A former neo-Nazi skinhead will be in West Virginia on Thursday to talk about tolerance.
Tom “TJ” Leyden says it’s an important and timely message since the white supremacist movement has grown over the last eight years.
“The Internet has helped them, music, video games and they’re getting pushed to a point where they talk about they’re 2% of the world’s population and they need to fight back,” Leyden said on Wednesday’s MetroNews Talkline.
Leyden knows the movement. He spent 15 years preaching white power as a skinhead after being converted over time.
“It was very gradual. I was already hanging out in the punk rock movement and I started hanging out with these skinhead kids,” he said of how he got involved.
“When the skinhead movement split into two factions, the area where I was at, the kids started going more and more into white power and I easily drifted right in there with them.”
Leyden worked as a regional recruiter in Southern California. “My job was to do everything I could to cause tension, cause dissension, cause mayhem in the city and get kids to join,” he said.
But things started to change when he had children of his own. At one point, Leyden’s three year old son used a racial slur when yelling at him.
“I started thinking about where this three year old was going to be in 15 years. I didn’t grow up with that in my house and I was putting that into his brain at a very young age.” He says his transition out started then.
Leyden and his wife, Julie, have since founded StrHATE Talk Consulting which works to combat hate, bigotry and intolerance through education.
He wrote the book Skinhead Confessions: From Hate to Hope, has been part of the White House Conference on Hate Crimes and was also featured in Time, on 48 Hours and some episodes of Gangland on The History Channel.
Leyden will speak at West Virginia State University in Kanawha County at 11 a.m. Thursday. The event at the Davis Fine Arts Building in Institute is free and open to the public.
It is the Eighth Annual West Virginia State University Human Rights Lecture.