Former East Village activist John Penley was in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past Sunday covering the Ku Klux Klan protest over that city’s plan to tear down an equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s top general in the Civil War.
A contingent of about 50 North Carolina Klan members was met by a far larger group of hundreds of counterprotesters. The latter, at first, kept the Klan from even getting to their rally point. Then, once the white supremacists finally commenced their demonstration, police warned them after only a half hour that there were too many counterprotesters and ordered them to call it off. But it was only after the Klan managed to leave that things broke loose and tear gas was fired.
“They tear-gassed everyone,” Penley said.
Twenty-three counterprotesters were arrested, four on felony charges.
The activist, who now lives in his native North Carolina, said it was Richard Spencer and his alt-right cohort who made Charlottesville a lightning rod for racists after leading a torch-lit protest there in May in opposition to the Lee monument’s removal. Spencer intends to return there for another protest on Aug. 12, and Penley plans to cover that one, too.
“He’s the same as the Klan,” Penley said of Spencer, “but more sophisticated.”
Penley said that, this time, a fair number of the Klan’s signs were not targeting blacks as much as Jews, homosexuals and “race mixers.”
“I think they’re trying to get more people,” he said of the supremacists’ desire to increase their ranks.
Penley was interviewed during the dueling protests by RT TV news, which, he proudly noted, identified him in a caption as a journalist for “The Village [sic] Newspaper,” a misprint of The Villager.
“Since Trump has been elected, on all levels…they’re trying to pull back the clock on white supremacy and institutional racism,” he told the Russian outlet. “The white people that voted for Trump want that stuff to come back. They feel threatened.”
— Lincoln Anderson
