Three men were arrested Saturday at a rally in Boston that the district attorney called an “organized white supremacist action.”
The Boston Police Department said Saturday that three men were arrested for disturbing the peace in Jamaica Plain, a diverse neighborhood of Boston.
A spokesperson for Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden said he was told one of the three men arrested is affiliated with the group known as NSC 131 or the Nationalist Social Club.
Hayden said in a statement that “the presence of white supremacists at a Jamaica Plain book reading” is a “disgrace and a warning.” Hayden noted that another group of white supremacists, members of the Patriot Front, marched through downtown Boston march earlier this month.
The Anti-Defamation League says NSC 131 is a New England-based neo-Nazi group founded in 2019 that “espouses racism, antisemitism and intolerance” and whose “membership is a collection of neo-Nazis and racist skinheads, many of whom have previous membership in other white supremacist groups.”
“Society everywhere is targeted by these groups, and society everywhere must reject them,” Hayden said, calling Boston a “a waypoint in the crusade of hate launched five years ago in Charlottesville.”
In 2017, hundreds of white nationalists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia in part to protest the city’s decision decided to remove a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a park. Violent fighting broke out between attendees and counterprotesters that day. Authorities eventually forced the crowd to disperse, but a car later barreled into a crowd of peaceful counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
The day’s death toll rose to three when a state police helicopter that had been monitoring the event and assisting with the governor’s motorcade crashed, killing two troopers.
Boston Police said they did not have further information on Saturday’s arrests because the officers involved were still completing the incident reports.
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