Racially charged flyers have been showing up in a few towns in the New Haven area. The flyers read "White Lives Matter," and have been found on residents' lawns in Milford, Orange, and East Haven.
The leaflets are a clear response to the Black Lives Matter movement, which began after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of 17 year-old Trayvon Martin, and gained momentum last year after the death of Michael Brown by white Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson.
The first flyers appeared in Milford, and reference the recent riots in Baltimore. The Milford flyers urge readers to "stand up for the white race," and contains the website address for the The Nationalist Movement, a Mississippi-based organization described as a white supremacist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The same leaflets appeared a day later in Orange.
The flyers found in East Haven simply read "#White Lives Matter."
In 2013, four East Haven police officers were found guilty of federal civil rights offenses, after an FBI probe found the officers engaged in a pattern of abuse and harassment of the town's Latino community. The town has since replaced about half of the police force, and made systemic changes to it's approach to immigrants.
No one is sure who is distributing the flyers, and no organization has taken responsibility for them.
