Racist Outbursts in U.S. in Wake of Trump's Election

In the aftermath of Republican firebrand Donald Trump being named president-elect of the United States early Wednesday, reports appeared to surge of hate-fueled taunts and threats hurled by triumphant Trump supporters.

Swastikas and graffiti declaring "Sieg Heil 2016" were reportedly spray-painted in South Philadelphia. "Trump!" was scrawled on the door to a prayer room used by Muslim students at New York University. A gay pride flag was burned in Rochester, New York. And the apparent effigy of a black man was hanged above the entrance to a coffee shop in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, dangling from the end of a rope.

As of Thursday evening, reports of more than 80 such incidents had poured into the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes.

"When we walked into the office this morning we were inundated," says Heidi Beirich, who directs the Intelligence Project for the center. "You just don't see a day in which 80 or 90 people are reporting terrible things happening to them. That is just really, really rare."

A "frightening number" of the incidents occurred at schools, Beirich adds, an apparent trend corroborated by other civil rights groups and by teachers who also received or witnessed such incidents, from fifth-graders who allegedly chanted "build the wall" at a school in Southern California to high school students in New Jersey who reportedly chanted "10 feet higher" – another reference to the wall Trump has pledged to build along the U.S.-Mexico border – at Latino students.

Legal experts and civil rights activists say it was Trump's rhetoric during the campaign that gave license to language and groups that were once on America's fringe.

"Our community is under siege, and we may be entering an era where our very own existence is an act of civil disobedience" Cristina Jimenez Moreta, executive director and co-founder of immigrant rights group United We Dream, said at a Thursday press conference in the nation's capital.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump characterized many Latino immigrants as "criminals," "rapists" and sources of "infectious disease." He called for banning Muslims from entering the U.S. and said Muslims could be registered in a national database, a proposal he walked back but did not disavow. He also would not rule out issuing Muslims ID cards, disseminated an anti-Semitic meme and was slow to disavow the support of white supremacists when pressed on television (separately, his campaign later denounced the support of a KKK-affiliated newspaper).

Trump additionally falsely claimed black communities are "absolutely in the worst shape" ever and referred to a black supporter he thought was a protester as a "thug," while also repeatedly praising violence at his rallies against protesters.

Trump's comments about immigrants were a central part of his appeal, and they mirrored similar arguments by British conservatives in their successful campaign to remove the United Kingdom from the European Union. In the month after the so-called Brexit vote in June, hate-crimes in the U.K. surged by 41 percent from the same month in 2015.

"These are people who are emboldened by the outcome of the election," Beirich says. "Unfortunately Trump's racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, misogynistic language has sanctioned the sort of things Andrew Anglin" – a neo-Nazi Trump supporter who's called for striking fear into Muslims – "is calling for, and this is an environment he absolutely needs to denounce."

Even before the election, at Southern Lehigh High School in Pennsylvania, students had been shouting gay slurs and the n-word, flashing the 'heil Hitler' salute and calling black students "cotton pickers," the school's principal said in a letter home to parents.

In Maine, residents in Appleton and Union outside Bangor discovered fliers purportedly left by the "Traditionalist American Rights of the Ku Klux Klan," decorated with a man in a white hood and text declaring "Police Lives Matter" above the number for the organization's "24-hour Klanline."

Similar anecdotes of troubling behavior have been compiled by Shaun King, a Black Lives Matter activist and New York Daily News columnist.

Others were shared at the press conference Thursday, where civil rights leaders spoke in tones strikingly dire for the transition of the American presidency, referring to Jim Crow, lynching, Brown v. Board of Education and the use of fire hoses on civil rights marchers.

"This election may be the most consequential in U.S. history," said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "The bigoted rhetoric and the divisive policies that the president-elect ran on are deeply troubling and have left many of us afraid that we won't have a place in Donald Trump's America."