NEW MARKET, Tenn. — A racist symbol found spray-painted near a building destroyed by fire at a social-justice center in Tennessee has been displayed by white supremacists here and abroad, including the man accused of livestreaming the massacre of worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
A fire of undetermined origin destroyed the main office Friday of the Highlander Center, an internationally known social-justice organization that hosted prominent leaders, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, during the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.
The building, about 25 miles northeast of Knoxville, Tennessee, in New Market, housed archives documenting the Highlander Center's history. It's unclear what documents were destroyed; the Wisconsin Historical Society preserves the center's documents and said the majority of the archives are safe.
In a news release Tuesday, the Highlander Center announced that a "symbol connected to the white power movement" was found spray-painted in the parking lot by the main office. Jefferson County Sheriff Jeff Coffey confirmed the symbol was found Friday and described it as "the hashtag symbol."
A photograph taken Tuesday shows the symbol, painted in black, not far from the rubble of the burned building on the center's 200-acre campus. It consists of three vertical lines intersecting three horizontal lines, and looks like a hashtag with an extra line in each direction.
The symbol was used by the Iron Guard, also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a far-right, anti-Semitic movement active in Romania in the 1930s, said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism. He specializes in right-wing extremism and maintains the organization's Hate Symbols Database.
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