Don Black

Stephen Donald Black (born July 28, 1953) is an American white supremacist.

He is the founder and webmaster of the neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial, and homophobic website Stormfront.Sources which consider Stormfront a white supremacist website are:

Local media labeled the botched attempt the "Bayou of Pigs", a play on words for the unsuccessful 1961 "Bay of Pigs Invasion" of Cuba.

Black later explained the invasion as an attempt to set up an anti-communist regime, saying, "What we were doing was in the best interests of the United States and its security in the hemisphere, and we feel betrayed by our own government."

The invasion was intended to restore former prime minister Patrick John to the mostly black Caribbean island.

Prosecutors said the real purpose for the invasion would have been to set up tourism, gambling, offshore banking, and timber logging operations on the impoverished island.

Black was born in Athens, Alabama, and became a white supremacy advocate at an early age when he began handing out swastika-adorned pamphlets from the National Socialist White People's Party at his high school, Athens High School, before transferring to Madison Academy in the fall of 1970 in order to avoid attending school with black students.

This led to a decision by the local school board to ban the distribution of political literature.

Black countered by mailing literature to student addresses obtained from school handbooks.

In the summer of 1970, after his junior year at Athens High School, Black traveled to Savannah, Georgia, to work on the gubernatorial campaign of J. B. Stoner, a segregationist and leader of the National States' Rights Party (NSRP).

It was in this election that Jimmy Carter won the Georgia governorship.

Black was asked to obtain a copy of the NSRP membership list by Robert Lloyd, a leader of the National Socialist White People's Party, formerly known as the American Nazi Party.

At the time, Black was a member of the Party's youth branch, the National Socialist Youth Movement.

Also working on the Stoner campaign was Jerry Ray, brother of James Earl Ray, who committed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. On July 25, 1970, Jerry Ray shot Black (who was 16 at the time) in the chest with a .38-caliber hollow-point bullet to stop him from taking files from Stoner's campaign office.

Ray was acquitted of all charges, saying he shot in self-defense after Black reached for what appeared to be a weapon.

Black finished his senior year at Madison Academy, a private school in Huntsville.

In the early 1970s, Black traveled on a road trip to an American Nazi Party conference in Virginia with fellow white supremacists David Duke and Joseph Paul Franklin (the latter of who was later convicted of multiple acts of racial and antisemitic terrorism and executed for serial murder).

Then after high school, Black graduated from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1975.

Black joined the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1975, one year after David Duke took over the organization.

He moved to Birmingham to become the group's state organizer.

In 1979, he ran for mayor of Birmingham, receiving 2.5% of the vote.

Richard Arrington Jr.. won the mayoral election, becoming Birmingham's first African American mayor.

After the resignation of Duke in 1980, Black became Grand Wizard, or national director, of the Klan.

On April 27, 1981, Black and nine other would-be mercenaries – many recruited from Klan affiliated organizations – were arrested in New Orleans as they prepared to board a boat stocked with weapons and ammunition to invade the island nation Dominica in what they would call Operation Red Dog.

In 1981, Black was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in the attempted invasion and his violation of the Neutrality Act.

He was released on November 15, 1984.

During his time in prison, Black took computer programming classes which led him to establish Stormfront on the Internet years later.

He ran for office in Alabama, this time as a Populist Party U.S. Senate candidate.

In 1995, Black founded Stormfront, which was the Internet's first significant website espousing racial hate.

It remains among the most popular online resources for those drawn to racist ideologies.

The site has featured the writings of William Luther Pierce and David Duke as well as works by the Holocaust denying Institute for Historical Review and the Culture of Critique series.

At first, along with these articles, Stormfront housed a library of white pride, neo-Nazi, and white power skinhead graphics for downloading, and a number of links to other white nationalist websites.

In a 1998 interview for the alternative weekly newspaper Miami New Times, Black said: "We want to take America back. We know a multicultural Yugoslav nation can't hold up for too long. Whites won't have any choice but to take military action. It's our children whose interests we have to defend."

In 1999, Black created the website "martinlutherking.org", which is administered by Stormfront.

This website was created to malign the character of Dr King.

In December 2007, Black gained attention for donating money to Ron Paul's 2008 presidential run.

In 2008, Black said that the establishment of white pride as a special interest group within the Republican Party is crucial.

Asked by an interviewer for Italian newspaper la Repubblica if Stormfront was not just the new Ku Klux Klan, Black responded affirmatively, though he noted that he would never say so to an American journalist.

In January 2018, the site remained online and surpassed sites containing reliable content in Google search results.

Today, the website is not accessible.