On Wednesday afternoon, about 100 people from a range of groups gathered at Billy Taylor Park in Providence to stand in solidarity in the face of Naziism.
Several people, including Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee, spoke at the event, held steps away from the Red Ink Community Library — a nonprofit library, reading room and organizing space in Providence’s Mt. Hope neighborhood, where group of neo-Nazis harassed attendees at a book reading it hosted on Monday.
“No one stands alone. I wanted to make sure that everyone comes together,” said Herlin Perry, who grew up in the neighborhood and helped organize Wednesday’s community gathering. “Strong is what we need to be in the face of hate.”
On Monday night, a small group of people had gathered at the nonprofit to read selections from “The Communist Manifesto” on the 174th anniversary of its publication.
“Suddenly we heard a loud banging on the windows and some shouting coming from the street,” David Raileanu, the director of Red Ink Community Library, told The Public’s Radio on Tuesday. “There was definitely a sense that we were not safe.”
In the midst of the reading, between 15 and 20 members of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Club, or NSC-131, began harassing the people gathered inside. Video of the incident posted to Twitter by user @guateguanaco shows a group of people holding a flag featuring a swastika and other Nazi symbols against the store’s front windows. Other video shows the group giving the Nazi salute, threatening people inside the store, yelling obscenities and chanting “Commie scum, off our streets.”
After police officers responded to the incident, the group dispersed.
NSC-131 took credit for the disturbance in a video they posted online on Wednesday. The Public’s Radio is not linking to the video created by the hate group.
NSC-131 is a neo-Nazi group that formed in Worcester, Massachusetts in 2019. Now, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the group has chapters in every state in New England.
“They are not out there trying to hide their identity,” said Robert Trestan, the New England regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. “They’re being very, very public about it.”
Like other neo-Nazi groups, NSC-131 is openly antisemitic, anti-Black, anti-leftist and has a nativist and xenophobic focus, according to Michael Loadenthal, executive director of the Prosecution Project and a post-doctoral researcher focused on political violence.
“They see themselves as self-appointed kind of vigilante defenders for white communities,” Loadenthal said. “They would like to have a society which has expelled or eliminated their enemies.”
Much of their activity involves posting propaganda in the form of stickers, graffiti tags, fliers, and dropping banners from highway overpasses around New England. A 2021 report from the Anti-Defamation League shows the distribution of white supremacist propaganda nearly doubled nationwide in 2020. The report found NSC-131 was among the groups most active in distributing propaganda.
One previous member of the group, Andrew Hazelton, was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography.
The group’s disruption in Providence followed other flash mob-style protests across New England and appears to be part of a shift towards more targeted, in-person activity, Loadenthal said. Most recently, the group orchestrated a series of protests at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston and personally threatened doctors who work at the hospital. Members of the group have also been part of an anti-semitic demonstration at the Boston holocaust memorial and at a homophobic demonstration in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
“We see them more and more acting offline, in person,” Loadenthal said. “They arrive largely unexpected or unannounced and they typically protest at sites which they associate with either the left or a broader kind of anti-white politic.”
Both Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee and Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza asked in statements on Twitter that people with knowledge of the incident contact the Providence Police Department. Though the hate group has acknowledged organizing the clash at Red Ink, a spokesperson for Providence police said she would not answer questions about the incident, which she described as “under investigation.”
“Never did I imagine that in Rhode Island and [at a] place that I have been multiple times, that there would be Nazis outside,” said Harrison Tuttle, the executive director of the Black Lives Matter RI PAC. “The immediate emotion is shock.”
Red Ink Community Library is hosting a virtual “Collective Safety Forum” on Saturday morning to “brainstorm and devise plans for collective security.”
Nina Sparling, investigative producer for the The Public’s Radio, can be reached at nsparling@thepublicsradio.org. Follow her on Twitter @nina_spar.
