Euphoric conference held against all odds!
By James Edwards
EURO MP3s, or try here.
I just experienced one of the most remarkable weeks of my life, of that there is no doubt. It was a week in which I went through the entire spectrum of emotions; a week that ultimately left me exhausted and full of hope. What you’ll read below will both shock and inspire you. I hope you’ll take the time to digest the entire article. With that being said, let me start at the very beginning.
Back in June I made the decision to work with David Duke and organize the 2008 European American Unity and Rights Conference (EURO) here in Memphis. After I was able to negotiate a very good contract with the Whispering Woods Hotel and Conference Center in Olive Branch, Mississippi, we were ready to begin promotion of the highly anticipated event, the first of its kind in over three years.
When Representative Duke announced on his website that the gathering would be held in the Memphis area on November 7-9, the local media went into an overzealous frenzy to try and uncover exactly which hotel would dare let European Americans exercise their freedom of speech. Being inept, they failed in their task to find the meeting location until about a week before it was to begin.
Wednesday, October 29
It was on this day that a local “civil rights” group called the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center finally discovered where Duke and Company were coming. Local leftist Jacob Flowers immediately posted the contact information for Travis Murray, General Manager of Whispering Woods, on their website and encouraged the radical left to contact him and voice their displeasure over the fact he would afford us a place to meet.
Contact Mr. Murray they did. By Wednesday night Mr. Murray’s wife and children had received several calls at home and been threatened by these Marxists with death if our contract was not canceled. The very next day, Travis Murray resigned from his position. “Peace and Justice,” indeed.
As a result of these terroristic threats, the government of DeSoto County, Mississippi, issued a week long “State of Emergency” declaration, which gave them authority to deputize police officers from neighboring counties in order to protect the hotel’s property and those who would be coming to the EURO Conference. Even though the local police was said to have been working with the FBI, we have still received no word as to what their so-called investigations have uncovered, even though the threats were made specifically to stop our People from coming together.
By this time the local media’s interest was beginning to reach a fever pitch. What did they report? The truth about the threats of violence against our members and the family of a honest hotel manager? Of course not. It was reported that a local “civil rights group” had tried to warn the manager’s family that hosting our conference might be “bad for business,” and that the real reason for all the unpleasantness was because the “Klan” was coming to the Mid-South, led by “White Supremacist” David Duke.
Friday, October 31 (Halloween)
On my way to Atlanta I stopped by the Whispering Woods Hotel to speak with the new acting General Manager. I made mention of the fact that the gross mischaracterizations our group was being subjected to in saturation coverage on television news was complete fantasy. I apologized for any inconvenience that these biased reports may have caused her staff, but reiterated to her that our members would be among the finest patrons she’d ever find and that I felt it incumbent upon me to meet with her in person to clear the air.
She seemed relieved to have this calming reassurance and promised that our conference would go ahead as scheduled; that our contract was ironclad and that we could expect the same professionalism and courtesy that any other group would expect to receive. Seemed fair enough to me.
The only thing she really seemed concerned with at the time was finding out how many banquet meals we’d be needing. I told her I’d get that number to her after the weekend. We shook hands, and that was that.
Tuesday, November 4
I was in downtown Memphis, walking along the banks of the Mississippi River with a fellow conference speaker from Denmark, when I received a series of calls from people who had registered for EURO and booked rooms at Whispering Woods. They were calling to inform me that they had just been told by the hotel that our conference had been arbitrarily canceled.
Yes, the hotel actually called all of those who were registered to attend the conference before they called the conference organizers themselves. Frantically trying to find out what went wrong, I began working with David Duke to get to the bottom of this.
In the end, the hotel management determined that the declaration of a “State of Emergency” gave them the authority to breach our contract. They even invited Duke to sue them, being smug in their opinion that no judge or jury would ever rule in favor of the politically incorrect.
What was equally damnable was that the hotel then reported to the media that they did not know with whom they were dealing with when the contract was originally agreed upon. Having the original contract here on my desk, I find that a little hard to believe when the contract lists “Dr. David E. Duke” as the event organizer, and “European American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO)” as the name of the event.
