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The white supremacist group Patriot Front resurfaced briefly in Prattville on Saturday, hanging an anti-substance banner from a railroad trestle over Main Street.
About a dozen members of the group appeared in Prattville in person in June 2023, protesting a small pride picnic by Autauga Creek. Wesley Van Horn, who is the regional director for the hate group, railed against homosexuality through a bullhorn while the others stood silently by a banner that read “RESTORE AMERICAN VIRTUE.”
Jennifer Humphrey told APR she had just left the nearby Winn-Dixie when she noticed the banner.
“I was coming from Winn Dixie—when you turn you out of there, you go under the railroad crossing or whatever—I looked up and the banner was there when it hadn’t been. As I read the banner and saw what it was, these men ran, they fled. They took off toward the Northington side of the railroad track.”
The banner read “REJECT POISON” as well as the Patriot Front website. In addition to the text, a red “NO” symbol (a circle with a diagonal line through it) overlaid four symbols: a syringe or needle, a marijuana leaf, pills and a cigarette.
Humphrey said she called Prattville police at 3:25 p.m. and it seemed that her report was the first, as the dispatcher seemed to be unaware of the situation before her call. Police soon arrived and removed the banner.
Mayor Bill Gillespie said the banner was removed out of concern that the banner could fall on a vehicle passing underneath.
The banner appears to be an anti-drug message, although it’s not clear what the syringe or needle means. There is no information about the message on the group’s website, but the messaging has appeared in other places as well.
A photo captured in Saline, Michigan of a sticker bearing the same message shows a clearer view of the crossed-out symbols. (THE SALINE POST)
The Anti-Defamation League tracked 26 instances of the “REJECT POISON” sticker being placed just in the state of Alabama between Jan. 1, 2023, and Dec. 31, 2024, from Mobile to Gadsden. These incidents usually included a variety of stickers bearing phrases such as “not stolen, conquered,” “free occupied America,” and “for the nation, against the state.”
Morgan Moon, a researcher for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, previously told APR that the group has had an outsized impact, however, in the spread of white supremacist propaganda, accounting for 80 percent of propaganda across the nation.
“That’s about 14 pieces of propaganda per day,” Moon said. “They’re extremely active. No other white supremacist group is able to amass 200 white supremacists to finance travel and fly to places like Washington D.C. It’s significant. It shows an embeddedness of members and a hardened ideology. They’re one of the groups operating today I’m most concerned about due to their ability to carry out large propaganda demonstrations.”
This is the fourth known instance of Patriot Front action in the area in the past 19 months, although one of those instances had gone unreported.
Patriot Front’s appearance at the pride picnic drove the founders of that event to formally start Prattville Pride, and a year after the confrontation hosted a much larger event that drew thousands to Cooters Park to celebrate LGBTQ+ pride.
But when organizers of the event arrived to set up, they noticed numerous Patriot Front stickers on the site. The founders told APR that they believed the stickers must have been placed there earlier that morning. The event organizers simply removed the stickers and went on with the event, so it appears nobody but the organizers saw the group’s efforts.
According to the ADL heat map, Patriot Front was involved in 142 of 243 hate incidents recorded in the state. This data did not include the stickering at the Prattville Pride location. Almost every incident was propaganda-based, whether through banner drops, stickering, graffiti or distribution of fliers.
