Tennessee Towns Brace For White Nationalist Rallies

MURFREESBORO, TN — Windows in businesses around the quaint squares in Murfreesboro and Shelbyville are boarded up, signs on the door saying there'll be no trading on Saturday. State emergency management officials are gearing up for rapid response. Events across two counties, long-planned and anticipated, are cancelled.

In Murfreesboro — home of Middle Tennessee State, the largest college in the Tennessee, and once home of the World's Largest Cedar Bucket — and 25 miles down Highway 231 in Shelbyville — best known for Tennessee walking horses and historically dominant high school girls basketball — people are preparing almost as if a hurricane is coming. But these storms, scheduled to hit the towns south of Nashville Saturday, are even more unpredictable and insidious, fueled not by the wrath of nature, but by hate in the human heart.

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Back-to-back "White Lives Matter" rallies are planned in the two town squares Saturday, organized by National Front, the loose confederation of white supremacist groups that helped organize the United The Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., where tiki-torch-bearing white nationalists sought, ostensibly, to protect a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on August 11 and then held a march that turned deadly the next day when counter-protester Heather Heyer died after being run over by a car that plowed into a crowd, allegedly driven by James Fields, 20, who is charged with second-degree murder.

Watch: Tennessee Towns Brace For White Nationalist Rallies

Brad Griffin, a member of the neo-Confederate group League of the South who blogs about white nationalist topics under the alias Hunter Wallace, told The Tennessean that white nationalist groups believe that police departments in Tennessee will keep better separation between the white supremacists and those who oppose them. White nationalist groups blame the violence at their rallies on far-left protesters and police who fail to keep them at a safe distance from the far-right marchers.

Griffin said the protest in Shelbyville is a statement against refugee resettlement, while in Murfreesboro, the focus is on the removal of Confederate monuments. The lawn of the Rutherford County Courthouse on the square in Murfreesboro contains several statues, including a general Confederate memorial, similar to many other county seats in Tennessee. The League of the South also said they are protesting "the recent black-on-white church shooting in Antioch." While the accused shooter in the Burnette Chapel Church of Christ attack, Emanuel Samson, was born in Sudan, the church has a fairly diverse membership.

The League of the South's founder, Michael Hill, says the purpose of his group is to create a "white nation" in the American South; another League leader, Michael Tubbs, went to prison in 1990 for stealing weapons from Fort Campbell with which he intended to start a race war.

League spokesman Griffin told WKRN they expect only about 100 people marching at Saturday's rallies.

Their reasoning and relatively paltry numbers aside, the protests have caused considerable uproar and upheaval in the cities — Murfreesboro is a rapidly growing city of 131,000, while Shelbyville is a somewhat sleepy town of 21,000 surrounded by massive and oft-elegant horse farms — since the marches were planned late last month.

Most every business in a two-block radius of the Murfreesboro square is closing Saturday, though Shacklett's Photography — a mainstay on the square for eight decades — is stubbornly staying open to prove the marchers don't scare them. Numerous community events in Murfreesboro, including the popular Flashlight Night at Oaklands Mansion and the 41st annual Harvest Days at Cannonsburgh Village, have been cancelled.

In Shelbyville, where the march has a permit, a special traffic and parking plan will go into effect at 6 p.m. Friday ahead of the rally, scheduled there for 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, with separate lots for the white nationalists and counter-protesters. After the permit was issued, Shelbyville's city council condemned hate groups.

The marchers requested a permit in Murfreesboro, but it's still under review, though city officials say they can't stop the march even if a permit isn't issued. A decision — which will allow the city to implement similar traffic and parking restrictions to Shelbyville — is expected by week's end.

Murfreesboro's mayor, Shane McFarland, posted a video on Facebook, in which, along with six local pastors, he declares that the city is united and loving and that it denounces violence.

With rumors swirling that a tiki-torch march may be planned for campus, MTSU cancelled two weekend events — a middle- and high-school science event and the 56th annual Contest of Champions, Tennessee's oldest and most prestigious high-school marching band competition — and said it will lock all dorms through the weekend. The purported target of the tiki march is Forrest Hall. Named for slave trader, Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest, the name of the building, which serves primarily as the headquarters for MTSU's ROTC program, has been a source of controversy for years.

Counter-protesters have been organizing for weeks, but it may be the weather that proves a foil, with the chilliest day of the fall in the forecast for Saturday, with highs only reaching the low 50s and a solid chance of showers throughout the day throughout Middle Tennessee.

Photo by Emily Molli/NurPhoto via Getty Images