Under the cover of a cool October night in 2021, two masked men wearing gloves and carrying cans of spray paint entered a pedestrian tunnel in a public park in Richmond, Virginia. They proceeded to spray over a mural dedicated to Arthur Ashe, a Black hometown tennis legend, while a third person filmed. Their target was not incidental, and their actions were not mere graffiti tagging nor petty vandalism. They’d come to leave an ominous message: stencil designs of the white supremacist neo-fascist group, Patriot Front, identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist hate group.
While the Ashe mural was eventually restored in early 2022, the destruction of the original caused a stir in the neighboring community, Battery Park, where over 77 percent of the residents are Black. Concerned parents told their children to avoid the park, and the vandalism was roundly condemned by activists and authorities in the Richmond area. Unfortunately, it was not an isolated incident. Members of Patriot Front have been active in the Richmond area since at least 2019, posting their propaganda stickers and committing acts of vandalism well into 2022. Many of the incidents occurred in the weeks leading up to a civil trial in nearby Charlottesville against the organizers of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally that saw one counterprotester killed in a deliberate car-ramming attack and 49 others injured.
A couple months after the Ashe mural incident, members of Patriot Front marched through Washington, D.C. on December 4, 2021. While they goose-stepped through the capital city, anti-fascist saboteurs rendered many of their cars damaged and inoperable. They then called the police, and some of the subsequent interactions involving Patriot Front members were captured on police body camera footage—including several of them saying their full legal names. This debacle led anti-fascist researchers and journalists to unmask several members and link two of them to the Ashe mural vandalism.
