Armed protesters donning ‘White Lives Matter’ signs stood outside the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Office in Houston on Sunday in protest of the organization’s response to the Black Lives Matter group, according to local reports.
The small group of 20 or so people held Confederate battle flags and waved signs in protest against the way they say the NAACP has handled the Black Lives Matter movement, which protestors deem a hate group.
“We came here because the NAACP headquarters is here and that’s one of the most racist groups in America,” Scott Lacy, a White Lives Matter member, told KPRC-TV.
Lacy was identified as a member of the Aryan Renaissance Society by Fox 4 News and The Southern Poverty Law Center.
One of the protestors held a sign that simply said “14 words,” in reference to the white supremacist slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks said to his knowledge the White Lives Matter group has not reached out to the NAACP beyond the protests over the weekend.
“It is not a welcome mat for engagement to brandish a Confederate flag and bring an assault weapon to the NAACP,” Brooks said in a phone interview.
But while the group touts that it formed organically as a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement, which is a civil rights campaign against police killings of black men across the country, White Lives Matter actually has roots in white supremacy, according to Mark Potok, senior fellow at Southern Poverty Law Center.
“It’s not a real movement at all,” Potok said. “These are a few very small Neo-Nazi, Klan, and similar groups that have formed to push this narrative into the main stream.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center tracked the group’s inception to 2015, and found that often members of the Texas-based Neo-Nazi group Aryan Renaissance Society (ARS) ran White Lives Matter Facebook pages and encouraged white people interested in White Lives Matter to contact ARS members.
And the protest in Houston was not the first. Potok said they’ve found Aryan Renaissance Society members distributing White Lives Matter fliers around Houston, and several held up signs at the funeral service for a Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy who was gunned down in 2015 by a man who had multiple encounters with law enforcement.
He notes small gatherings of White Lives Matter protests have popped up across the country, though the groups are “small and scattered.”
In Houston, protester Ken Reed told the Houston Chronicle, the NAACP failed to adequately respond to the Black Lives Matter movement, which he and other protestors believe have resulted in the “attack and killing of police officers, the burning down of cities and things of that nature.”
“If they’re going to be a civil rights organization and defend their people,” he said, “they also need to hold their people accountable.”
Brooks said the NAACP has always maintained the Black Lives Matter is not a negation of white lives, but “rather an assertion of our shared humanity.”
He points to the wide variety of Black Lives Matter protestors, with members coming from the Urban League, the NAACP, National Action Network, as well as protestors who don’t belong to any groups.
While a common, though infrequent, criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement has been the sometimes destructive protests, Brooks notes that the White Lives Matter protestors are misguided in blaming the NAACP.
“To blame the violent excess of a small fraction of demonstrators in the country is both logically wrong headed and morally wrong-hearted,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
On social media, many noted that White Lives Matter missed the point of Black Lives Matter.
♦ Culled from USA TODAY Network
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