Extremism: Christian Picciolini, Balding man with dark hair, beard, mustache, black top stands in front of bookshelves

Why Teenage Christian Picciolini Joined, Then Quit White Power Movement

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Christian Picciolini, 14, was hanging out one day in an alley near the intersection of Union and Division streets in Chicago. 

An older man with cropped hair and big shiny boots drove up. 

He was warm and friendly, and he offered fatherly advice: Don’t smoke marijuana, he told Picciolini. “That’s what the Communists and Jews want you to do,” he said. He told Picciolini to be proud of his Roman warrior ancestors: They were a superior race, he said. The man was Clark Martell, a violent neo-Nazi who was later sentenced to prison for assault and robbery. But Picciolini was hungry for attention and he saw Martell as heroic.

toolkit: Woman showing papers to man and woman in suits.

Toolkit Can Help OST Workers Band Together to Respond to Hate Messages 

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What do you do if you find racist graffiti on a wall near your school or youth program? Or come across neo-Nazi flyers in the area? Or read white nationalist comments on an online platform used by your program? A toolkit, “Confronting White Nationalism in Schools,” can help adults who work with youth choose specific responses. It was created by the Western States Center, a Portland, Oregon, nonprofit whose mission is to strengthen inclusive democracy and respond to bigotry and intolerance.

white nationalism: Rear view of man in crowd wearing ball cap, blue tank top that says Proud Boy.

When Hate Groups Recruit Youth: Teacher, Former White Nationalist Tell How to Counter It

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Nora Flanagan’s first brush with hate group recruiting took place when she was 15 and living in Beverly, a southwest Chicago neighborhood. Her older brother brought home a couple of his friends. To Flanagan’s dismay, they’d shaved their heads and wore Confederate flags on their jackets. It signaled they were part of the burgeoning skinhead movement in Chicago in the late 1980s and early 1990s, led by a teen named Christian Picciolini. “And they had been recruited and they were running around with this guy terrorizing the South Side.