William Luther Pierce

His father was born in Christiansburg, Virginia in 1892.

His mother was born in Richland, Georgia in 1910, with her family being part of the aristocracy of the Old South, descendants of Thomas H. Watts, the governor of Alabama and attorney general of the Confederate States of America.

After the American Civil War, the family lived a working-class existence.

William Luther Pierce III (September 11, 1933 – July 23, 2002) was an American neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and far-right political activist.

For more than 30 years, he was one of the highest-profile individuals of the white nationalist movement.

A physicist by profession, he was author of the novels The Turner Diaries and Hunter under the pen name Andrew Macdonald.

Pierce's father once served as a government representative on ocean-going cargo ships and sent reports back to Washington, D.C.; he later became manager of an insurance agency but was killed in a car accident in 1943.

After the elder Pierce's death, the family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, and after that to Dallas, Texas.

Pierce performed well in school; his last two years in high school were spent at the Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas.

As a teenager, his hobbies and interests were model rockets, chemistry, radios, electronics, and reading science fiction.

After finishing military school in 1951, Pierce worked briefly in an oil field as a roustabout.

He was injured when a four-inch (10 cm) pipe fell on his hand, and he spent the rest of that summer working as a shoe salesman.

Pierce earned a scholarship to attend Rice University in Houston.

Pierce graduated from high school in 1952 and he went on to receive a bachelor's degree in physics from Rice University in 1955 as well as a doctorate from University of Colorado at Boulder in 1962.

He became an assistant professor of physics at the Oregon State University in that year.

He graduated from Rice in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in physics.

He worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before attending graduate school, initially at Caltech during 1955–56.

At the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, he earned a master's degree and a doctorate in 1962.

He taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965.

His tenure as assistant professor at Oregon State University coincided with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and later the counterculture.

The former, along with the protests against the Vietnam War, he regarded as being led by Jews.

After a brief membership in the anti-communist John Birch Society in 1962, he resigned because the Society was uninvolved in race issues.

After he moved to Washington, D.C. he became an associate of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party.

During this time he was the editor of the party's quarterly ideological journal, National Socialist World.

In 1965, he left his tenure at Oregon State University and became a senior researcher for the aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut.

In 1965 to finance his political ambitions, Pierce left his tenure at Oregon State University and relocated to North Haven, Connecticut, to work as a senior researcher at the Advanced Materials Research and Development Laboratory of aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney.

In 1966, Pierce moved to the Washington, D.C. area and became an associate of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, who was assassinated in 1967.

Pierce became co-leader of the National Youth Alliance, which split in 1974, with Pierce founding the National Alliance.

Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries (1978) depicts a violent revolution in the United States, followed by a world war and the extermination of non-white races.

In 1985, Pierce relocated the headquarters of the National Alliance to Hillsboro, West Virginia where he founded the Cosmotheist Community Church to receive tax exemption for his organization.

Pierce spent the rest of his life in West Virginia hosting a weekly show, American Dissident Voices, publishing the internal newsletter National Alliance Bulletin (formerly titled Action), and overseeing his publications, National Vanguard magazine (originally titled Attack!), Free Speech and Resistance, as well as books which were published by his publishing firm National Vanguard Books, Inc. and the white power music label Resistance Records.

Another novel by Pierce, Hunter (1989) portrays the actions of a lone-wolf white supremacist assassin.

The former has inspired multiple hate crimes including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Pierce founded the white nationalist National Alliance, an organization which he led for almost 30 years.

Born in Atlanta to a Presbyterian family of Scotch-Irish and English descent, Pierce was a descendant of Thomas H. Watts, the Governor of Alabama and the Attorney General of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War.

At the time of Pierce's death in 2002, the National Alliance was bringing in more than $1 million a year, with more than 1,500 members and a paid national staff of 17 full-time officials.

After Pierce's death, it entered a period of internal conflict and decline.

William Luther Pierce III was born in Atlanta, Georgia.

The son of William Luther Pierce Jr. and Marguerite Farrell, his Presbyterian family was of Scotch-Irish and English descent.

Pierce's younger brother, Flournoy Sanders, an engineer, assisted Pierce in his political activities.