Northwest civil rights group runs out of money

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, October 5, 2003

SPOKANE — The Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity, which once prominently campaigned against white supremacy in the region, has run out of money.

"We are in a financial crisis," longtime board member Stew Albert of Portland told The Spokesman-Review. "How we got to this spot, that’s what I’m trying to figure out."

The coalition’s telephone is disconnected, its Web site is down and its Seattle post office box closed. In its last report, filed in 2000, the coalition said its expenses of $880,000 were double its income.

The group’s executive director, Eric Ward, resigned in mid-August and hasn’t been replaced. In his resignation letter, he wrote, "Keeping the doors of the Northwest Coalition open during the last two years has been a month-to-month financial battle."

The group was evicted from its Seattle office this summer for not paying rent.

Some board members said they expect the remaining six people on the board to vote later this month to disband the organization, which even now exists only on paper.

Mark Potok, of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., described the coalition as the largest grass-roots civil rights organization of its kind in the United States.

"For 15 years, the Northwest Coalition was a very important force in the battle against white supremacy," he said.

The group began as the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment, founded in Coeur d’Alene in 1987 by the late Bill Wassmuth and others to combat the Aryan Nations and other hate groups.

The coalition’s records on white supremacists and hate groups in the Northwest were sold to the Center for New Community, an anti-hate group based in Chicago, said Devin Burghart, director of the center.

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