Prometheus 6   

The Black White Supremacist
By PAUL TOUGH

… Felton managed to stay free for only three months. He is back in prison now, beginning a 21-year sentence for crimes he committed after his release. The prosecutor in the case said in court that Felton was a racial terrorist, that he had been ''plotting to use violent terrorist actions, like blowing up the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., in the hope and belief that such actions would spark and ignite a racial war, a racial holy war, that would bring about this new, all-white nation.'' In a letter that Felton wrote to the judge, after he was found guilty, he confirmed that his ultimate goal was to establish ''a politically and territorially autonomous White nation somewhere in North America.'' He wrote that given the way things had looked to him at the time he got out of prison, he wasn't able to see any path that seemed like ''an honorable alternative to armed revolt.''

… If you know Leo Felton's story, it is difficult, when you first meet him, to concentrate on anything other than his appearance. It's not just the tattoos. He has spent many years devoted to the idea of racial separation, to the belief that Americans should be divided by the color of their skin. But his own appearance is hard to define. His skin is olive-colored. His features are angular. It's not hard to believe what he wrote in a letter to a racist friend just before he got out of prison, that he is '' 1/4 English and 3/4 Italian.''

But, in fact, he is the product of a short-lived and idealistic late-60's marriage between a white former nun named Corinne Vincelette and a black architect named Calvin Felton. That is Leo Felton's biological reality, despite his elaborate attempt, over the last decade, to rebel against it. It is a reality that he blames for many of the wrong turns that his life has taken, a reality that he successfully shielded from his brothers in the movement for years, a reality that only now, back in prison, is he trying to understand in a new way.