28-04-2025
Who was Leonard Zeskind, the relentless watchdog of white nationalism?
Leonard Harold Zeskind, who spent a lifetime mapping the dark and tangled undercurrents of American white nationalism died April 15 at his home in Kansas City. He was 75.
The cause, as confirmed by his longtime colleague Devin Burghart, was cancer. Zeskind had been fighting it for years, though if you knew him, you also knew he was never one to make a big production out of personal hardship.
He had other battles on his mind.
Over more than four decades, Zeskind established himself as one of the country's fiercest, and, most stubborn, chroniclers of racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-government extremist groups. His 2009 book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, remains, even now, the definitive roadmap for understanding how hate moves, how it adapts, and how it sneaks into places it shouldn't belong.
He wasn't the flashiest activist. Or the loudest. He was the guy still in the archives at 2 AM., still trying to cross-reference the tenth alias of a neo-Nazi leader most Americans had never heard of (yet). For his trouble, in 1998, the MacArthur Foundation gave him one of their Genius Grants, recognising a career spent mostly working in the shadows.
A childhood shaped by justice
Zeskind was born in Baltimore in 1949, the son of Stanley and Shirley (Berman) Zeskind. When he was about 10, the family packed up and moved to Miami, chasing new opportunities like so many mid-century American families did.
It was the early '60s. The country was cracking open with civil rights protests, sit-ins, the slow, grinding march toward change. Zeskind soaked it in. He remembered, later in life, the moment a local NAACP president spoke at his synagogue during his bar mitzvah. It wasn't a thing that most kids would necessarily remember forever, but Zeskind did. 'It was the way you grew up in those days,' he said. 'And I just didn't stray from that.'
College? He gave it a shot. University of Florida first, then University of Kansas, studying philosophy — which made sense for a guy who liked to question everything. But he didn't make it to a degree. The Vietnam War was raging, and Zeskind ended up getting expelled from KU for protesting the ROTC program. (He was proud of it.)
Instead, he went to work. Real work, welding, ironwork, auto plants. Thirteen years of it. Somewhere along the way, he started organizing on the East Side of Kansas City, trying to cool the tensions between working-class white and Black neighbors who, frankly, had been set up to resent each other. It was messy, thankless work. He didn't expect a medal.
Building a life on the front lines
By the mid-1960s, Zeskind had found what would be his true calling: fighting racism not by grandstanding, but by getting into the weeds. The idea was simple enough, white people needed to organize other white people against racism, but living it out wasn't so simple.
He started in Kansas City, talking to poor white kids who'd grown up believing the deck was stacked against them (because it was, just not in the way they thought). And when the Klan started bubbling back up in the late '70s, along with newer, slicker hate groups — Zeskind shifted gears. Watching wasn't enough anymore. Someone needed to document it.
In 1982, he launched a little magazine called The Hammer, anti-racist, anti-fascist, fiercely independent. It wasn't exactly a bestseller, but it got noticed. Three years later, he became research director at the National Anti-Klan Network, and by 1983, he'd founded the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) back in Kansas City, where he could do the kind of methodical, painstaking work he believed in.
Zeskind's research was the opposite of surface-level. Court documents, extremist newsletters, informants, first-hand field notes, he dug everywhere. He knew who these groups were, not from TV soundbites, but because he'd sat in on their rallies, read their screeds, traced their networks across states and decades.
One of the biggest myths he loved to demolish was the idea that white supremacists were all ignorant hillbillies. 'They think that white supremacists are uneducated people with tobacco juice dripping from their mouths,' he once said, almost wearily. 'Nothing could be farther from the truth.' A lot of them were middle-class – professionals, teachers, small business owners, the guy fixing your car, the woman arguing about property taxes at the town council meeting.
And they weren't looking to preserve the old racial order anymore. They wanted to overturn it completely.
Blood and politics
If you want to understand just how far ahead Zeskind was, look no further than Blood and Politics. Sixteen years of research went into that book, and not the comfortable kind of research you do in an air-conditioned library, either.
The book traced the white nationalist movement from the margins to the edge of the mainstream, following figures like David Duke, Willis Carto, and William Pierce. It laid out strategies like 'mainstreaming' – toning down the rhetoric just enough to sound respectable, and 'vanguardism,' which aimed to build smaller, hardcore cells to take power when society collapsed.
When it first came out, some readers thought Zeskind was being alarmist. He wasn't.
Charlottesville in 2017. January 6 in 2021. The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Trumpism, all of it was there, sketched out in Blood and Politics, before most people even knew they should be looking.
Zeskind also wasn't shy about pointing to figures like Pat Buchanan, whose presidential runs in the '90s flirted with white nationalist talking points. He saw the signs early, maybe too early for most people's comfort.
Even after he was gone, the battles he fought kept raging. In 2025, the Trump administration oversaw a purge of 381 books, mostly on racism, civil rights, diversity, from the U.S. Naval Academy library. Blood and Politics was one of them. Burghart, who succeeded him at IREHR, called it what it was: 'a systematic attempt to erase and exterminate Civil Rights.'
Leonard Zeskind never wanted to be a hero. He didn't even much like the spotlight. But he understood, better than almost anyone, that silence, even polite, well-meaning silence, is what lets hate grow.
And he refused to be silent.
