James Stern, who disrupted racist groups, dies at 55

James Hart Stern, a black minister with a colorful past who made news earlier this year by seeming to wrangle control of a Michigan neo-Nazi group away from far-right extremists in hopes of turning it to nobler ends, died on Oct. 11 at his home in Moreno Valley, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. He was 55.

His death was confirmed by Autumn Karen, a North Carolina writer who collaborated with him on “Mississippi Still Burning (From Hoods to Suits),” his life story, published last year. She said the cause was cancer

tern’s eventful life included preaching as a young man in the Los Angeles area, working to ease gang violence there, and spending five years in prison in Mississippi on fraud charges.

The prison sentence proved to be the catalyst for bringing him to national attention. In 2010 and 2011, he was in the same prison medical facility as Edgar Ray Killen, who was serving time in the high-profile deaths of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. The two developed an unlikely bond and, Stern said, Killen gave him power of attorney. (Killen died last year.)

Once Stern was released, he used that power to disband the White Knights, the Ku Klux Klan chapter Killen once led (though at a 2016 news conference announcing this “declaration of dissolution” he overstated the case, saying the entire Klan had been dissolved). He made more news early this year when it came to light that Jeff Schoep, the leader of the neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Movement, who had a long history of outspoken racism, had signed control of that organization over to Stern.

In 2014, by then out of prison, Stern had invited Schoep to a “race summit” he was organizing, with his connection to Killen, whom Schoep knew, providing a point of connection. The two maintained occasional contact in the ensuing years; Stern claimed credit for persuading Schoep to drop the swastika from the National Socialist Movement logo.

In early 2019, according to Stern, Schoep confided that he was nervous because he and his group had been named in a lawsuit stemming from the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virgimia, in 2017 that left one counter demon st rat er, Heather Heyer, dead.

“He said the lawsuit would destroy his livelihood, take his house and his financials,” Stern told The Daily Beast in March. “That scared me because if he dissolved it, someone else could pick it up and reincorporate it, and carry on the same shenanigans he’s been doing the past 25 years. So I made a comment to him. I said: ‘ You know what? You want to prove you don’t want to use this organization any more? Give it me.’”

Schoep did, signing over its incorporation documents, though other members of the group quickly challenged that, initiating a legal dispute that was unresolved at the time of Stern’s death. (Schoep has in recent months renounced white supremacy and become a speaker and consultant on extremist movements and how to deal with them.) Stern, in various interviews, had floated several ideas for what to do with the group, like showing the movie “Schindler’s List” on its website.

“His goal was to disband it in a sense,” Karen said, “but really to re-form it, to leverage it for good. It was an opportunity, and James never missed an opportunity.

“James was a master connector. He was a good guy who listened, and he always had an ear.”

That, she said, explained his ability to connect to people with racist views such as Killen and Schoep.

“He saw that he could have Christian empathy without condoning any of these things,” she said.

Stern was born on June 13, 1964, in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles to George and Vernice Stern. “James Chaney, Michael Schwerner. and Andrew Goodman took their last breath just eight days after I breathed my first,” he said in his book.

Those were the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi that year during what became known as Freedom Summer; in 2005 Killen was convicted of three counts of manslaughter in their deaths. He was serving a 60- year sentence for those crimes when Stern met him at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, the notorious prison known as Parchman Farm.