JEFF BERRY, ROT IN HELL!

If there was anyone who represented the buffoonery of the Ku Klux Klan more than this guy, that person was too stupid to know how to get himself in the spotlight. Destroying Jeff Berry’s life was too easy for anti-racists at the time, mostly because he helped.

One People’s Project

KANKAKEE, IL–When Jeff Berry died of lung cancer on May 31, he was a broken man. His days as a Klan leader had long been forgotten, he was living in the home of the son who shot him eight years ago, and no one cared until just this week when the news came out. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, It took them five days to confirm his death.

There used to be a time when Berry was relevant however, but one would have to go back almost twenty years to 1995 when he started an outfit called the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (AKKKK). The group’s noteriety came from Berry’s appearences on Jerry Springer at the time, and it was able to recruit from that noteriety. Other regional chapters began to form, and he started holding rallies around the country. One notable one took place in October 1999, which was organized by AKKKK member and former corrections officer James Sheeley in New York City, which is to this day believed to be one of two Klan rallies held in the city in its entire history.

1999 was also the year that Berry and other Klansmen held a news crew hostage after they attempted to interview him and he demanded the videotape when he did not like how the interview went. The journalists surrendered the tape to win their release after talking with their bosses, and once they were released filed criminal charges. Berry was arrested, but prosecutors declined to file charges, saying there wasn’t enough probable cause to warrant a kidnapping charge. it was also revealed that he was a longtime drug informant for the police that provided information that led to over 70 arrests. To that end, the SPLC filed suit against Berry on behalf of the reporters and won a $120,000 civil judgement against him and the AKKKK. That was when prosecutors reversed their decision and filed charges against Berry, and in 2001 he pled guilty to conspiracy to commit criminal confinement with a deadly weapon and sentenced to seven years in prison.

Eighteen months after he left prison in January 2005, Berry, who by this point renounced the Klan and all of its activities, was nearly beaten to death at a barbecue by his son Anthony Berry and a 21-year-old Klansman named Fred Wilson, who wanted to revive the AKKKK, a move the elder Berry opposed. In 2007, Anthony Berry pled guilty to a felony charge of criminal recklessness for the attack on his father, Anthony Berry was sentenced to a year on work release and ordered to pay $15,000 toward his father’s medical bills.
Berry, who died in a Cook County, IL hospital, did not have a public memorial service or even an obituary. He was cremated, according Heartland Memorial Center in Tinley Park, Ill., which handled his final arrangements, which is ironic given the recent history of the Tinley Park 5 and the fight with the white supremacists who have taken Berry’s place in the neo-Nazi spotlight.