Compassion Guides Picciolini's Life After Hate

Former white supremacist Christian Picciolini co-founded the organization Life After Hate in 2011. Its mission is to help people leave lives of hate and violence.

During a Jan. 22 visit to Evansville, Picciolini talked about his life – before and after hate – during presentations at Mater Dei and Reitz Memorial high schools, and in a public presentation at the Victory Theater in downtown Evansville.

Picciolini offered a profound-yet-simple challenge. “Find somebody you feel doesn’t deserve compassion and give it to them,” he said. “They’re the ones who need it the most.”

The ‘back story’

Thirty years ago, then-teenager Christian Picciolini was developing his sense of identity. Born to Italian immigrants in greater Chicagoland, he had reached a pivotal stage in young adulthood where that sense of identity – and a sense of purpose – became critically important; maybe more than he realized.

Clark Martell saw it; knew it; focused on it.

At the time – in the late 1980s, before the Internet we know today – Martell and others like him used face-to-face communication to recruit members to their organization and its cause – white supremacy.

“I was standing on a street corner, 14 years old, smoking a joint when Martell approached me,” Picciolini, said. “He told me that I was being what Communists and Jews wanted young white people like me to be … docile.”

Martell recruited the youngster into his organization – Chicago Area Skinheads. “He started feeding me (the information) I needed to get closer to him,” Picciolini said. “He told me I should be proud of what I am, but that people wanted to take it away from me.”

Picciolini recounted how Martell and others in CASH leadership soon found themselves behind bars for criminal acts. “At that point, everyone looked to me for leadership,” he recalled. At age 16, he took over CASH. He reorganized the group and added a new element that proved important to the movement – music.

Forming bands like White American Youth and Final Solution, Picciolini found himself awash in white power. Final Solution became the first American white-power band to perform in Europe, and its leader said that the trip really began to foster doubts.

“We played an event in Germany that led to people leaving the concert in this quaint little down and turning very violent and destructive. I had been having doubts for a while, but that really started raising doubts in my mind,” he said.

Picciolini married at 19 and, by 21, was the father of two children. “Suddenly, I faced the question of whether I was a hate monger, or a husband and father. Love started to push out the hate.”

He opened a record store in the Chicago area that did 75 percent of its business through the sale of white-power music. He intentionally diversified his product offering, and an interesting thing happened. “When I started offering other kinds of music, the store began attracting black customers, Jewish customers, gay customers,” he said. “Beyond taking their money, I really didn’t want to be their friend. But over time, I began talking to them.”

Picciolini officially renounced all ties to the white-supremacist movement in 1996, and he closed the record store. By that point, he had lost his relationship with his parents; he had lost his wife and children. His decision also cost him his white-power friends. He found himself, effectively, back on that street corner looking for his identity and purpose.

A friend suggested that he apply for work with IBM. “I didn’t expect much,” he said. “I was covered in tattoos, and my background didn’t really seem to fit IBM. But a couple of interviews later, they hired me to install equipment that they sold.”

Right off the bat, he got sent to a high school he’d been kicked out of after fighting – literally – with a custodian who is African American. “I saw him fairly soon after arriving, and I knew I had to go up to him and say something,” Picciolini said. He picked his spot, approached the man, and could only find two words to offer.

“All I could say to Mr. Holmes was, ‘I’m sorry,’” he recalled. “He remembered me, and he forgave me. And he made me promise that I would tell my story to help others.”