The Fishermen and the Dragon

A gripping account of one town's reckoning with the forces that strive to turn residents against each other-a story that involves racial prejudice, ecological disaster, and a significant chapter in the origin story of the modern white supremacy movement.

In the late 1970s, the fishermen of Galveston Bay, Texas, were struggling to make ends meet. The ocean they relied on-which had sustained generations of shrimpers and crabbers before them-was being poisoned by nearby petrochemical plants. Meanwhile, a small but growing number of Vietnamese refugees had recently started fishing in the gulf, as well, straining the limited resources even further.

The situation was a tinderbox waiting to explode, and the Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan saw an opportunity to stoke the fishermen's rage and prejudices. One day in 1979, torch in hand, he strode over to an old boat graffitied with the words U.S.S. VIET CONG, and issued a 90-day deadline for the refugees to leave, or else "it's going to be a helluva lot more violent than Vietnam!" As the boat burned, the white fishermen roared their approval, convinced that if they could drive these newcomers from the coast, everything would return to normal.

A garish campaign of violence ensued, marked by burning crosses, death threats, torched boats, and armed Klansmen patrolling Galveston Bay. The Vietnamese were on the brink of fleeing, until a charismatic leader in their community named Colonel Nam convinced them to stand their ground and to take their fight to the courts. Drawing upon a trove of never-before-published material, including FBI and ATF records, unprecedented access to the SPLC's case files, and scores of firsthand interviews with Klansmen, shrimpers, law enforcement, environmental activists, lawyers, perpetrators and victims, Johnson uncovers secrets and secures confessions for crimes that have gone unsolved for more than 40 years. This gripping investigation of a forgotten story ultimately leads Johnson to the decades-long battle to save the bays from the true threat.

Auteur

Kirk Wallace Johnson is the author of The Feather Thief and To Be a Friend Is Fatal, and the founder of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, which he started after serving with USAID in Fallujah. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and on This American Life, among others.