Louis Beam
American white nationalist
Louis Ray Beam Jr. (born August 20, 1946) is an American white supremacist.
After high school, he joined the United States Army and served as a helicopter door-gunner in Vietnam. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Once he returned to the United States, he became a Klansman, leading a maritime Louisiana KKK element and Klan rally in Texas against government help to Vietnamese immigrant fishermen. He was also the leader of the Texas Emergency Reserve, a militia that was disbanded by the courts in 1982 as a result of a lawsuit filed under Texas anti-militia law by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The lawsuit was brought by SPLC after the militia harassed Vietnamese fishermen during the 1981 fishing season.
Beam was using Camp Puller near Houston in 1980 to train militia, including children as young as eight years old, in armed guerrilla tactics; the camp was shut down after publicity led to protests, and parents complaining that they were not aware of the children's activities at the camp. The Boy Scouts Council of Houston rejected a charter request from the troop at Camp Puller. Videotape shown during the shrimper hearing had Beam saying, "We're going to assume authority in this country." He moved to Idaho afterwards and became active with Aryan Nations in the early 1980s.
The public source identifies “Louis Beam” as american white nationalist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Louis, Beam and American.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1763778. VIAF identifies the subject as 11228720. The Library of Congress control number is n83189220. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1982, 1981 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Louis Beam” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.