Elizabeth Rickey, Derailed David Duke
One of the perks of fighting antisemitism for a living is the occasional opportunity to meet a genuine hero. On September 12, one of those heroes — a largely unsung one — died at age 53 alone in a motel room in Santa Fe, N.M., after a long battle with Crohn’s disease that had left her destitute.

No one I ever met was braver or more committed to fighting hatred than Elizabeth “Beth” Rickey, the person who, more than anyone else, was responsible for the demise of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan member almost elected to statewide office in Louisiana in the early 1990s.

A Southern white conservative from proper patrician stock, Rickey was an unlikely figure to take to the frontline in the battle against Duke. Yet she spent down her own wealth to do so.

Rickey had grown up a staunch Republican in Louisiana, proud of her father’s World War II service and her uncle Branch Rickey’s signing of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. She worked on Ronald Reagan’s campaigns and was a rising star in Louisiana politics, having won election to the Louisiana Republican State Central Committee.

In 1989, when Duke was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives as a Republican, Rickey looked instinctively to her colleagues on the Republican State Central Committee to censure and disavow him. Their failure to do so — and the actual embrace in which some of them enveloped Duke — transformed her life.