For Denise Williams, the 70-year-old head of Springfield’s NAACP chapter, the past few weeks have been a test, to say the least.
Last month, flyers calling for mass deportations of immigrants by the so-called Trinity White Knights, a group associated with the Ku Klux Klan, were distributed in black-majority neighborhoods in south Springfield.
“I tell people: don’t do anything, don’t approach them. But it is not easy for people to see this,” she said.
“I think that’s what a lot of people can’t understand – why do we have so much hate?”
According to the US Census Bureau, approximately 22% of Springfield residents are African American.
“People are angry. African Americans here don’t understand how this is allowed. We just have to keep this up for a while. I know it’s hard.”
Trinity White Knights is headquartered in Kentucky, where flyers were also seen in July by residents of the Cincinnati suburb of Covington as part of an apparent recruitment effort. The flyers included a post office box address in Maysville, Kentucky, and a telephone number.
Since Donald Trump claimed during a September 10 televised debate watched by 67 million people that immigrants in Springfield were eating people’s pets — a claim that appears to be unfounded — Springfield has seen a groundswell of far-right extremism.
Last weekend, several people affiliated with Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group founded in 2020, stood in front of the Springfield mayor’s home holding flags with swastikas. That same weekend, individuals were seen outside Springfield City Hall holding signs that read, “Haitians have no home here” in English and Haitian Creole.
And in another incident last month, a Clark County Democratic Party volunteer was verbally threatened by a group of Proud Boys members, according to a report by the Dayton Daily News.
Proud Boys is a far-right group that has re-emerged in recent months as “unofficial protectors of ex-President Donald Trump,” according to Reuters.
That followed a group called Israel United in Christ, a hate group designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which held a large public rally in south Springfield on September 21.
They feel strengthened by the former president. They feel like it’s okay to do this
Denise Williams
While Israel United in Christ says it “does not advocate or condone any act of violence against any race, ethnicity or gender,” the Anti-Defamation League has accused the country of anti-Semitism.
During the vice presidential debate, Republican Party nominee JD Vance repeated the false claim that Springfield’s Haitian community is “illegal immigrants.” The vast majority of Haitians in Springfield entered the U.S. legally through the Temporary Protected Status program, a status granted to nationals of certain countries facing significant security concerns.
“They feel strengthened by the former president. They feel like it’s okay to do this,” Williams said.
“He gives them the green light. Because he says hateful things and untruths, they feel comfortable speaking the way they speak [and] coming here to do what they do.”
But the increase in hate group activity in recent weeks has not been limited to Springfield.
In Charleroi, a city with approximately 4,000 inhabitants in western Pennsylvania, a digital flyer was distributed on Facebook this week by or on behalf of the Trinity White Knights.
It read in part: “Don’t let the government destroy your city. These third world immigrants are destroying every city they arrive in. The government is pushing these third world immigrants into every city across America.”
Joe Manning, Charleroi’s borough manager, said there were about 700 Haitian immigrants living in Charleroi, many of whom worked at a local food processing plant.
“They’ve been here for five, maybe six years and no one has really paid attention to them,” he says.
That was before September 15, when Trump said at a rally in Tucson, Arizona, that Charleroi “isn’t that nice anymore” and that the city was “made up of lawless gangs,” comments aimed at the city’s growing immigrant population.
“We are a fairly small community here in western Pennsylvania and need to be identified by name [by Trump]That created a whole firestorm,” said Manning, who believed the appearance of the KKK-linked flyer after Trump’s comments was not coincidental.
“Before, no one really paid attention to the immigrant community here, but now suddenly it’s, ‘Oh my God, we’re under attack.’ They say it’s a crisis. If so, then it’s the slowest damn crisis I’ve ever seen.”
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In Wyoming last week, graffiti clearly visible from a major interstate support organization of Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, appeared on a bridge, while a banner promoting the same group and calling for the “reclamation” (sic) of America was removed from a bridge in downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina, days after Trump’s debate remarks. A student event held at the University of South Carolina on September 18 featuring Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes was reported to have drawn approximately 150 attendees.
“Springfield doesn’t happen in isolation. We have been monitoring four other incidents, such as the attack on the Haitian community in Alabama,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate incidents in the US.
“We have also seen the sharing and pushing of the racist and anti-Semitic Great Replacement Theory in various campaigns and hate group posts in recent weeks.”
For Williams, who has been tasked with managing growing community outrage over the rise of the KKK and other hate group activities in Springfield, recent events have come at a personal cost.
She said she had received text messages from someone claiming to represent the Blood Tribe and had increased her security in recent weeks. When members of the same group showed up at Springfield’s mayor’s home last weekend, the police chief sent a security guard to her home.
“I look over my shoulder,” she says.
“You would think this would be over – I don’t get it, by 2024.”
