WASHINGTON—The Washington D.C. Metro has dropped the idea of running separate trains for
demonstrators coming to a “Unite the Right” white-nationalist rally scheduled for Aug. 12, after the city’s largest transit workers’ union said it would refuse to operate them. “Metro will not be providing a special train or special car for anyone next Sunday,” board chair Jack Evans said Aug. 4. The rally is being organized by Jason Kessler, a leader of the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia last summer where a participant fatally rammed a counderdemonstrator with his car. Evans said the board had considered the separate trains as a way to avert violence between participants and counterprotesters. But the plan was leaked by Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, which said Aug. 3 that its members would “draw the line at giving special accommodation to hate groups and hate speech.” “More than 80% of Local 689’s membership is people of color, the very people that the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalist groups have killed, harassed, and violated,” Local 689 President Jackie Jeter said in a statement. “The union has declared that it will not play a role in their special accommodation.” Read more
