GAINESVILLE, Ga. — If you ever meet Chester J. Doles, don't call him a racist. "White nationalist" is the term he likes.
The 42-year-old violent ex-con with the Nazi tattoos and the 10 home-schooled children drove down from the north Georgia mountains with a band of skinheads Saturday to stomp around the town square, wave flags and shout nasty things about immigrants.
"What do we want?" Doles hollered.
"Mexicans out!" the skinheads answered.
"When do we want it?" Doles yelled again.
"Now!"
"We are not your enemy!" screamed another burly man in combat fatigues.
Once upon a time, a white supremacist rally was a main event in the kudzu-covered woods of north Georgia. The area was infamous during the Jim Crow era and beyond for violent Ku Klux Klan marches and road signs--official ones, put up by the counties--warning blacks to get out of town by sunset.
These days, most hate groups have gone deep underground. And many of the once all-white communities where they were based, like Gainesville, have become home to immigrants, blacks and all sorts of diversity.
What made Saturday's hate rally unusual was that the organizers picked a very visible spot to stir up trouble.
And nobody bit.
"We were kind of hoping the cops would clear out the town square and let us go at it with the parasites," Doles said, referring to a small group of teenage counter-protesters.
But as Doles' men marched down drizzly Main Street, their Aryan flags limp with rain, their jackboots squeaky, nobody paid much attention.
Actually, there was a much bigger crowd at a nearby ham radio convention.
"We put out the word to stay away," said Greg Bautista, a Latino activist in Gainesville. "We know this group is using concerns about illegal immigration as a front for white supremacy. We didn't want to dignify them."
Doles' group, part of a larger neo-Nazi organization called the National Alliance, picked Gainesville, 50 miles north of Atlanta, because it's home to one of the highest concentrations of Latino immigrants in the South. The town of 26,000 is the self-proclaimed "poultry capital of the world," and thousands of Mexican immigrants have come here to work in the numerous chicken plants, taking minimum-wage jobs that most locals eschew.
The 2000 census found the city is 33% Latino, up fourfold since 1990. Gainesville officials say that, with undocumented immigrants, that figure is closer to 60%.
