Cain Lazarus prepares for many what-if scenarios while organizing protests against police brutality. In August, Lazarus’ group, the Coalition for Racial Justice, hosted a march in Nevada City calling for justice for Breonna Taylor.
Lazarus expected there might be some pushback. After all, the small town had become increasingly polarized after the police killing of George Floyd in May and the worldwide racial justice demonstrations that followed.
But this time was different.
“We were prepared for the counter-protesters, but we weren’t prepared for them to get violent,” Lazarus said of the Nevada City event. Lazarus uses they/them pronouns.
Lazarus and other experts fear the summer of social unrest could be a precursor to even more clashes between white supremacist and civil rights groups as the country approaches another contentious election — and that the Nevada City confrontation was just history repeating itself.
That protest took an unexpected turn when a group called Back the Blue showed up, which led to physical violence. Lazarus said the police did not do enough to keep things calm, and a Nevada City councilmember who was present agreed.
“At one point, some cops showed up, and some of them just sat in their cars and some were kind of directing traffic, but they weren’t doing anything about the violence at all,” Lazarus recalled. They added that a group of mostly white men carrying thin blue line flags began yelling at the protesters to “get out of their town” and screaming “all lives matter.”
The Nevada City Police Department has since said they are investigating the incident.
But the violence from the protest had already left a mark on Lazarus.
“After the march on August 9, I didn't leave my house for three weeks,” they said.
Simon Clark, a researcher with the Center for American Progress, said historically, white supremacist groups have always risen in tandem with civil rights movements as a direct backlash to fear of loss of power. That dates back to the creation of the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan first emerged during the reconstruction era after the Civil War out of fear that white members of the Confederacy would lose influence at the polls if African Americans were given the right to vote, Clark said.
“And so they decide to use terror against free Blacks and against the whites who support them — both those who come from the north and those in the south who have decided that the world needs to change,” he said.
That violence paved the way to Jim Crow Laws, which legalized segregation and disenfranchised African Americans for nearly a century.
America is entering another period of racial upheaval, and that is in part why tensions are rising on both sides today, Clark added.
“It's a very interesting moment,” Clark said. “You have a huge cultural shift. No surprise, given American history, that you get a response to that change, which is violent and which aims to use indiscriminate violence against civilians to stop that change.”
Sacramento is no stranger to far right extremist groups.
In 2016, months before the election, a far right nationalist group planned a rally at the state Capitol in support of then-candidate Donald Trump. When a group composed of local organizers and a Black Bloc cohort of Antifa demonstrators heard wind of the event, hundreds showed up to counter-protest.
In the resulting violent clash, seven people were stabbed.
More recently, far right groups like the Proud Boys have been seen at Reopen California protests at the Capitol building.
A recent report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a nonprofit organization that maps crisis and conflict scenarios, has said that California is at “moderate risk” of seeing increased violence from militias around this year’s election. Capital cities like Sacramento are also said to be a particular point of focus.
Eric Ward is the executive director of the Western States Center, a nonprofit that studies far-right groups on the west coast. He says for a city like Sacramento, the capital of what is nationally perceived as a liberal-leaning state, these groups are using violence to push for political change and stop racial progress.
“In Sacramento, the focus is on sending a message to legislators,” Ward said. “We should be clear that these movements are as focused on the ballot box as they are on the bullet.”
He said the groups often use violence, or the threat of it, in the streets to recruit new members, as well as to intimidate voters and sway legislators with fear, Ward said.
“This means that ballot box bigotry that shows up on Election Day then gets actualized over the course of legislative sessions,” Ward added.
The Sacramento chapter of the FBI has said they will be closely watching polling centers and keeping an eye out for potential voter intimidation on Election Day. But they won’t be tracking specific groups ahead of the election simply based on their ideologies.
As Robert Tripp, the special agent in charge at the Sacramento FBI, put it: “We do not look at groups. We look at actions.”
“If somebody says they're going to commit an act of violence, that could be a true threat, which is a violation of federal law,” Tripp said. “But just for thinking something, the FBI is not going to track that group. We're not a domestic intelligence agency. We're an investigative agency.”
Those who have been involved in organizing racial justice demonstrations in Sacramento say they’re prepared to meet some resistance around Election Day.
Meg White, an organizer with Sacramento Justice Unites Individuals and Communities Everywhere, also known as JUICE, said they’ll be warning participants to stay with the group and to keep an eye out for anyone who looks suspicious in the event that there are demonstrations in the wake of election results being released.
Despite the preparation, White said she doesn’t think the election will bring anything new.
“I think that we have been clashing with white supremacists since the very beginning of this,” White said. “I think that there are likely a lot of white supremacists in the police department that we also clash with and have been clashing with since the beginning of this.”
And though it’s a concern, White said those confrontations with white supremacists won’t stop them from protesting racial injustice.
“It’s something that actually makes us go even harder as opposed to something that makes us feel like we should be backing down,” White said.
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