Alabama travelers driving on Interstate 65 to parties and barbecues on Memorial Day expected to see messages on digital road signs honoring veterans who died fighting for the United States. But some drivers near Clanton, AL reported seeing a sign that was hacked to display the words “Reclaim America,” a white nationalist slogan, and “Patriot Front US,” referencing the white supremacist group that was involved in the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
John McWilliams, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) West Central Region, added that ALDOT is investigating how the white supremacist language appeared on the sign near Clanton, about 40 miles northwest of Montgomery, Ala. Officials have given no immediate indication of who is responsible for apparently hacking the interstate sign.
The hacked Alabama road sign comes at a time when President Biden has declared white supremacy “the most dangerous terrorist threat” to the country. During his commencement address at Howard University this month, Biden told the graduating class at the historically Black university that he pledged “to stand up against the poison of white supremacy, as I did in my inaugural address — to single it out as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.”
“I don’t have to tell you that progress toward justice often meets ferocious pushback from the oldest and most sinister of forces,” Biden said in a recent speech, after quoting Donald Trump’s equivocating response to the 2017 rally in Charlottesville that killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injured 19 others. “That’s because hate never goes away.”
The discussion surrounding white supremacists and white nationalists in Alabama intensified after Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said that people identified as “white extremists” and white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the U.S. armed forces. When asked by a reporter with WBHM in Birmingham whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, Tuberville replied, “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”
White supremacist group Patriot Front is a Texas-based hate group that broke off from Vanguard America and formed after the Charlottesville rally, the SPLC says. Its members have chanted “Reclaim America” at rallies in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Washington and Boston in recent yeards. Patriot Front is responsible for “the vast majority of white supremacist propaganda distributed in the United States” since 2019, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
It’s not the first time that language promoting Patriot Front has made its way into a public space in Alabama. In July, graffiti beneath a Birmingham bridge appeared with “Patriot Front US” spray-painted in red and blue letters, AL.com reported. Other Patriot Front graffiti has also been spotted in Birmingham, a city with a population that’s nearly 70 percent Black.
A photo posted to Twitter this month showed more Patriot Front graffiti along the Red Mountain Expressway in Birmingham with the words, “We Dare Defend Our Rights.” The Patriot Front graffiti was later removed, but the message left Sydney Duncan, the attorney director for the Magic Legal Center in Birmingham, saddened that hate had become so public in some parts of Alabama. “White supremacy is alive and well,” Duncan wrote.
No comments:
Post a Comment