PLEASANT HOME, Ore. _ Tom Metzger, founder of the White Aryan Resistance, returned to the Portland area over the weekend, reiterating his separatist views.

On Saturday, he spoke to Volksfront, a secretive group that describes itself as a European American organization concerned with the advancement of white people and "freedom for our folk from Zionist manipulation and foreign influence."

The media wasn't invited to the meeting in a Portland suburb, but Metzger spoke with several reporters on Sunday.

"Nothing breeds racism like integration," Metzger said. "The more integrated Portland becomes, the more racism you'll have."

Metzger added that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the troubled economy will lead more people to seek a white-only state.

Metzger, who now lives in California, has a long history in Oregon. He helped organize some of Oregon's neo-Nazi skinhead gangs in the late 1980s and became a defendant in a landmark civil-rights trial in Portland.

A Multnomah County jury in 1990 found Metzger guilty of helping incite three Portland skinheads in the fatal beating of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian who attended Portland State University.

The jury awarded Seraw's family $12.5 million, a judgment that bankrupted Metzger and the White Aryan Resistance.

On Sunday, Metzger said he has paid only a fraction of the award.
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Steven Stroud, who monitors hate groups for the Oregon Spotlight, a Portland civil-rights group, said about 100 people attended the meeting. Cars in the lot bore license plates from Oregon, California, Idaho and Montana.

Metzger's appearance fell on a date racist organizations sometimes refer to as "Martyr's Day." On Dec. 8, 1984, federal agents killed Robert Mathews, founder of a white-supremacist gang called The Order, in a standoff on Whidbey Island, Wash. The Order robbed banks and an armored truck to finance a race war based in the Northwest. It also killed a radio talk show host in Denver and got into a shootout with federal agents in Portland.
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