Members of a neo-Nazi group that is based in New England, Nationalist Social Club 131 (NSC-131), staged a small demonstration on the steps of White Plains City Hall on Saturday, Nov. 9, White Plains Public Safety Commissioner David Chong has confirmed to the Business Journal. City Hall was closed since it was a Saturday. It is located at 255 Main St. in downtown across from the City Center retail and residential complex and in an area where there is plenty of pedestrian and motor vehicle activity.
“We noticed about ten to a dozen males dressed in all black standing on the steps of City Hall,” Chong said. He said that the banner they were holding up identified their group and that the banner stated that all foreigners should go home.
“Our patrol units spotted them and immediately ordered them off the steps of City Hall,” Chong said. “They were compliant as more police units showed up. They walked in a group chanting their name and broke up when they realized that the police were following them up Main Street to North Broadway.”
Chong said that the members of the group were not openly harassing pedestrians and did not cause any criminal mischief. He said that the Westchester County District Attorney’s Instigator Squad was notified, and the whole incident lasted no more than 20 minutes. Chong said that other appropriate agencies in the county have been notified of what took place.
“No other similar incident was reported by any other community in the county,” Chong said. “Our detectives will be setting up a follow up meeting with the Westchester District Attorney’s Office.”
Information obtained by the Business Journal indicated that at least some of the group’s members wore ski masks to hide their identify for at least part of the time they were on the steps of City Hall.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, NSC-131 came into being in 2020 when a previous white supremacist group went out of existence. In addition to being active in New England, especially around the Boston area, it added chapters in the Midwest, Southwest and Southeast, but soon abandoned those chapters and concentrated on the six-state New England geographic area of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
A search by the Business Journal failed to find reports of demonstrations in New York by NSC-131 prior to what happened in White Plains.
The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that in the spring of last year, NSC-131 launched a group called People’s Initiative of New England that welcomes women into its ranks. It uses a logo similar to NSC-131’s logo.
In April, NSC-131 staged a rally in front of Town Hall in Greenwich that lasted about an hour. Police said at the time that those taking part in the rally had not broken any laws but they found after the rally that a young girl had been injured by some individuals who took part in the event.
In March, Stamford police reported that anti-Semitic and other hate speech literature attributed to NSC-131 had been distributed in the city.
NSC-131 had said that its members were present when the U.S. Capitol was attacked on Jan. 6, 2021, and that it added 250 new members after Jan. 6. The total number of people active in NSC-131 remains unclear, but the Boston Globe reported in August 2023 that the group had 30 or 40 members. Other sources have said that the membership is “large.”
