They arrived in July: dozens of masked white supremacists, shuffling out of U-Hauls, to march through Nashville carrying upside-down American flags.A w eek later, members of a separate neo-Nazi group, waving giant black flags with red swastikas, paraded along the city’s strip of honky-tonks and celebrity-owned bars. The neo-Nazis poured into the historic courthouse to disrupt a City Council meeting, harassed descendants of Holocaust survivors and yelled racist slurs at young Black children performing on a street. The appearance of white nationalists on streets of a major city laid bare the brazenness of the Patriot Front and the Goyim Defense League. Their provocations enraged and alarmed civic leaders and residents, causing the city to grapple with how to confront the groups without violating free speech rights, reports The New York Times.
“I can’t imagine having a mimosa on Fifth and Broadway, and 400 Patriot Front members walk out of a U-Haul — it has to be one of the most jarring experiences as an American and as a tourist in the city,” said state Rep. Aftyn Behn, who represents the city’s downtown. “Nashville is a microcosm of the greater country, and we are at a moment where we have to decide who we are.” Both groups that visited Nashville have become more visible since the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va, and are now among the top sources of white supremacist propaganda. White supremacists have appeared in Nashville before and have increasingly promoted racist and antisemitic messages across the country. Those include plotting to riot at a Pride event in Idaho, disrupting city council meetings in New England and protesting at the opening New York performances of “Parade,” a musical about the 1915 lynching of a Jewish man in the South.“ What I would characterize this as is terror tourism,” said Mayor Freddie O’Connell. He recalled how his maternal grandfather, whose father was an Orthodox rabbi, and his siblings fled Poland as antisemitism took hold in Europe before the Holocaust. Of the white supremacist groups, he said: “These are mostly people from out of area, coming in here mostly to disrupt and use hate speech as an act of terror, and it’s very difficult to prevent them from doing so.”