Nevertheless, they went on to tell us that not only would we not be allowed to use their facilities to hold our meeting, but we wouldn’t even be allowed to keep our rooms there for the purposes of sleeping. We had filled up their hotel with over one hundred booked rooms, and now these people were being thrown out as well.
After five months of meticulous planning, we were now two days away from the start date of our conference without a place to meet, and without a place for our those registered to stay. So distressed was I that my body literally went into a convulsive state. I can remember gagging while I was on the phone with David as we tried to determine what our options were. The stress was nearly more than I could bear, but we dug deep and made the decision to press onward. Duke said he’d be in Memphis the next day to set up a command center and arrange a press conference.
Wednesday, November 5
I met David at a local restaurant and we began to prepare the contingency plan, which was not an enviable task. We had to locate and secure and alternate meeting venue, call over three hundred registered conference attendees and determine who was still coming to Memphis and who wasn’t, and try to find hotel rooms for everyone, all in less than 48 hours.
I recruited a few local supporters to help us with the phone list and they locked themselves in Dr. Duke’s hotel room and began calling each person, one by one. In the meantime, I was narrowing down a short list of prospective venues while calling the local media to alert them that Duke would like to set the record straight.
This would be the second of six consecutive nights that we would get less than three hours of sleep.
Thursday, November 6
A silver lining was beginning to manifest itself this morning when we settled on a new location to hold the conference. Additionally, it looked like well over half of those who originally planned on coming to be with us were, in fact, still planning on coming to be with us. We told them to try and book a room in a certain area of town that houses a cluster of hotels that are all relative inexpensive. We told them that we would call them on Saturday morning, one hour before the conference was to begin, to give them directions to the meeting location. It’s sad when honest people have to keep such information confidential, but for security concerns, in was absolutely necessary.
To my astonishment, not a single person we called complained, not in the least. Even though the event had to be shortened from a three day meeting to a one day meeting, they were just thrilled that we had decided to not be bullied into submission by threats of violence and dishonest media coverage. The leadership we were showing in the middle of such adversity seemed to inspire them to rally.
Later this afternoon, David Duke held his press conference. Affiliates for all the major networks and several newspaper reporters showed up to ask questions of the man that they had been so relentlessly attacking for the past week. So incredible had this story become by now that the entire Mid-South was talking about us. It had been the lead story for days, with each report becoming increasingly hostile.
I stood just behind the collection of cameras as Duke issued his statement and took questions. I refused to comment to the press, as is my policy when local media inquiries are made to me, but remained shocked to see just how rabidly biased they were against the message of equal rights for White Americans. With the man they love to hate in their cross hairs, they were particularly vicious and condescending, but Duke handled them with mastery, as he usually does.
After the press conference was over, I was standing with David in his hotel room when we heard a knock on the door. It was the manager of the Drury Inn, along with two uniformed police officers. The manager informed Rep. Duke that he had been determined to be a “security risk” to hotel patrons at the hotel and that he would have to vacate his room immediately. Apparently, there had been another bomb threat made due to the fact that the news reported that this was the hotel that Duke was staying at. Keep in mind that Duke was not holding the conference on hotel grounds, he was merely using the room for his private accommodations.
Feeling as though he was being discriminated against, he asked to speak with the corporate management of Drury Inn. The end result was the same, and we were forced to relocate to another hotel across the street. Drury Inn later released a statement to the press informing them that Duke was no longer welcomed on their property. Do you think the same scenario would have unfolded had Jesse Jackson been in that room instead of David Duke? The double standards being employed were egregious.
When you have your legally binding contracts broken without cause, as we did at Whispering Woods, when you are not afforded the freedom to assemble peaceably and exercise your God-given freedom of speech, and when you are not even allowed to sleep in a hotel room because of your beliefs, then what rights do you have? Is this what European Americans can come to expect in the coming Obama Administration?
Undaunted still, we kept charging forward.
