East Boston Reacts To White Supremacist Fliers

BOSTON — After fliers promoting white supremacy appeared around East Boston Thursday, several residents sprang into action, walking street to street to tear them down and prompting the mayor and other elected officials to release a statement denouncing the message.

"These ideas are toxic to our society and contribute to physical violence, economic disparity and division along lines of race, class, nationality and origin," read a joint statement from East Boston City Councilor Lydia Edwards, Mayor Marty Walsh, Sen. Joseph Boncore and Rep. Adrian Madaro.

"While we must always uphold a free exchange of ideas, hatred that demeans individuals or groups based on who they are, how they look or where they come from is not welcome in Boston," the statement continued. "Those seeking to promote bigotry will always fail in the face of unity that is stronger, lasting and more resilient."

The fliers come after several communities in Greater Boston have reported the appearance of similar messages. Earlier this year, anti-Semitic fliers were found in Little Libraries in Newton. In the fall, "It's okay to be white" signs popped up on Tufts University campus, and then a handful of masked men disrupted the Anarchist Bookfair at Boston University chanting "Blood and Soil."

The fliers' appearance also comes amid a surge of hate speech online, according to a growing body of evidence and findings from a group of scientists called the Network Contagion Research Institute.

Researchers there tell Patch that extremist speech online follows political trends, such as the president's talk about the building a wall along the southern U.S. border.

Several East Boston residents, including Phil Haggerty, put a spotlight on resiliency when they found out about the fliers. Shortly after he got home from work, around 11 p.m., he saw on an East Boston Facebook group that folks were talking about a white supremacy flier that had been posted.

"We were so dumbfounded we had to go see for ourselves," Haggerty said in a phone interview.

As of the 2010 Census, more than 50 percent of Eastie population is made up of Latin Americans and other immigrants.

"The strength and greatness of East Boston is its diversity," Haggerty said. "It is an immigrant community. And it is a very welcoming community."

The fliers depicted an image of a man with the words, "Reclaim your birth right," and another that read, "Welcome to Occupied America where morality is subjective, borders are irrelevant, decadence is encouraged, illness is promoted, dissent is criminal."

Patriot Front, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an extremist hate group, appears to be behind the fliers. They also referred to "Blood and Soil"– an early Nazi slogan used in Germany to evoke the idea of a pure Aryan race and the territory it wanted to conquer, according to the National Holocaust Museum. The slogan was chanted at Charlottesville during demonstrations in 2017.

Haggerty, who is familiar with the organization, said he didn't think twice about tearing the flier down and taking the next hour to walk around the neighborhood with his girlfriend to tear down other fliers he saw.

He was just one of several in East Boston who did the same, according to posts on social media.

"The people who put up these fliers, they are not from here. They're not welcome here. It's not just something that doesn't belong in our neighborhood," he said. "It's the antithesis of what East Boston is all about."

It appeared a small group of others worried online that was infringing on the group's free speech.

"When you're talking about hate speech and in particular them targeting this community specifically: There's a reason they're not plastering in Back Bay or Beacon Hill. They're attempting to incite violence and bigotry. I'm not interested in getting into a debate about the First Amendment. It's our civic duty and obligation to confront racism and hate when ever it rears is head," said Haggerty.

Read the full response from the mayor and elected officials:

And echoing the sentiment from many online:

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RELATED:

• Anti-Semitic Fliers Found In Newton
• Mayor Fuller Responds To Anti-Semitic Fliers Found In Newton

Photo courtesy Phil Haggerty