The message sounded clearly in Northampton and scores of other communities across the country during the weekend: there is no place in America for the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups that spew hatred and breed violence.
Unconscionably, it took President Donald Trump until Monday afternoon — two days after the tragedy in Virginia and only after intense criticism of his previous tepid remarks — to explicitly condemn those groups as “repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
Hundreds of people gathered outside Northampton City Hall on Sunday night as part of a national movement, #DefendCville, in response to violent clashes Saturday between white nationalists and protesters Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, that culminated in the death of a protester when a car mowed through a crowd. Two state police officers monitoring the protests also died when their helicopter crashed.
Organizers said the Northampton rally was called to demonstrate against white supremacy, racism, anti-Semitism and fascism. “This is what happens when you give Nazis an inch of a platform,” said Diana Sierra of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center. “We will not give them any inch. Hate speech is not free speech.”
The deadliest of a series of confrontations between white nationalists and protesters since Trump took office in January occurred in Charlottesville Saturday when supremacists gathered to protest the city’s plan to take down a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The white nationalists, some of whom wore body armor and toted combat weapons, waved Confederate flags and shouted Nazi-era slogans. The protesters, including some people who have been active in the Black Lives Matter movement and with anti-fascist groups known as “anti-fa,” sang and carried signs. After brawling broke out, police began dispersing the crowds, although some have complained that they waited too long to intervene.
A short time later, a car plowed through a group of protesters, sending people flying into the air, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and leaving at least 19 others injured. The alleged driver, James Alex Fields Jr., 20, of Maumee, Ohio, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. Earlier Saturday, Fields was photographed in Charlottesville with several other people carrying the emblem used by Vanguard America — which calls itself the “Face of American Fascism” and is among the nationalist groups that organized the “take America back” campaign.
Trump’s initial response to Saturday’s violence was delivered from his New Jersey golf club where he was vacationing. Trump broadly denounced violence, without identifying any white supremacist groups by name.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence that’s on many sides. On many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump. Not Barack Obama. It’s been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America,” the president said.
“Above all else we must remember this truth: no matter our color, creed, religion, or political party, we are all Americans first. We love our country, we love our God, we love our flag, we’re proud of our country, we’re proud of who we are. So we want to get the situation straightened out in Charlottesville, and we want to study it. And we want to see what we are doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen.”
Criticism — bipartisan, swift and furious criticism — met Trump’s failure to specifically condemn the white supremacists. The president should “correct the record here,” Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina told “Fox News Sunday.” “These groups seem to believe they have a friend in Donald Trump in the White House … and I would urge the president to dissuade those groups that he’s their friend.”
Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer, a Democrat, said during “Face the Nation” on CBS that Trump had during his campaign for office gone “right to the gutter, to play on our worst prejudices. I think you are seeing a direct line from what happened here this weekend to those choices.”
After the White House issued an unsigned statement Sunday explicitly denouncing the KKK and neo-Nazi groups, Trump finally attached his name to a forceful declaration Monday after returning to Washington. He is correct in saying, “Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America.”
However, Trump’s failure to immediately condemn white nationalists and the violence they sow only reinforces the conclusion that this president of the United States is doing more to continue dividing the country than to heal it.