“[Louis] Beam characterized the campaign of violence and harassment of the Vietnamese as ‘guerilla theater,’ capable of being replicated anywhere.” books WhiteSupremacy History
These days the Kemah Boardwalk is a glitzy, overbuilt amusement park where competing pop songs blare from speakers and the smells of fried fish, children’s sweat, and Houston’s overripe air waft over throngs of visitors. But I have never heard Bruce Springsteen’s “Galveston Bay” played there—a tune that unlocks a shocking secret about this popular tourist trap.
“There was a cannon on the stern. Something was hanging from one of the outriggers,” he writes. The men aboard, all toting rifles, wore the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan. The hanging man was only a dummy, but the boat parade in Kemah was part of a sustained campaign of threats against Vietnamese fishermen that featured firebombs, windows shot out of houses, and cross burnings in backyards.
Back in the early 1980s, Kemah and Seabrook were near NASA’s Johnson Space Center, but also only minutes from an address on Red Bluff Road that served as the Texas hub of the KKK and the base of a Klan leader named Louis Ray Beam Jr. who was training a private army. As part of his research, Johnson reached out to Beam, a Vietnam War vet, who at one time in the 1980s claimed a membership of as many as 5,000 in Texas.
Years later in San Antonio, Nam’s son was shocked when his father announced another move. Nam had heard “there was good money to be made in the shrimping business. Even though he knew nothing about shrimping, he’d bought a fish house with a small bungalow overlooking the bay,” Johnson writes. Johnson also relied heavily on insights gleaned from Diane Wilson, a gutsy female shrimper and well-known environmental crusader based in Seadrift. Over decades of activism, Wilson has been arrested, conducted hunger strikes, filed lawsuits, and repeatedly allied herself with Vietnamese fishermen, Houston attorneys, and anyone else willing to fight corporate polluters.
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