s first branch in the Keystone State, a BWU member from the group’s South Carolina state chapter had been arrested on illegal weapons charges after getting into an altercation with a PSP trooper during what had begun as a routine traffic stop. A search of the suspect’s car had subsequently turned up nearly two dozen automatic weapons as well as a half-dozen grenades and literature on building a homemade bomb. Under further questioning, the suspect confessed that he had intended to use the items to mount attacks on state and federal office buildings in the Philadelphia area.
For Liddell and his supporters the arrest was an incredible embarrassment; it played right into the hands of the organization’s enemies and gave law enforcement agencies the perfect excuse to dig deeper into BWU affairs. When he arrived in Pennsylvania, one of the first things he did was to dismiss the unfortunate Carolinian from the BWU’s roster and issue a brief (and somewhat less than totally convincing)statement disavowing any knowledge of the man’s actions or intent concerning the illicit weapons. Shortly after this incident BWU members began instituting a network of “safe houses” as a means of protecting their firearms against surprise raids by federal or state law enforcement agents.
Six months after his first Pennsylvania visit he ventured up north again, this time to make contact with a group of white power stalwarts in upstate New York who had written to him expressing an interest in becoming associated with the Brotherhood. Their leader, an ex-school history teacher named Alan Ellis Worley, had met Liddell during a gathering of white power activists in Nevada in the summer of 1985 and the two had quickly established a long-distance friendship by mail; in June of 1987 Liddell officially appointed Worley as the chairman of the Brotherhood’s New York State branch. In the early days of Worley’s career as part of the BWU, his branch’s energies were for the most part devoted chiefly to spreading anti-Semitic and anti-black propaganda throughout the Northeast; at that time they had neither the numbers nor the resources to mount any kind of significant attacks on even the softest targets, let alone the kind of targets Liddell deemed it necessary to go after in what he and his fellow neo-Nazis regarded as an inevitable coming race war. Under Liddell’s supervision, Worley subsequently began spreading the Brotherhood’s tentacles into the New
England states; by the spring of 1988 BWU chapters were up and running in New Haven, Connecticut and Providence, Rhode Island and the FBI’s Boston office had started to hear ominous rumors the group was trying to form a branch somewhere in the Cape Cod region of Massachusetts.
It would actually take until late August of that year before the Brotherhood finally established its first outpost in the Bay State. But that didn’t stop Worley and Liddell from aggressively courting white power advocates throughout the New England region-- even in the quintessentially liberal state of Vermont, Liddell managed to find willing listeners for his message of hate and bigotry. At the time of George H.W. Bush’s inauguration as President in January of 1989 there were 31 Brotherhood chapters established in the New England region and groundwork being laid for the formation of two others. The beginning of the Gulf War would add new fuel to the fire of Liddell and Worley’s efforts to widen their organization’s foothold beyond the Mason-Dixon line....
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