KKK rally in Virginia met with large counterprotest

At least 23 people have been arrested during a march in the
US state of Virginia by supporters of the white supremacist
group, Ku Klux Klan.

A few dozen Klansmen protesting against the removal of a
statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville
were met by hundreds of jeering counter-protesters on
Saturday.

The two groups were separated by a metal barricade and a
phalanx of armed police.

The Klan group shouted "white power" and brandished
Confederate flags and signs with anti-Semitic messages. They
marched past hundreds of people shouting "racists go home"
and other chants.


State police threw tear gas containers to disperse the crowd,
and arrested two dozen people for failing to disperse as the
rally ended.

The KKK rally was authorised on free speech grounds and
lasted less than an hour.

City officials said about a 1,000 people were present at the
march, of whom 50 were KKK members.

Confederacy statues and flags have been removed from

public spaces across the US since 2015, after a white

supremacist murdered nine black parishioners at a South

Carolina church.

Critics of the monuments say they foster racism by

celebrating leaders of the Confederacy in the pro-slavery

South during the US Civil War.

Supporters say they represent an indelible part of US history

and part of regional heritage.

Watching the rally in Charlottesville, Mason Pickett, a 60-ish

retired businessman, said he regretted the city's decision to

remove the nearly century-old bronze statue of Lee and his

horse.

"Statues can be good history, they can be bad history -- you

may not like it and you may love it, but it's history," he said.

But Tina Young, a 49-year-old lawyer, said it was past
 time to remove signs of the state's Confederate past.

"In Washington, DC, they have put up a Martin Luther 
King statue, they have an Afro-American museum, they 
have a Jewish museum, they made the public space more
 fair and balanced," she said.

As to Lee, she added, "he did represent slavery, he did 
fight a war against our government which killed thousands and thousands of soldiers, he could have chosen the better side but he didn't."

A legal battle is going on over the statue's removal
 and no date has been set.

In its heyday in 1925, the KKK had as many as four 
million members.

These days it has from 5,000 to 8,000, mainly in the deep
South, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which
monitors and studies extremism in America.