For Denise Williams, the 70-year-old head of Springfield’s NAACP chapter, the past several weeks have been testing to say the least.
Last month, flyers calling for mass deportations of immigrants were distributed by the so-called Trinity White Knights, a group associated with the Ku Klux Klan, in Black-majority neighborhoods in south Springfield.
“I’m telling people: do nothing – don’t approach them. But it’s not easy for people to see this,” she said.
“I think that is what a lot of folks cannot understand – why do we have so much hate?”
About 22% of Springfield residents are African American, according to the US Census Bureau.
“People are mad. African Americans here don’t understand how this is allowed. We just have to take this for a minute. I know it’s hard.”
Trinity White Knights is headquartered in Kentucky, where flyers were also seen by residents of the Cincinnati suburb of Covington in July as part of an apparent recruitment effort. The flyers included a PO box address in Maysville, Kentucky, and a phone number.
Ever since Donald Trump claimed during a 10 September televised debate watched by 67 million people that immigrants in Springfield were eating people’s pets – a claim that has been found to be baseless – Springfield has seen a groundswell in far-right extremism.
On a recent weekend, several people affiliated with Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group founded in 2020, stood in front of the home of the mayor of Springfield holding flags bearing swastikas. The same weekend, individuals holding signs that said: “Haitians Have No Home Here” in English and Haitian Creole were seen outside Springfield’s city hall offices.
And in another incident, a volunteer with the Clark county Democratic party was verbally threatened by a group of Proud Boys members last month, according to a report by the Dayton Daily News.
Proud Boys is a far-right group that, according to Reuters, has re-emerged in recent months as “unofficial protectors of ex-president Donald Trump”.
That followed a group called the Israel United in Christ, a hate group as designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center, holding a large public gathering in south Springfield on 21 September.
Though Israel United in Christ says it does not “advocate or condone any acts of violence against any race, ethnicity or gender”, the Anti-Defamation League has accused it of antisemitism.
During the vice-presidential debate, the Republican party candidate, JD Vance, repeated the false claim that Springfield’s Haitian community were “illegal immigrants”. The vast majority of Haitians in Springfield have legally entered the US through the temporary protected status program, a status that is provided to nationals of certain countries experiencing significant security challenges.
“They feel emboldened by the former president. They feel like it’s OK to do this,” said Williams.
“He gives them the green light. By him saying hateful things and falsehoods, they feel comfortable in speaking the way they are speaking [and] coming in here doing what they are doing.”
But the rise in hate group activity in recent weeks hasn’t been confined to Springfield.
In Charleroi, a town of about 4,000 people in western Pennsylvania, a digital flyer was this week distributed on Facebook by or on behalf of the Trinity White Knights.
It read, in part: “Do not let the government destroy your town. These 3rd world immigrants are destroying every single city they arrive in. The government is pushing these 3rd world immigrants into every single town across America.”
Joe Manning, the Charleroi town borough manager, said there were about 700 Haitian immigrants living in Charleroi, with many working at a local food processing plant.
“They’ve been here for five, maybe six, years and nobody really paid attention to them,” he says.
That was before 15 September, when Trump said at a rally in Tucson, Arizona, that Charleroi “isn’t so beautiful any more” and that the town had become “composed of lawless gangs”, comments aimed at the town’s growing immigrant population.
“We’re a pretty small community here in western Pennsylvania, and to be identified by name [by Trump], that sort of set off this whole firestorm,” said Manning, who believed the appearance of the KKK-linked flyer after Trump’s comments wasn’t coincidental.
“Before this, no one really paid attention to the immigrant community here but now, all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re being invaded.’ They say it’s a crisis. Well if it is, it’s the slowest goddamn crisis I ever saw.”
In Wyoming, graffiti in clear view of a major interstate supporting Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, appeared on a bridge last week, while a banner promoting the same group and calling for the “recaiming” (sic) of America was removed from a bridge in downtown Winston-Salem in North Carolina days after Trump’s debate comments. A student event held at the University of South Carolina featuring the founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, on 18 September is believed to have attracted about 150 attendees.
“Springfield is not happening in isolation. We have tracked four other incidents, such as targeting the Haitian community in Alabama,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks incidents of hate across the US.
“We’ve also seen the sharing and pushing of the racist and antisemitic great replacement theory in various campaign and hate group messaging in the last few weeks.”
For Williams, who finds herself managing growing community outrage at the rise in KKK and other hate group activity in Springfield, recent events have come at a personal cost.
She said she had received text messages from someone claiming to represent Blood Tribe and had increased her security in recent weeks. Last weekend, when members of the same group appeared at the mayor of Springfield’s home, the chief of police sent a security detail to her home.
“I’m looking over my shoulder,” she says.
“You would think that this would be over – I don’t get it, in 2024.”
