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Creativity Movement

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The Creativity Movement is an United States-based racialist White-supremacist organization that advocates a whites-only religion called Creativity. The group denies the Holocaust and embraces racial eugenics. J. Gordon Melton considers the group to be a church, despite that they are atheists and that the term "creator" refers to themselves. [1]

The Creativity Movement was founded by Ben Klassen in early 1973 under the name Church of the Creator. The group was later led by Matthew F. Hale until his incarceration on January 8, 2003 for plotting with FBI informant Anthony Evola to murder a federal judge. In 1996, it became the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC). Hale prefixed the name with World in 1996 in an effort to symbolize the organization's global mission of attaining a white world without Jews and non-whites. The group is not related to the TE-TA-MA "Truth" Foundation's Church of the Creator, which legally trademarked the name Church of the Creator and won a lawsuit in 2002, forcing the most recent name change.

Violent acts by members

Although the organization officially preaches non-violence, several of its members and officers have engaged in racially motivated criminal acts.

In 1991, Harold Mansfield Jr., an African-American veteran of the Gulf War, was killed in a parking lot in Neptune Beach, Florida, after he charged at two Church of the Creator members with a brick, and threatened one of the members. George Loeb and his wife Barbara Loeb were arrested on June 6 and charged with different crimes related to the event. George Loeb was convicted of first-degree murder on July 29, 1992, and received a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.[2] Barbara Loeb was sentenced to one year in jail on weapons possession charges. The organization has repeatedly argued that Loeb was acting in self-defense when he committed the act. In March 1994, the murder victim's family successfully sued the organization, winning an award of $1 million in damages. Before the judgement was handed down, Klassen sold the organization's North Carolina compound, which housed its headquarters, in an attempt to unload the assets of the organization. He chose as his successor former telemarketer Richard McCarty, who moved the organization's headquarters to Niceville, Florida. Soon after appointing McCarty in the summer of 1993, Klassen (already dying from cancer) committed suicide.

During the weekend of July 4, 1999, group member and fellow law student Benjamin Nathaniel Smith went on a shooting spree because Matthew F. Hale was denied a law license. Before doing so, Smith formally resigned from the Church to distance the organization from his planned actions. Smith is viewed as a martyr by the Creativity Movement.

On July 22, 2002, two followers of the organization were found guilty in federal court of plotting to blow up Jewish and black landmarks around Boston, in what prosecutors said was a scheme to spark a "racial holy war." A federal jury deliberated seven hours over two days before convicting Leo Felton (the 31-year-old mixed-race son of civil rights activists) and his 22-year-old girlfriend, Erica Chase.

In August 2004, Reverend Hardy Lloyd, a friend of Hale, killed a former associate in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who was trying to kill him and his family. The act was ruled a case of self-defense by a jury in November 2006. Lloyd now heads the Church of Creativity, which is based in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. (The Church of Creativity is a family-oriented church with Sunday services and picnics for children.)[citation needed] Hale has praised Lloyd as a great asset to the Creativity Movement.[citation needed]

In 2000, the Oregon-based TE-TA-MA Truth Foundation filed a lawsuit against the World Church of the Creator for using the name Church of the Creator, which the Oregon group had registered as a trademark. Early in 2002 U.S. District Court Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow ruled in favor of the World Church of the Creator.[3] However, this decision was appealed by TE-TA-MA, and in November 2002, in a reversal of the previous ruling, a panel of three judges in the appeals court overturned the previous decision. Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow then enforced the appeals court injunction in favor of TE-TA-MA; barring the use of the name by Hale's organization.[4]

In December 2002, the World Church of the Creator announced it was moving its headquarters to Riverton, Wyoming, in what the Anti-Defamation League claimed was an effort to avoid the court injunction barring use of the name. That same month, the World Church of the Creator sued U.S. District Court Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow, accusing Lefkow of "violating the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights of Church adherents" by ordering "the Bibles of the Church and its adherents be confiscated and destroyed."[5] On December 19, 2002, Hale registered a trademark on the name Creativity Movement and was in the process of changing the name of his organization to avoid legal problems. However, there were still mentions of the name Church of the Creator in most of the Church's books, which were published from 1973 to 1994. This brought more legal action against the organization, for not removing those trademarked terms from the online versions of those books (even though quotations and the contents of the books were permitted if a different organization name was put on the covers and a disclaimer was provided).

On January 8, 2003, Hale was arrested and charged with trying to direct his security chief Anthony Evola to murder Judge Lefkow. Evola, an FBI informant who had been instructed by the FBI to join the group to "get something on Hale" (Evola's testimony at Hale's trial). Evola remained a member for at least two and a half years, all the while wearing a surveilance device during conversations with Hale. Hale was arrested as he arrived at Chicago's federal courthouse to face a possible charge of contempt of court for refusing to obey Lefkow's enforcement of the appeals court ruling. He was found guilty of four of the five counts against him on April 26, 2004.

After Hale's arrest, there were ongoing schisms within the organization, amounting to what was at one time eight independent groups. One of those groups, The Church Of The RaHoWa, was illegally acquired and controlled through false pretences by former bounty hunter and later police informant Adam Hanson (aka Adam Hansen, aka Adam James Hansen, aka James Halen). Many police raids and charges were made against adherents of The Church Of The RaHoWa, including its founder Colin Campbell, and others who had supplied their personal details to Hanson.[6]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Expert: Hatreds rooted in poverty don't thrive here, the Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, MA), July 9, 1999
  2. ^ http://www.solargeneral.com/creator/audiovideo/FLvsLOEBHQ.rm
  3. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20030410141837/www.creator.org/pressrelease/theirstyle2a.htm
  4. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20030423173442/www.creator.org/legal/Te-Ta-Ma.pdf
  5. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20030304201133/www.creator.org/pressrelease/theirstyle2y.htm
  6. ^ http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1559149.htm
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