Hate Groups In America: Map Shows They're Everywhere

White supremacists converged on Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, igniting a violent clash with counter-protesters that left a woman who stood up to hate dead when a man, revealed to have a violent past and Nazi views, allegedly drove his car into a crowd of people. In the wake of the weekend's violence in Charlottesville, as the city heals and a new push to remove Confederate statues gains steam, the country was also reminded that hate and hate groups have long been alive and well in America.

A map of such groups created by the Southern Poverty Law Center shows the locations of more than 900 such organizations that exist in the country.

"All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics," the SPLC explains.

While many white supremacists are associated with known hate groups, a majority of them are not formally affiliated with a particular organization.

"I like to encourage the notion of not overly focusing on groups per se," a senior investigative researcher at the Anti Defamation League's Center on Extremism told Patch. The researcher asked not to be named due to the sensitive nature of his work.

He pointed to the example of Dylann Roof, who killed nine black churchgoers at a South Carolina church in 2015. Roof was not part of any larger organization and was radicalized online.

Still, some groups have a larger presence nationally, like the National Socialist Movement led by Jeff Schoep, which is based out of Detroit. That movement, the ADL expert said, is the largest Neo-Nazi group that has somewhat of a small national presence with different state chapters. Another example is the Keystone State Skinheads who are based in Pennsylvania and have more of a regional presence in the state.

Watch: The Many Symbols Of The Modern White Power Movement

These groups can be found everywhere, from the urban to the suburban and to the rural, the expert told Patch.

"So you can find them pretty much everywhere," he said.

When groups do organize formal rallies or public events, there could be a tendency to have rallies in areas where they have a bigger presence, even though white supremacists come from out of state. The National Socialist Movement, for example, held its annual rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in November.

"They're gonna come to these areas because they have a white supremacist population that will show up," the expert said.

Pointing to the alt-right movement, the expert said that while it is not new, the movement has gotten a lot of attention lately and its rise can be charted to the rhetoric of the 2016 presidential election, which gave them "implicit approval" that "it was OK now." The alt-right, he said, is a group that rejects mainstream conservatism and is made up of a loose network of racists and anti-Semites "without the robes and hoods of the Klan."

A graph on the SPLC's website charting the rise of hate groups shows a slight decline starting around 2011 and a dramatic resurgence starting in 2014. The SPLC explains that since the turn of the century, the rise in hate groups is driven in part by anger over Latino immigration and demographic projections showing that whites will no longer hold majority status in the country by around 2040.

When looking to more recent events, the ADL expert said that the political climate has really opened the door for them to feel emboldened.

"They feel emboldened when the president gets criticized for not calling it out," the expert said, pointing to President Donald Trump's refusal to single out the ideology of white supremacists when he first addressed the events in Charlottesville on Saturday.

The SPLC charts a rise in 2009 followed by a decline that it attributes to the fact that groups were moving to the web and away from on-the-ground activities.

"The internet has been this incredible tool for all types of white supremacists," the expert said. It gives white supremacists a sense of anonymity and it's also a great tool for radicalization. While there are still some "keyboard commandos" who are not ready to go out there, there are plenty of people out there who feel that this is their opportunity.

The shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina, is where it started, the expert said. After the shooting, Confederate flags began to come down, and then the Confederate monuments, giving white supremacists something to protest.

The SPLC divides the hate groups in America into the following categories:

Ku Klux Klan-130 groups

Neo-Nazi-99 groups

White Nationalist-100 groups

Racist Skinhead-78 groups

Christian Identity-21 groups

Neo-Confederate-43 groups

Black Separatist-193 groups

Anti-LGBT-52 groups

Anti-Muslim-101 groups

General Hate-100 groups

ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson, who was on the scene in Charlottesville over the weekend, notes that many of the groups in attendance at the rally did not belong to more widely known hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan or Nazi Skinheads. Rather, many belonged to new organizations like Vanguard America, Identity Evropa, the Traditionalist Workers Party and True Cascadia. Thompson notes that many of these groups see themselves as part of the broader alt-right movement, who the ADL expert says is a sub-movement within the overarching umbrella of white supremacy.

Extremist groups are not backing off after the rally in Charlottesville Saturday. Rallies similar to the one in Virginia are being planned. One such rally planned on the campus of Texas A&M University for Sept. 11 has been canceled, and another rally, organized by the group Patriot Prayer, has been granted a permit at San Francisco's Crissy Field for later this month.

You can see the full list of hate organizations in from the SPLC here.

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