White supremacist found slain in burning Miss. house

Barrett, a New York City native and Vietnam War veteran, moved to Mississippi in 1966. Soon after, he began traveling the country to promote antiblack and antiimmigrant views and founded a supremacist group called the Nationalist Movement.

In the 1990s, after his group was denied a parade permit to march through South Boston, Barrett successfully sued the city in federal court. A judge ruled in 1998 that the city of Boston had illegally denied his group a parade permit because officials didn’t like their ideas.

One expert on hate groups said that Barrett was well known for his news conferences and protests in places having racial strife but that he had mustered little real clout in the white power movement.

“Richard Barrett was a guy who ran around the country essentially pulling off publicity stunts,’’ said Mark Potok, who monitors hate groups for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. “He really never amounted to any kind of leader in the white supremacist movement.’’

Barrett attracted about 50 supporters to his 2008 rally in protest of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in the Louisiana town of Jena, where six black teenagers were charged with beating a white classmate. Years earlier, he sued over a ban on Confederate flags at University of Mississippi football games.

His modest, one-story brick home with white columns and shutters is off a winding rural road outside the Jackson suburb of Pearl. Yellow police tape was stretched across the yard yesterday.

Authorities executed a search warrant at a neighbor’s house where Barrett, 67, was last seen. Barrett’s visit to the house was work related, the sheriff said, without elaborating.

When asked whether Barrett was killed by someone else, Pennington said: “Absolutely, based on the condition of the body.’’

Barrett operated the Nationalist Movement from an office in the small rural town of Learned, Miss., about 20 miles southwest of Jackson, where he also ran a school for skinheads.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barrett said he believed there would be a revolution in the United States if Barack Obama were elected as the first black president.