On Sept. 29 the League of the South (LOS), a Southern Nationalist organization, is scheduled to hold a rally at Sycamore Shoals State Park in Elizabethton, Tennessee. The LOS has sixteen state chapters according to its website. The sixteen chapters represent each of the 11 former Confederate States of America as well as Oklahoma, which did not become a state until after the Civil War, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland and Missouri who each played a role in both the Confederacy and the Union at different points.
Named a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the LOS website describes their main goals as “political independence” and “a return to a more traditional conservative Christian-oriented Southern culture.” They declare their opposition to be, “an unholy crusade of leftist agitators and foreign religions.”
The LOS embodies this internal belief that mainstream society is involved in a conspiracy to destroy southern culture and southern people, a belief that Emmanuel Christian Seminary student and adjunct humanities professor, Nathan Cachiaras, attributes to “a false narrative of history.”
“It grieves me that there are people that feel they are under attack,” Cachiaras said, followed by, “I resist the terms under which they feel they are being attacked.” Cachiaras isn’t the only local resident unhappy with the LOS hosting their rally at Sycamore Shoals. A Facebook event called the “Pro-Love-Anti- Hate Rally,” created to counter the LOS rally, has caught the interest of more than 1,500 people.
“I do not wish to see the same wound inflicted on my ‘adopted’ hometown of three years inflicted on the town of my childhood and roots,” organizer of the counter-rally Thom Gray wrote, referencing last year’s violence in Charlottesville, in a Facebook comment under the event. One might know Gray from his Facebook profile as “The Overmountain Man.” Gray has long time ties to Sycamore Shoals as his grandparents were heavily involved in its early days, and he does not want his grandparents’ legacy and the history they worked to preserve to be associated with the ideology of the LOS. Gray’s rally is set to occur at Sycamore Shoals at the same time as the LOS rally.
“I cannot sit back and watch as this hate group attempts to claim their superiority over people who are different than they are,” said Emmanuel student Rebecca Miller. She discussed the LOS’s claim to Christian values saying that she feels the group’s beliefs contradict everything Christ stood for.
Miller touched on another question brought up in the interview with Cachiaras. “While I do not agree that ‘Southern culture’ is threatened, it is important to ask, what exactly is the ‘southern way of life’ that the league wishes to protect?” The LOS website answers this question as, “European, mainly Anglo-Celtic and Christian, folkways that are peculiar to our region and are rooted in a firm belief in a kith & kin nation.”
Cachiaras says that the South’s identity shouldn’t come from the Civil War and that the LOS is “missing a clearly informed history of what it means to live in the South.” He says, “There is so much to appreciate here,” calling the slow way of life “so beautiful,” but he says the LOS does not portray a positive example of their culture.
The Stampede contacted the Tom Pierce, Tennessee State chairman of the LOS, in attempt to get a response to the quotes above. Pierce was willing to answer questions, but unfortunately time did not allow for an interview.