Friday, November 7
By now the media had been successful in whipping the local communities into an absolute hysteria. So fearful was the Board of Aldermen of Olive Branch, Mississippi, that they approved an “anti-gathering” ordinance that Mayor Sam Rikard said was prompted by our group.
The ordinance prohibits demonstrations (or meetings) on public property including streets, highways, right of ways, sidewalks, and businesses “in order to properly secure the immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety of the citizens of the City of Olive Branch.” Is this America or Soviet Russia? What freedoms can we depend on if we can’t even discuss the issues vital to our survival?
And this, as Sam Dickson so eloquently says, is the point. The campaign of harassment and persecution conducted against this meeting is vivid confirmation of the fact that contrary to what they claim, our enemies do not represent – and have never represented – freedom, civil liberties, the market place of ideas and all the other virtues they constantly claim for themselves. This is now standard operating procedure for the minority-racist and White liberal coalition and the Establishment it controls.
But, little did the cowards of Olive Branch government know that we had now confirmed a place in Memphis, and would no longer be needing them.
Saturday, November 8
This was it, our day of reckoning. Faced with exhausting nights of endless work, constant badgering from the media, threats against our lives, and an outright logistical nightmare, we prepared ourselves for the day of the conference.
At 6:00 a.m. we began providing our coalition of the willing with the directions to the meeting hall, which was a hotel ballroom within walking distance from where Duke had held his press conference just two days before.
In an expression of the indomitable spirit that makes our race so wonderful, I was overwhelmed to count over two hundred conference attendees on hand after such extraordinary hardships. For the next twelve hours, men and women from France to California cheered and roared as the collection of speakers delivered their presentations from the podium. I was pleased to have been one of them.
I have been a political activist for eight years now, having spent the last four as host of The Political Cesspool Radio Program, and never before have I been so proud of our People. We overcame and endured against all odds. How glorious it was to have the sense of satisfaction that comes in knowing that David Duke, myself, a handful of others who volunteered to see this through to completion, and all of those in attendance, would not surrender. We got the job done and had our conference after all. My heartfelt thanks and appreciation goes out to all of those who were there. Our voices were heard and those who had tried to silence us were routed.
By the time the press (and police, who were there for our security) showed up at the hotel it was too late to stop us. Their very best efforts to run us out of town were not nearly good enough. Never before had I felt so satisfied and so overjoyed. The camaraderie was something to behold, and my heart goes out to those who were not able to be with us. Even learning midway through the day that Duke had been kicked out of another hotel, the nearby Baymont (again for merely being a registered guest there), was not enough to dampen our spirits – or his.
I could write an equally long recap of what took place inside the meeting itself, but I’ll leave that to David Duke. Speaking of Duke, let me say for the record, for the SPLC and ADL, what a tremendous honor it was for me to have worked with him on this conference. We went to war together and scored a victory for the basic civil rights of European Americans, a victory that I hope will be duplicated by others many times over.
After the conference, David appeared as the featured guest on my live broadcast of Political Cesspool and fielded supportive phone calls from across the country. The show was downloaded so many times that it contributed to an RBN server crash. Republic Broadcasting is now working to retrieve the archive. People seem to be waking up.
[See http://www.republicbroadcasting.org]
There is so much more that happened behind the scenes this week, enough stories to fill a book. The meals, the brainstorming, the fellowship, and the ultimate sigh of relief…what a thrill to share such a great experience and to have played a role in the salvaging of this historic gathering.
Let this triumph increase our fierce determination to never retreat, surrender, or apologize when our backs are pushed up against the wall. We owe it to our ancestors, and to our future progeny, to hold the line and be eternally vigilant. The future is what we make it and I choose to fight.
Please feel free to copy this post to your mailing lists or post it to your website(s). This story needs to be told.
Dr. David Duke speaks to a packed house of patriots at the Nov. 8, 2008 EURO Conference in Memphis, TN
(Photos by Virginia Gentlewoman & Jamie Kelso)
Read more James Edwards at www.thepoliticalcesspool.org
