Portsmouth council condemns hate speech after neo-Nazi activity in Seacoast
PORTSMOUTH — Mayor Deaglan McEachern read a statement against hate speech Monday night on behalf of the City Council, following recent incidents in the area involving a neo-Nazi group.
“The Portsmouth City Council condemns hate speech and discriminatory actions of all kinds. By declaring ourselves a racial justice municipality in 2020, we committed ourselves to supporting racial justice, providing racial bias education and training, engaging stakeholders and cooperating with other efforts to welcome diversity throughout our community,” McEachern said during a council meeting, reading the statement. “If we said nothing while hate groups identified by the Anti Defamation League continued to assert themselves on our streets and in our neighborhoods, we would not be living up to those commitments.”
McEachern credited Assistant Mayor Joanna Kelley with “providing the first draft” of the statement.
The statement comes after the neo-Nazi group, the Nationalist Social Club, distributed recruitment materials to homes and other various areas in Portsmouth, Kittery and other areas around New England. The incidents have led the Kittery Town Council and Dover City Council to make similar resolutions against hate and to Seacoast residents organizing a recent rally in Kittery.
Members of the same group targeted the Seacoast Repertory Theatre of Portsmouth over its drag queen story hour last year, leading to a surge of community support for the theater pushing back against hate. A similar incident happened last month in Boston with a similar community response.
McEachern said in the anti-hate statement that “education and awareness help us all build a stronger defense against such invasive plagues. Assuming that if we ignore them they will go away is not a robust response to infections like these that spread fear, hate and lies."
He added Portsmouth police are “aware of the actions of these particular hate groups and will continue to investigate their actions both visible and invisible to the full extent of the law."
“The police department will continue to partner with our community in welcoming diversity and protects all citizens from the militant violence of domestic terrorist organizations,” he said.
Kelley said during the meeting she knows “many people in our community thank the council for this statement.
“As we have discussed this throughout our community in the last few weeks, one of the common threads that I have said is that silence is the friend of my enemy,” Kelley said. "There are some people in the community who felt like we didn’t need to make statements, who didn’t want to give wind to these sails. But at the end of the day when we don’t say anything, we allow these groups to feel welcome in our community.”
Kelley added, "It’s very important that all of us here on the council, city staff, and every single resident make it very clear that hate is not welcome here.”
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Portsmouth council condemns hate speech after neo-Nazi activity
