NORTHAMPTON — More than 30 people were packed shoulder-to-shoulder at the Northampton Friends Meetinghouse on Thursday, voicing some of the many emotions they were feeling: sadness, anger, fear, bravery, determination.
The group was gathered for a nonviolence training ahead of protests Saturday in Boston, where several far-right figures will headline a “Boston Free Speech” rally that has counterdemonstrators preparing to march and city officials expecting a tense day. Just a week after a deadly white supremacist terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, many of the activists in the room expressed concern about the possibility of further violence.
To combat the far right on Saturday, local activists Jeff Napolitano and Patricia “Paki” Wieland taught nonviolent protest strategies, including de-escalating tense situations and working as “peacekeepers.” They also talked about important logistics, like making safety plans and working together as a group.
Those plans, however, are just some of tactics protesters from across the region will likely use at the rally. As white supremacists feel emboldened under the presidency of Donald Trump, there has been a growing conversation on the left about how to most effectively protest the far-right, with nonviolent demonstrators increasingly sharing space with more confrontational activists.
“I don’t know really a viable alternative,” Napolitano, director at the American Friends Service Committee of Western Massachusetts, said of nonviolent resistance. Violent confrontation plays into white supremacists’ hands, he said. “They know how to respond to violence very well.”
Indeed, some of the speakers at Saturday’s event have become known for violence. Kyle Chapman, also known as “Based Stickman,” has led a group he calls the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights, which the Southern Poverty Law Center called “a new fight-club fraternity of young white, pro-Trump men.” Chapman himself got his nickname after breaking a wooden post over an antifascist activist’s head in Berkeley, California.
The Boston Free Speech Coalition, which organized the rally, received a permit from the city for 100 people on the Boston Common from noon until 2 p.m. That permit comes with strict rules, however, including no carrying of backpacks, sticks or weapons.
John Medlar of the Boston Free Speech Coalition thinks as many as 1,000 people could show up. The group said on Facebook that it is not affiliated with the Charlottesville rally organizers in any way.
Two Facebook events for counterprotests have drawn more than 13,000 people who have said they are going to Boston.
Natascia Pica, an organizer of Thursday’s nonviolence training, said that her group, Western Mass Showing Up for Racial Justice, has chosen nonviolent action as the best way to stand together with fellow black, brown and Jewish counterprotesters against the rally.
“We’re hoping to stand in solidarity with the leadership of Black Lives Matter and the true community organizers that started this counterprotest,” she said.
But speaking from her own point of view, Pica said different tactics can work for different people.
“I think a lot of the rhetoric that has been going around about the antifa is that they’re violent, and I don’t necessarily think that’s the case,” Pica said, using the common nickname for antifascist activists. “I think they are protecting other people from very violent forces.”
Trump himself has drawn widespread criticism for casting blame on “many sides” for the violence in Charlottesville, describing groups he referred to as the “alt-left” as “very violent.”
Antifascists received praise after the white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, however, when supporters shared a similar perspective to Pica’s.
“We would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchists and the antifascists who approached, over 300, 350 antifascists,” Harvard professor and political activist Cornel West said on the show Democracy Now! after torch-wielding white supremacists had trapped him and a group of clergy inside a church last Friday. “We just had 20, and we’re singing, ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ you know what I mean?”
Antifascist protest tactics can include physically beating back white nationalists, but often first consist of other combative schemes to deny them a platform for hate speech. Examples include shouting down right-wing speakers, attempting to get a venue to cancel racist events and other pressure tactics.
The Gazette reached out to the groups Western Massachusetts Antifa Network and Boston Antifa on Facebook, but received no response. A member of the group South Shore Antifa, who declined to give his name, did respond, and said his group had attempted to keep far-right figures from showing up in Boston by releasing their personal information online — a practice known as “doxing.”
If true, those tactics may have gotten a response from Boston Free Speech Coalition, the group organizing Saturday’s rally.
“So it’s been a little tumultuous running up to the 19th,” the group posted on Facebook after several speakers pulled out of the event. “We’ve attracted much love from the ‘Alt Left’ aka ‘Antifa’ and their trolly bits.”
Antifascists have gained prominence this year after aggressively shutting down far-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, who canceled an event in February at the University of California at Berkeley after protesters sought to deny him a place to do things like identify undocumented students.
Antifa is a far older movement, however, that traces its legacy to activists pushing back against Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts in Italy or Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts in Germany, and to antifascists who fought in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.
Of course, not everyone thinks that physical confrontation is the most effective first tactic, even if they aren’t morally opposed to it.
“I advocate for people defending themselves against right-wing violence, if that’s the situation. But for me it’s always a question of self defense,” David Woodsome, an organizer with the UMass Amherst chapter of the International Socialist Organization, said. “We’re not looking to go into this offensive street battle with the far right.”
A big reason for choosing other tactics, he said, is to make sure his organization is bringing a diverse group of people together in a united front in Boston, and not making them feel isolated or unsafe because of aggressive tactics.
“I think in parts of the left you have this kind of bravado — ‘Oh we’re just going to smash the fash,’” Woodsome said. “And yeah, it’s fun to talk about and imagine, but it’s not going to win.”
Dave Lartigue, a member of the Pioneer Valley chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, agreed that people under attack have the right to defend themselves from “fascists who have already shown they are more than willing to inflict physical harm.” But at nearly 50 years old, he said he’s not about to throw haymakers at neo-Nazis when he’s in Boston.
“I am not interested in violence; I am not interested in harming people,” he said. “I will yell, I will have signs and that’s what I’m hoping for is to make a voice heard.”
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.