Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.

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Dan Casey

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U.S. v. William A. White

Ongoing coverage: Watch the trial throughout the day from inside the courtroom
Bios: Meet the people involved in the case
Timeline: Catch up on the backstory

One of the best shows in town these days is the federal criminal trial of a racist crank who is charged with threatening various people all over the North American continent.

The defendant is one of Roanoke's low-rent landlords, William A. White. He's also the narcissistic costume-Nazi "commander" of the American National Socialist Workers Party.

White's trial started last week, and I dropped in there for a spell Friday to hear the testimony of Leonard Pitts, the Pulitzer Prize-winning nationally syndicated columnist who is one of White's alleged victims.

His column runs in this newspaper, and I am a big fan. And I wanted to get his personal take on the charges against the biggest jerk in town.

Plus, it's always kind of fun to watch thuggish buffoons like Bill White on the hot seat, you know?

But the entertainment value diminished quickly after Pitts, who is black, began testifying.

Over the course of about two hours, he described to the all-white jury his reactions to a phone call his wife took from White one night in June 2007.

It was followed the next morning by two e-mails White sent Pitts. One had the subject line "N----r Pitts," and a link to an Internet post in which White revealed Pitts' unlisted phone number and home address to the world.

In the other, White quoted lyrics from a racist song prophesying the day when the white race would destroy and enslave all blacks.

"I was essentially chilled by the dehumanizing language," Pitts told the court. "What really sealed the deal and what really made my blood run cold was the reference to my home address and the reference to my wife."

White was saying, " 'I have all this information about you and the name of your wife and I can get to you,' " Pitts told the jury.

That was only the beginning. There are a lot of racist freaks like White out there, after all.

Dozens of nasty phone calls and hundreds of hateful e-mails followed -- not from White but from others. Pitts felt compelled to warn administrators at his children's schools, the police in his hometown of Bowie, Md., and the FBI.

"My information was disseminated to people who were hateful and violent because of the color of my skin," Pitts testified. "It was terrifying."

White's defense is that his actions are constitutionally protected by the First Amendment, and that though he may have veered close to the line of unprotected criminal threats, he never crossed it.

Now Pitts and I have a few things in common. We're both newspaper columnists who are married with a bunch of kids and are the same age.

White has published both of our home addresses and phone numbers on the Internet.

Both of us utter strong opinions -- Pitts' best are on issues of race -- and we both hope for a strong response from readers. That comes with the column-writing territory.

But the similarities pretty much end there. Pitts is big time and I am small fry. He has millions of readers and I have (hopefully) thousands.

And, of course, Pitts is black and I am white. That's the really big difference in this context.

Threat, you see, is kind of like beauty. It's more or less in the eye of the beholder.

Why should I have ever felt threatened when White published my address, phone number and photograph?

In this country, my race has never been systematically discriminated against in education, housing, employment and other ways.

No gangs ever donned cloaks and masks and hunted down and lynched white guys they hated because of their skin color.

In my lifetime, there has never been institutional racism against Irish-Catholic white guys. In those respects, I'll never be able to walk in Pitts' shoes, or fully comprehend the fears White evoked when he published Pitts' address and invited like-minded freaks to visit Pitts' home.

After his testimony, Pitts and I talked for a few minutes outside the courtroom.

Where do you believe the lines should be drawn between free expression and criminal action? I asked him.

"I think the line is drawn where there's an implicit suggestion of harm," Pitts said.

Do you believe Bill White's actions were criminal?

"That's one of the things I'm not going to talk about," he replied. "I'd rather wait until there's a verdict."

Do you feel at all uncomfortable at the idea that Bill White is on trial for his freedom, in part, because of something he wrote about you?

"No," he responded flatly.

Listening to Pitts' testimony Friday, it's not hard to understand why.