The Five Words symbol is a reference to a White Supremacist slogan: “I Have Nothing to Say.”
In the late 1990s, White Supremacist activists Tom Metzger and Alex Curtis popularized the phrase, which they claimed should be the only words White Supremacists say when arrested by the police.
Tom Metzger
Metzger joined the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1970s and eventually became its leader in California. He left the organization in 1980 and pursued his own path of hate. He founded White Aryan Resistance with former Ku Klux Klan members, helping foster a generation of neo-Nazis in the United States. In 1988, he sent his followers to organize a Skinhead group in Portland, and within days, three neo-Nazis murdered an Ethiopian student.
Human rights organizations sued him, and a court found him liable, awarding the victim’s family $12.5 million in damages. Bankrupt and impoverished, he returned to his hometown in Indiana, where he continued spreading hate until his death in 2020. At the age of 82, after years of promoting hatred through his radio programs, the Anti-Defamation League stated following his death that “we can now put him in the dustbin of history and collectively take a breath.” His death, the organization said, closed “a dark chapter of hate” involving a notorious figure who poisoned the hearts and minds of others with his xenophobia, racism, antisemitism, and intolerance.
Alex Curtis
Alex Curtis was charged with a federal hate crime in 2000. Although he had vowed never to cooperate with the government, he eventually broke down and pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiracy. The American Nazi Party, for one, had hoped that Curtis’s legal battle would become the “FIRST time Racists STAND UNITED AGAINST THE SYSTEM.”
Curtis was known, among other things, for his essay explaining how to answer all questions from law enforcement with just five words: “I Have Nothing to Say.”
Curtis eventually broke his pledge. In March 2001, he pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiracy, admitting that he had harassed U.S. Representative Bob Filner with racist messages and placed snakeskin in his mailbox; vandalized two synagogues in San Diego County, as well as the homes and offices of local civil-rights activists, with racist graffiti; and left a grenade at the home of a California state legislator.
He was described as a “Lone Wolf” because he used his online newsletter, Nationalist Observer, to promote violence against the government. He was reportedly part of a small cell of racist activists who were already in custody on related charges. One of the members pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one year in prison.
During his legal proceedings in 2001, he pledged not to associate with any of a long list of 138 “known” White Supremacists - including White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger, a powerful ally who had raised money for Curtis’s legal defense. Curtis is reportedly believed to have died in 2021 in Ireland, where he had been living in self-imposed exile, at the age of 66.
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