Have Hate, Will Travel: White supremacists traveled to Blount County protest

Community activists said they aren’t surprised by the white supremacy that was on display this past weekend, but they hope those community members who were will help stamp out the ills of racism.

“As sad as Sunday’s incidents were, it validates our work,” said the Rev. Dr. Willa Estell, pastor of St. Paul AME Zion Church and president and chair of the Alcoa-Blount County NAACP. “Sometimes it’s hard for people to believe that racism exists in our community. We have great work ahead of us, and we believe there are far more people who stand for equality and justice for all.”

David Billings gave a presentation Saturday and signed copies of his book, “Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in U.S. History and Life,” at Southland Books and Cafe, 1505 E. Broadway Ave. He addressed groups Sunday at Highland Presbyterian Church, 721 E. Lamar Alexander Parkway, and First United Methodist Church, 804 Montvale Station Road.

All three locations were targeted by white supremacists on Sunday. However, law enforcement has not determined whether the same group or individuals were responsible.

Fliers espousing white supremacist rhetoric were discovered Sunday morning at Highland Presbyterian Church and Southland Books and Cafe. A group of white supremacists also assembled Sunday evening in front of Maryville Junior High School, across from First United Methodist Church, to protest Billings’ “Conversation Matters” presentation.

“I’m not surprised by what happened Sunday, because it happens all the time,” said Dorothy Kincaid, who coordinated Billings’ visits. CDJ Media Productions, a group comprised of Kincaid, Charles Pride and Jo Davenport, hosted the author’s events this past weekend. They have spent years documenting people for a project they call “Blount County Black History — As Told By Those Who Lived It — Then and Now.”

Kincaid, who attended Charles M. Hall High School in Alcoa, has been “hurt more” by the reactions of community members during the past two days than the white supremacists Sunday.

“I’ve been more saddened honestly to hear how many people were surprised. It hurts to have your experiences invalidated by people. They’re in deep denial. They don’t want to admit it happens here, that there are racists living here,” she said.

The 72-year-old has memories of Ku Klux Klan members driving through her neighborhood, flying their Rebel flags and yelling racial epithets at her. She has also received death threats in the past five years for her work.

“People say Maryville is better than this past weekend,” Kincaid said. “That’s not really true. It doesn’t matter how many people were there and where they came from. We deal with racists every day, so those protesters didn’t scare me. I was scared though that people don’t hear or see what’s going on. They don’t believe when their neighbors tell them what’s going on, because they don’t have data. If anybody else related something to you, it’d be oral history.”

Rob Williamson, an ordained Presbyterian minister, helped Kincaid organize Saturday’s event. He and his wife, Jean, consider Kincaid to be “one of the most wonderful people” they’ve ever met, and also were “saddened but not surprised” by the past weekend’s events.

“While we live on the ‘Peaceful Side of the Smokies,’ there’s a lot more to be concerned about than we’d like to believe,” Williamson said.

He added that he looks forward to seeing what the groups who sponsored this past weekend’s events will do to address the county’s culture and respond to the white supremacists.

Six protesters identified

Lisa Misosky, co-owner of Southland Books and Cafe, contacted the Anti-Defamation League on Sunday. The group has been looking into the Maryville incidents and studying digital footprints and photos.

Protesters outside First United Methodist Church were members of the Arkansas-based ShieldWall Network, said Allison Padilla-Goodman, director of the nonprofit’s Southeast Region, based in Atlanta. The group is run by Billy Roper, whose “goal is to create a white ethnostate,” or a whites-only nation.

The ShieldWall Network has “several dozen members” in Arkansas and maintains several chapters in Tennessee, Padilla-Goodman said. “They’re mostly small groups that are big on getting media attention.”

ADL also has identified five of the eight protesters, Padilla-Goodman said. Those individuals who have been identified are not from Blount County. She said they are:

• Johan Carollo, who was identified two months ago in the Cincinnati Enquirer as the leader of Knoxville’s chapter of the now-defunct Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP). He was involved in the “Defend Knoxville Confederate Monument” rally, held Aug. 26, 2017, in Knoxville and traveled nearly three months ago to white nationalist Richard Spencer’s event at Michigan State University.

• Kynan and Deborah Dutton, who moved in April from Salem, Ore., to Knoxville. The couple is affiliated with the National Socialist Movement, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “one of the largest and most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the United States.”

• Tom Pierce, a current League of the South member, who organized the Knoxville rally. The Knoxville native also ran in 2016 for Knox County Commission.

• Craig Spaulding, a Knoxville neo-Nazi and former TWP member, who was involved in the Unite the Right rally, which was held August 11-12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Va., and allegedly participated in the fights ahead of Spencer’s Michigan State speech.

League of the South is a “neo-Confederate group that advocates for a second Southern secession and a society dominated” by a white elite, according to the SPLC. TWP is a “neo-Nazi group that advocates for racially pure nations and communities and blames Jews for many of the world’s problems.”

Padilla-Goodman isn’t surprised that non-county residents participated in the protests. The nonprofit has discovered that modern white supremacists are increasingly willing to travel long distances to express their hateful ideologies, and its Center on Extremism determined in the “Have Hate, Will Travel: The Demographics of Unite the Right” report that white supremacists from at least 35 states participated in the Charlottesville rally.