D.C. supremacist rally denounced
White nationalist group is tamped down by counterdemonstrators.
A year after the race-fueled violence in Charlottesville, Va., a small group of white supremacists marched through downtown Washington on Sunday on their way to a rally in front of the White House.
It was over almost as soon as it began.
The white supremacists were met along their march route and at the rally site by thousands of counterdemonstrators denouncing racism and white supremacy. The white nationalists, who numbered about two dozen, stayed in Lafayette Square, a park just north of the White House, for a short time and left before 6 p.m.
They had been scheduled to hold a two-hour rally in the square beginning at 5:30. A spokesman for the National Park Service con- firmed that the white supremacists had ended their event by that time.
Before they made their exit, the white nationalists were separated from the counterprotesters by metal fences and dozens of law enforcement offifficers guarding against any outbreaks of violence.
After marching from a neighborhood just west of the White House, the white supremacists settled in a pocket of Lafayette Square, tucked underneath trees.
Many of them carried Amer
ican flags, and several wore President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign hats.
The group’s organizer, Jason Kessler, stood on a platform with a microphone, addressing attendees who arrived before the event was scheduled to begin. He blamed a harsh law enforcement response after last year’s Charlottesville rally for his group’s meager showing.
“There were a lot of people who were at last year’s rally who are very scared this year,” he said. “They felt like last year they came to express their point of view. They were attacked. And when they fought back, they were overly prosecuted.”
Counterpro te s te r s in L afayette Square stood against fencing, shouting and booing in the direction of the white supremacists.
Even as rain began to fall and lightning lit the sky, protesters bearing signs and shirts deploring racism and anti-Semitism remained in Lafayette Square, chanting across rows of police offifficers, about a half dozen of whom stood guard atop horses.
Anjali Madan Wells, a middle school teacher from suburban Montgomery County, Md., said it was “common sense” for her to come out and protest.
“The idea that people were gathering in my city to spread a message of intolerance,” she said, adding that “I talk to my students about stand- ing up for what is right.”
In Charlottesville, organizers and participants from last August’s counterdemonstrations there massed in Booker T. Washington Park, just north of the University of Virginia, and 1 mile from the area downtown where a 32-year-old woman was
killed by a neo-Nazi. Dozens of state police officers formed a barricade that blocked protesters from moving outside a checkpoint. With no sign of white supremacists there, tensions were confifined to interactions between the left-leaning protesters and law enforcement.
As a steady rain set in in the early evening, police offiffi
cers began breaking down barricades and reopening streets, apparently convinced
that the threat of a serious disturbance had waned.
On Saturday, Trump issued a general call for unit y, denouncing “all types of racism,” but not specififically condemning white supremacism.
“Riots in Charlottesville a year ago resulted in senseless death and division,” he wrote Saturday morning on Twitter. “We must come together as a nation. I condemn all types of racism
and acts of violence. Peace to ALL Americans!”
Trump’s words were reminiscent of his reluctance a year ago after the deadly Charlottesville rally to single out white supremacists, instead blaming “both sides” for the violence and appearing to draw a moral equivalence between hate groups and counterprotesters.
The rally in Washington on Sunday, called Unite the Right II, was scheduled to take over Lafayette Square for two hours. The Unite the Right group planned to have up to 400 people, according to the permit it received from the National Park Service, though the gathering was considerably smaller.