Friend,

It was 1991, the height of the vibrant alternative music scene in the Pacific Northwest, and a young Black punk rocker by the name of Eric K. Ward was worried.

He had reason to be. Police had warned that a group of neo-Nazi skinheads was threatening violence at a Eugene, Oregon, concert of Fugazi, a popular punk band known for pushing back against the growing terror being unleashed by white supremacist groups in the region.

But instead of providing a security presence at the concert hall – as the musicians had requested – the Eugene Police Department pressured the music club management to cancel the concert.

The incident, Ward recalled, crystallized his understanding of just how far this country has fallen short of the ideal of liberty and justice for all.

“Up until that time, I mostly saw Eugene as a pretty liberal kind of haven,” Ward said. “But this was a wake-up call that neo-Nazis didn’t even have to show up, like they had done at clubs and shows in Los Angeles. To shut our scene down they merely had to make the threat, and the community found itself immobilized.”

At that moment, the dreadlocked ska-punk singer – who today has become a prominent leader against hatred and extremism – began to seek a better way. Bringing together a rainbow of vulnerable communities living under the threat of organized bigotry, he began gradually, step by step, to launch more sophisticated efforts at change.

Ward walked into meetings of some of the earliest gatherings of America’s emerging “alt-right” to try to reason with them. He traveled by bus across thousands of miles to help establish hundreds of anti-hate task forces in small towns and big cities. He worked with law enforcement on strategies to handle extremists.

And as he began to learn about like-minded community-based efforts around the country focused on human rights, he eagerly reached out to several organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, adopting their playbooks for countering organized hate.

Today, Ward’s dreadlocks are gone, but his activism still resonates. A senior fellow with the SPLC’s Intelligence Project since April 2020, Ward this month will receive the Civil Courage Prize, a human rights award that recognizes steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk.

“I don’t take bullying very well, and I always take the side of those who I think are being bullied,” Ward said. “And so I think what happened for me is, first, folks are messing with the music that I love. Then, what others helped me figure out was, this wasn’t just a set of individual behaviors, this was an ideology. And it was a political strategy to derail the aspiration for a multiracial and multicultural society, one that was steeped in actually trying to overcome challenges, not using those challenges as an excuse to descend into chaos and bigotry. That’s really what galvanized me.”

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