LOUIS BEAM
(Louis Ray Beam, Jr.)
The KKK were riling up the white shrimpers because Vietnamese-American fishermen were fishing in ‘their waters”. The Southern Poverty Law Center, on behalf of the Vietnamese Fishermen, sued the KKK in Federal Court and won an injunction prohibiting the Klan from continuing its training program to burn the Vietnamese-American’s boats. Some of the Vietnamese-American fisherman had fought agaist the Viet Cong in Vietnam before coming to American and they armed themselves with shotguns and rifles, Faced with legal and possible violent resistance, Beam and the Klansmen disappeared from the area.
Louis Ray Beam, Jr. (born 1946) is an American white nationalist. After high-school, he joined the United States Army and served as a helicopter door-gunner in Vietnam. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Once he returned to the U.S. he became a Klansman, leading a maritime Louisiana KKK element against government help to Vietnamese immigrant fishermen. He was also the leader of the Texas Emergency Reserve, a militia that was disbanded by the courts in 1982 as a result of a lawsuit filed under Texas anti-militia law by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The lawsuit was brought by SPLC after the militia harassed Vietnamese fishermen during the 1981 fishing season. Beam was using Camp Puller near Houston to train militia in 1980, including children as young as 8 years old, in armed guerrilla tactics; the camp was shut down after publicity led to protests, and parents complaining that they were not aware of the children's activities at the camp. The Boy Scouts Council of Houston rejected a charter request from the troop at Camp Puller. Videotape shown during the shrimper hearing had Beam saying, "We're going to assume authority in this country." He was later acquitted in a separate case of conspiring to overthrow the government. He moved to Idaho afterwards. He became active with Aryan Nations in the early 1980s. He is considered to be the first important proponent of the strategy of leaderless resistance within the White Supremacist movement.
