USA TODAY International Edition
WHITE LIVES MATTER GROUP ACCUSED OF HAVING ITS ROOTS IN RACISM
Armed protesters, waving Confederate banners and signs, rally outside NAACP office in Houston
Armed protesters carrying “White Lives Matter” signs stood outside the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s office in Houston on Sunday in a demonstration against the organization’s response to the Black Lives Matter group.
The small group of 20 or so people held Confederate battle flags and waved signs, deeming the Black Lives Matter movement a hate group.
“We came here because the NAACP headquarters is here, and that’s one of the most racist groups in America,” Scott Lacy, a White Lives Matter member, told KPRC- TV.
Lacy was identified as a member of the Aryan Renaissance Society by Fox 4 News and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
One of the protesters held a sign that simply read, “14 words,” in reference to the white supremacist slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
NAACP President Cornell William Brooks said that to his knowledge, the White Lives Matter group has not reached out to the NAACP beyond the protests over the weekend.
“It is not a welcome mat for engagement to brandish a Confederate flag and bring an assault weapon to the NAACP,” Brooks said in a phone interview.
Although the group says it formed organically as a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement, which is a civil rights campaign against police killings of black men across the country, White Lives Matter has roots in white supremacy, according to Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“It’s not a real movement at all,” Potok said. “These are a few very small neo- Nazi, Klan and similar groups that have formed to push this narrative into the mainstream.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center tracked the group’s inception to 2015 and found that members of the Texas- based neo- Nazi group Aryan Renaissance Society ( ARS) ran White Lives Matter Facebook pages and encouraged white people interested in White Lives Matter to contact ARS members.
The protest in Houston was not the first.
Potok said Aryan Renaissance Society members distributed White Lives Matter fliers around Houston, and several members held up signs at a funeral service for a Harris County sheriff’s deputy who was gunned down in 2015 by a man who had multiple encounters with law enforcement.
Potok said small gatherings of White Lives Matter protesters have popped up across the country, though the groups are “small and scattered.”
In Houston, protester Ken Reed told the Houston Chronicle, the NAACP failed to adequately respond to the Black Lives Matter movement, which he and other protesters said has resulted in the “attack and killing of police officers, the burning down of cities and things of that nature.”
“If they’re going to be a civil rights organization and defend their people,” he said, “they also need to hold their people accountable.”
Brooks said the NAACP has maintained that Black Lives Matter is not a negation of white lives but “rather an assertion of our shared humanity.”
He pointed to the variety of Black Lives Matter protesters, including members from the Urban League, the NAACP, the National Action Network, as well as people who don’t belong to any groups.
Brooks said the White Lives Matter demonstrators are misguided in blaming the NAACP for the destruction that has sometimes accompanied Black Lives Matter protests.
“To blame the violent excess of a small fraction of demonstrators in the country is both logically wrongheaded and morally wronghearted,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Brooks said that although the group is small, it speaks to the sentiments of some angry working- class people.
“Let’s not overestimate their numbers or underestimate their appeal to the thoughts of many Americans,” Brooks said.
“These are a few very small neo- Nazi, Klan and similar groups that have formed to push this narrative into the mainstream.” Mark Potok, senior fellow, Southern Poverty Law Center