ADL Asks if Skinheads Are Behind Plymouth Rock Swastika Graffiti

The New England office of the Anti-Defamation League has asked the Plymouth County district attorney to investigate whether a neo-Nazi Skinhead group active in Massachusetts may be connected to the daubing of a swastika on Plymouth Rock.

The swastika was spray-painted over a square foot of the national landmark on Monday night or early Tuesday. Fisherman discovered the graffiti at about 4 a.m. and it was erased the same morning by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management.

The fisherman said they had seen several youths around the pavilion that surrounds the fabled rock, where the Pilgrims landed in 1620.

But “police searched the area and came up empty,” said Lt. Victor Higgins of the Plymouth police department.

Higgins said Plymouth Rock has been defaced in the past. Vandals have carved initials into the stone, pelted it with eggs and sprayed it with shaving cream.

But he said there are neither gangs nor Skinheads in Plymouth, a city of 50,000 whose population swells to 100,000 in the summer.

He called the graffiti a “reverse swastika” because “the tails are going in the wrong direction.” On that basis, he deduced that an organized group had not done it, because “they would know how to draw it.”

ADL civil rights attorney Sally Greenberg disagreed. “It’s immaterial that it was drawn incorrectly. We’re not talking about geniuses here.”

RECENT SPATE OF HATE CRIMES

A spate of hate crimes began in this area in May, Greenberg said. They include the beating of two gay men in the Chinatown section of Boston and threats by a group of teens against a black girl at the North Attleboro train station.

In other recent incidents:

Eight teen-agers were stopped in a van carrying neo-Nazi literature, brass knuckles, baseball bats and a hatchet.

Literature belonging to the White Youth League, a racist group, was found in the woods in North Attleboro.

Two youths were charged with civil rights violations for painting swastikas on a granite wall.

Lt. Michael Gould of the North Attleboro police department has been investigating unsolved civil rights violations there. When told of the “reverse swastika” on Plymouth Rock, he recalled that one of the youths who had painted the swastika on the granite wall possibly had a reverse swastika tattooed on his arm.

“The curve of hate crime activity and violence is going up,” said Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates in Cambridge.

“There’s a lot of direct (hate) mail that has been received by various people from Massachusetts, and there’s been an increase in the recruiting and pitching by the Ku Klux Klan,” he said.

But so far, major neo-Nazi or white supremacist leaders “are not showing themselves” in this area, as they are in the Pacific Northwest, where there is also an increase in racist activity, Berlet said.