Sam Francis

A title that seems well justified by the ubiquitous presence of his columns in racist forums and his influence over the general direction of right-wing extremism. In recent years and until his death in 2005, he served as chief editor of Citizens Informer, the newsletter of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a leading white supremacist hate group.

In His Own Words
"[W]hites did not descend to their present pitiable condition because their racial purity was somehow diluted but because they conceptually surrendered their will and identity... . The conceptual surrender is leading to a situation where the biological survival of the race is threatened, and if that occurs, then — because race is necessary, because no other race or people seems able to replicate or adopt the concepts on which white civilization is based — the conceptual surrender will not be remedied, and white civilization, the whole conceptual corpus, will die with the race."
— "Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival," American Renaissance, 1995

"If whites wanted to do so, they could dictate a solution to the racial problem tomorrow — by curtailing immigration and sealing the border, by imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites and encouraging a higher white birth rate, by refusing to be bullied into enduring "multiculturalism," affirmative action, civil rights laws and policies; and by refusing to submit to cultural dissolution, inter-racial violence and insults, and the guilt that multiracialists inculcate."
— "Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival," American Renaissance, 1995

"At a time when anti-white racial and ethnic groups define themselves in explicitly racial terms, only our own unity and identity as a race will be able to meet their challenge. If and when that challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us as Robert Mugabe has threatened to do to whites in Zimbabwe, they will do so not because we are 'Americans' or 'Christians' or 'conservatives' or 'liberals,' but because we are white."
— "Race and the American Prospect: An Introduction," VDARE.com, 2006 (published posthumously)

Background
Francis earned his B.A. from Johns Hopkins University in 1969 and his Ph.D. in modern history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1979. From 1977 until 1981, he worked as a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. He joined the staff of The Washington Times in 1986, where he worked as an editor and staff columnist. In both 1989 and 1990, he earned the Distinguished Writing Award for Editorial Writing from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

While always a staunch conservative, Francis's views radicalized over time. He began describing himself as a "paleoconservative" focused heavily on racial issues and ended up writing for racist publications like the Council of Conservative Citizens' (CCC)  newsletter, Citizens Informer. (The CCC, which had from the late 1980s until the late 1990s dozens of state legislators and other politicians in its ranks, is a white supremacist group that focuses on issues like support for the Confederate battle flag and opposition to non-white immigration, school busing and affirmative action. The group was built using the mailing lists of the White Citizens Councils, organizations formed to fight school desegregation in the South.)

Francis' definitive break with more mainstream conservatism came with his 1995 firing from The Washington Times. The newspaper acted after conservative author Dinesh D'Souza quoted a Francis speech to a 1994 conference put on by the white supremacist and race science journal, American Renaissance. D'Souza wrote that Francis' comments embodied the "new spirit of white bigotry."

Over the years, Francis increasingly focused on the mortal dangers to American society that he believed were posed by non-white immigration. To combat what he saw as threats to American society posed by "nonwhite minorities and their white anti-white allies," he argued in a 1995 article for American Renaissance that "Whites must formulate a white racial consciousness that identifies racial and biological endowments as important and relevant to social behavior, and their own racial endowments as essential to the continuing existence of Euro-American civilization." To counter the demographic threat from "immigration, nonwhite fertility and whites' own infertility," he called for ending all immigration, deploying the armed forces at the border, deporting all illegal immigrants, ending all state subsidies for the "nonwhite birth rate," and encouraging "white fertility." 

In the mid-1990s, Francis became chairman of the American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF), a virulent anti-immigrant organization long listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. AICF's website suggests that immigrants have "sown the seeds of ethnic strife in America" and that large-scale immigration into America, especially Third World immigration, is "a policy rooted in humanistic pride and the worship of Mammon [a Biblical reference to anti-Christian materialism]." In 1999, Francis went on to join the staff of the CCC's Citizens Informer as co-editor with Chris Temple, an adherent of the anti-Semitic Christian Identity religion. (Unlike Francis, Temple did not stay in his post long. He was indicted in 2003 after bilking some $1.6 million from his clients. In 2004, Temple pleaded guilty to mail fraud and money laundering charges and was sent to federal prison.)

For six years, until his death in 2005, Francis used the CCC's Citizens Informer to publicize his racial views and promote those of his like-minded allies. Still, behind the scenes, Francis continued to work with more mainstream conservative figures. For example, he edited Pat Buchanan's 2002 book, The Death of the West, which Francis wanted to title, The Death of Whitey. Buchanan's book cited many of the white nationalists close to Francis and its central thesis — "This new book deals with the vanishing white race and the vanishing European race and the death of our culture and civilization"— was first articulated by Francis.

The news of Francis' death on Feb. 15, 2005 inspired a flurry of eulogies by prominent racists. "What a terrible waste that this immense fund of learning and insight should suddenly be struck down!" wrote Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, which has described blacks as "deviant" and "psychopathological."

Meanwhile, The Washington Times ran an obituary about their former editorialist that omitted any mention of racism. The article even failed to note Francis' 1995 firing from the Times or his prolific writings for white supremacist publications, instead describing him as "a leading voice of traditional conservatism."