Alwaght-Tens of thousands of people have marched across the US city of Boston on Saturday to protest a hate speech rally featuring far-right speakers a week after a woman was killed at a Virginia white-supremacist demonstration.
The march and rally came one week after racially motivated protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly.
Amid a heavy police presence, men, women and children from diverse backgrounds showed up Saturday morning to march from the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center in Roxbury to Boston Common Park.
A coalition of mostly left-leaning groups and activists such as the Black Lives Matter movement organized Boston's counter protest.
Some carried signs with messages such as "No Trump. No KKK. No racist USA" and "Americans against hate." At times, they chanted "Hey hey, ho ho, white supremacy has got to go" and "Black lives matter."
US President Donald Trump made contradictory remarks about thousands of protesters who took to the streets in Boston before a planned “Free Speech” right-wing rally on Saturday.
Trump initially described the thousands of peaceful counter-protesters as "anti-police agitators," but then applauded them.
The president has been harshly criticized by many in the US and abroad after he blamed the Charlottesville violence on both sides of the conflict last weekend.
His messages have fueled the escalating rhetoric from "alt-right" figures and white supremacists across the United States and prompted local and federal law enforcement officials to warn about the potential for more violence in the coming days.
Meanwhile, thousands of people attended a peaceful rally against white supremacism in Dallas. The event was marred by scuffles with supporters of a Confederate monument at Pioneer Park Cemetery. Dozens of protesters are defying police orders to disperse.
Saturday's rally was one of many across the US that was organized in response to last week's deadly assault in Charlottesville that was sparked after the city made plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
White supremacists and neo-Nazis who revered Lee and the Confederacy oppose a plan to remove the statue. People across the ideological spectrum have supported the removal of Confederate monuments.
The Confederate monuments in the US were erected and dedicated by white southerners as an expression of their collective values—chief among them a commitment to white supremacy that secessionists were willing to die for.
