STORY BY IAN KIRBY
Once in a while along comes a story so compelling, we have to tell it. Entertainers of all walks are featured in our magazine and certainly some of the most captivating in the campus market are the speakers. Not since Daryl Davis and his story of infiltrating the KKK as an African-American has this writer seen such a stark look and inside perception of the most deeply recessed crevices of racial hatred and indifference in our country. Now, perhaps with TJ Leyden, this bar has been set 22, CAMPUS ACTIVITIES MAGAZINE, March 2009
even higher, because TJ was not a foreign presence infiltrating a uniform body in which clearly didn’t belong only to come back and report to us outsiders as Daryl has.
hole that almost claimed his life. He now focuses all of his being on keeping other young and impressionable minds off of the same wrong track he headed down.
No, TJ was mixed in as one of the homogenous white mass that makes up the most diabolical sects of racism in the US. He spent half a life in the depths of anger, hatred, intolerance and despair. Only after the dawning realization that he was forcing his children into the same tumultuous existence did he escape the clutches of the black
TJ Leyden was a skinhead. While the larger term describes to the uniformed masses anyone who is in a racial gang in jail or on the streets, the group is actually much more narrowly defined. With humble beginnings on the West Coast in Southern California, the skinheads weren’t always an army of drug crazed and racially focused animals. It
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started off simply enough with just a bunch of angry kids with too much time on their hands, far more mundane than the Nazi-esque monsters we imagine in these groups. Much like the image of an innocent little boy named TJ doesn’t fit into our normal frame of reference. It wasn’t until coming out of a broken home that TJ was any more like the racial thugs we cringe at so easily. Now a successful and highly accredited speaker, TJ presents his hate crime lectures to colleges, law enforcement, military and
even the White House Conference on Hate Crimes. He worked on former California governor Grey Davis’ assessment panel for hate groups and has had a hand in much hate crime legislation. Long before all of this though, TJ was just a scared kid looking for a sense of identity. TJ was only 14 when the locomotive that was his home life started to derail. “My parents started getting divorced when I was 13 and by my next birthday I had started hanging around on the streets a lot. To vent my frustration, I started attend-
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ing a lot of the early punk rock shows, which were really all about anarchy and violence anyway.” TJ’s mettle quickly showed itself and he caught the attention of some pretty questionable characters. “I was in the mosh pit one time and a group of older guys saw me and liked my spunk, charisma and most especially my penchant for violence. They invited me to hang out and sort of provided me a new home away from home. They were skinheads.” TJ’s presentation is an interesting introspective into March 2009, CAMPUS ACTIVITIES MAGAZINE, 23