Harold Covington

Harold Armstead Covington (September 14, 1953 – July 14, 2018) was an American neo-Nazi activist and writer. He was a controversial figure even within the neo-Nazi movement; academic Jeffrey Kaplan described him as having "always raised more ire than virtually anyone in the fissiparous world of American National Socialism". After high school he joined the United States Army and joined the neo-Nazi group the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP). After being discharged from the army, Covington moved to South Africa, then Rhodesia, before being deported from Rhodesia for harassing members of a Jewish congregation. Upon his return to America, he joined the National Socialist Party of America (NSPA), becoming its leader. Following the Greensboro massacre that involved the NSPA, Covington was accused by both the Nazis and the Communists involved of being involved and possibly having informed on the far-right to escape consequences, which he denied. He ran for a number of local political positions in the 1970s, but did not achieve electoral success. In 1980, he ran for attorney general of North Carolina, receiving 56,000 votes in the Republican primary, over 43% of the vote. In his later years, he advocated the creation of a white ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest and was the founder of the Northwest Front (NF), a white separatist political movement that sought to establish a new nation to that effect. He wrote and self-published several fiction novels to mixed reception within the white nationalist movement.