When 'Osama Bin Laden' Needed Help to Remove Racist Tattoos, Bar Group Found a $35K Donor
When Bryon Widner phoned the Southern Poverty Law Center, workers at the civil rights organization knew who he was.
Widner is so well-known as a white supremacist, “it was like the Osama Bin Laden of the movement calling in,” says Joseph Roy, the chief investigator of the Montgomery, Ala.-based group.
But Widner was calling for an unusual reason. And the SPLC not only to gave him a hearing but, after extensive discussion, agreed to help him with what he wanted—removal of the racist tattoos that covered his face and hands, the Associated Press reported.
The Daily Mail version of the story includes a number of photos.
Married, with children, Widner and his wife, who also has a white supremacist past, renounced their former way of life. They even moved out of Michigan, where they viewed by former fellow-travelers as traitors and were being threatened, the news agency recounts. But Widner couldn’t get work and move on with his life with white supremacist tattoos covering his face.
Widner agreed to provide information to the SPLC and police, and the SPLC found an anonymous donor to pay the $35,000 it would cost just to remove the tattoos from his face, neck and hands. It took 25 surgeries over 16 months, in a process that was far more painful than getting the tattoos in the first place.
He still feels bad about the damage he may have done to others; he doesn’t remember a lot of what he did, he tells the AP, because he was often in a drunken stupor when he beat people up. A documentary about the tattoo removal shows him hurting, and he saw the pain and humiliation as penance.
But there has been atonement, too: After it was screened, a black woman hugged Widner and tearfully told him, “I forgive you.”
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “Unusual Tattoo Gets Gang Member Convicted of First-Degree Murder in Cold Case”
ABAJournal.com: “Defendant Who Covered Up Tattoos at Trial Declines to Do So in Life-or-Death Penalty Phase”
St. Petersburg Times: “Neo-Nazi John Ditullio gets life sentence in 2006 stabbings”
