Originally published in the Autumn 2021 edition of the Virginia Defender, issue 66, printed October 25. Reproduced here for accessibility and archival purposes. For other stories in this issue or to see the full PDF, see the Autumn 2021 post here. For the full web catalog, see our Full Issues page.

By Phil Wilayto

White supremacist organizations have been active in the Richmond area again.

Over the weekend of Oct. 16-17, Henrico County police say they received reports of bags of racist flyers left in neighborhoods in Varina and Fairfield, the two majority-Black districts in the five-district county. The bags “contained a flyer naming the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” according to a police media release.

It’s not the first time this has happened. “Similar flyers were distributed in the Glen Allen area in January, and in Ashland and Hanover County earlier this year,” according to a report in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Around the same weekend, a Black-themed mural at the corner of Meadowbridge and Newbury in Richmond’s predominantly Black Highland Park neighborhood was defaced, including with the words “Patriot Front,” the name of a white hate group. The multi-colored mural had features the words “Black Monument Avenue.”

Then, on Oct. 21, the beautiful, large mural honoring tennis great and anti-apartheid activist Arthur Ashe in Richmond’s Battery Park was defaced with racist graffiti. Ashe, a Richmond native, had honed his craft on the park’s tennis courts while being barred from playing the segregated courts in the city’s Byrd Park, a public space still named after William Bryd II, one of Richmond’s earliest and wealthiest slave owners. In the vandalism, Ashe’s image was defaced and the mural was tagged with the name “Patriot Front.”

In response to the various incidents, Henrico police say they’re stepping up patrols in the Varina and Fairfriend districts, and Richmond police say they will be monitoring murals and other monuments across the city. The Patriot Front is a white-supremacist organization that broke from Vanguard America, another neo-fascist group, shortly after the so-called Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017.

James Alex Fields, the Hitler admirer who drove his car into a crowd of protesters after the rally, killing anti-racist activist Heather Heyer and injuring some three dozen others, was photographed earlier that day marching with Vanguard America, holding one of their shields with their neo-Nazi insignia.

Fields was convicted of the attack and given multiple life sentences. He is about to be in federal court as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by Charlottesville residents against more than a dozen Unite the Right organizers and participants. The lawsuit charges a conspiracy to commit racist violence.

The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in Pelham, N.C., is a white supremacist and antisemitic organization formed around 2012. About 50 members held a rally in March of 2017 in Charlottesville, where they were met by more than 2,000 anti-racist protesters, including members of the Virginia Defenders.