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Several hundred people marched in a candlelight procession in Mountain View on Sunday night in solidarity against white supremacist and hate groups.

The vigil, which was organized by the 3,000-member Together We Will Palo Alto Mountain View, attracted residents from the Midpeninsula, including Redwood City, many of them families. The group began a several block walk from El Camino Real and Castro Street and converged on the Civic Center Plaza where they sang together and individuals spoke about how they felt. They promised to be back again another day in larger numbers.

Marchers said they were moved to come out after the violence stemming from a white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. There were numerous clashes and one woman was killed and more than a dozen others injured after a man plowed his car into counter-demonstrators following a white supremacist rally.

President Trump issued an initial statement in which he decried the violence “on many sides,” and did not name or blame the large collection of white supremacist groups that converged on Charlottesville, including the KKK.

“I’m appalled with the response from our president and our congress. We stand with everybody here. We really will not tolerate this kind of hatred and vulgarity,” said Margaret Herzen, a Redwood City resident.

Mountain View resident Shawn Shahin said the vigil is the first time she has come out to demonstrate.

“I just couldn’t stand by and do nothing. I truly believe we need to tolerate and accept all people,” she said, noting that she was deeply moved by the Charlottesville violence.

“This is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said.

Christopher Kashap, also of Mountain View, attended with his daughter, Isabella, 11.

“I’m here because I’m frightened and outraged. I’m the son of an immigrant. That’s what makes this country great — immigrants,” he said.

Sue Dremann is a veteran journalist who joined the Palo Alto Weekly in 2001. She is an award-winning breaking news and general assignment reporter who also covers the regional environmental, health and...

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30 Comments

  1. Remember Reginald Denny? That woman who got run over was rioting in the street, blocking traffic so that the Antifa thugs could throw bricks and bottles at the cars. Nobody wants to be Reginald Denny. If you choose to riot in front of my car in the street, I will run you over.

  5. LOL: Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei = NAZI. Please note the first word. Americans have long had the wrong notion of what NAZI stands for. Hitler wanted to differentiate his party from the Soviet Communist party by creating the above mentioned title.

  6. swissik,

    I don’t think you read the article. Then innocent young woman killed by that Nazi was a leftist and a socialist.

    Consider your argument as applied to North Korea; it calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, yet none of us would consider it democratic, of the people, or a republic.

    The fact is that Nazism is an extreme right-wing ideology that was strongly resisted on Saturday by leftists and socialists.

  7. Yes, terminology can be tricky. I don’t really care for “White Nationalist”
    either… I mean what “Nation” are these racists from? They talk about
    “preserving the white race”, and say derogatory things about people of
    color, Jews and Women. How about “white bigots”? “Men who didn’t learn
    manners”? Violent Sociopaths? Take your pick. I think all apply.

  8. To all who are making irrelevant comments about the political views of the deceased woman….The point is that this violent event was fueled by Trump rhetoric (as noted by David Duke, KKK)…end of story… Trump is a sorry excuse for a POTUS. He needs to go.

  9. Thank you to everyone who showed up. Putting yourself out there on the streets is the best way to show these terrorists they won’t win.

  10. @MyOpinion, I think you may have misunderstood me. I mean both of those terms (leftist and socialist) in a positive manner. These are the people fighting for a better future for all of us against the dangerous ideologies fomenting on the right.

    The fact that @joe p and @swissik were trying to smear the woman by calling her a Nazi was a bridge too far for me. She was out there resisting as a proud socialist, and to allow people to equate her beliefs with Nazism would be a disservice to her memory.

  11. People are looking for society to say “Its OK, I won’t think any less of you if you’re a racist”
    That’s not going to happen. The US has far too many caring and good people for that to happen.

  12. A little historical background to the exchange above: Fascism (the literal word, from Italy) and National Socialism (NSDAP) are both explicitly variations on Socialism; all are forms of government deriving from the core idea of forcing the population to conform to behavior deemed enlightened by advocates. In Socialism, that’s done in the abstract name of “the people” (in Russian, narod — whence so many gov’t bodies in the old USSR were Narodny This or Narodny That; narodny = “of the people,” or “people’s” — down to the grotesque extreme of Narodny Kommissariat Vnutryennikh Del, People’s Commisariat for Internal Matters — Stalin’s dreaded secret political police — all in the name of the people, naturally). Anarchist intellectuals have long pointed out that these political movements claiming to decentralize power into the hands of the “people” regularly achieve exactly the opposite, putting dictatorial authority into the hands of one, or a very few, “people.”

    Fascism grew avowedly out of Socialism (founding members, such as Benito Mussolini, had been Socialists), rhetorically substituting “the nation” for “the people” (which incidentally also overlaps the use of “narod” by the Russian Communist Party). PBS’s TV documentary on Socialism, “Heaven on Earth,” interviewed one of the surviving original Italian Fascisti, who said they’d been looking for a philisophical rationalization for their group (intent on seizing power), and found that if they took principles of Marxist Socialism and substituted “the nation” for “the people,” they had something that sounded good; by 1922 they controlled Italy.* The later Fascist-inspired parties in Germany (NSDAP, shortened to “Nazi”) and Britain (BUF) also followed that example.

    “LOL,” commenting above, appeared unaware of all of this.

    * ‘Mussolini asserted that the French Marxist and revolutionary syndicalist Georges Sorel was his “master,” who he claimed was instrumental in birthing the core principles of Italian fascism, that eventually “fused socialism with nationalism.” Other historians argued that Fascism billed itself “not only as an alternative, but also as the heir to socialism.” ‘ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Fascism

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