SHELBYVILLE — The late-afternoon sun cast a golden hue over the Shelbyville Housing Authority neighborhood.

As children chased one another and two small dogs around the yard, Varina Hinojosa and her neighbors stood in a driveway. In the rows of matching brick duplexes, Shelbyville natives live among immigrants from Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, a sign of the slowly changing demographics of this city 60 miles southeast of Nashville.

The neighborhood sits just behind one of the city’s main intersections, the site of a “White Lives Matter” rally set for Saturday in protest of longtime Middle Tennesseans having to coexist with their newer, foreign-born neighbors. It follows a similar demonstration held in Charlottesville, Va., this August, a rally that turned violent and left one counterprotester dead.

Now, some Shelbyville residents are concerned about how events will unfold this weekend in their city of 21,000.

“It does worry me, because most of the housing project is a bunch of different races,” said Hinojosa, 37.

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Across the street from Hinojosa, Connie Price sat on her front steps, looking out at the children playing in the public housing development.

She remembers in 1980 watching robed Ku Klux Klan members walk the sidewalk along U.S. 41 in Shelbyville, lingering outside Bright Temple Church of God in Christ — a predominately African-American church where one of her friends attended — and passing out fliers on the corner.

Nearly four decades later, Price said she dreads the thought of another white supremacist demonstration in her city.

“I’m not going to have them coming over here starting nothing,” said Price, who like Hinojosa is a white woman born and raised in Tennessee.

On the other side of Price's duplex lives a young Somali family — a man and woman who both work as meatpackers at the local Tyson Foods chicken plant, and their 1-year-old son who fondly calls Price “Mum” when he sees her.

The couple has invited her to attend an upcoming party at their house for their baby, Price said, even going out to buy Price a long robe and hijab after she expressed concern about what she would wear.

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Price, 63, didn’t go on a trip outside the state until she was 20 years old.

She is planning to go to her Somali neighbors' party and to wear the new outfit.

“They’re not really hurting anybody,” she said. “As long as they’re not hurting anybody…” Price continued, pausing to think. “Matter of fact, most of them are all fairly nicer than a lot of the other folks around here.”

Why this town?

Though speculation and rumors continue to spread among residents in Shelbyville as to why a group of white nationalist organizations — including those that were part of the August “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville — chose their city, the leaders of the event have made it clear: The demographics of Middle Tennessee have changed, in part because of the resettlement of refugees and other immigrants moving to the region.

The State Department reports that over the last 15 years around 18,000 refugees have arrived in Tennessee, amounting to just over one-quarter of 1 percent of the state's population. That figure doesn't include immigrants who have moved to the region.

“There has been a big dumping of refugees all over the area,” said Brad Griffin, a member of League of the South, which has spearheaded the organization of the "White Lives Matter" rally in Shelbyville and a possible second demonstration that day in Murfreesboro.

The cause is hardly new for League of the South, an organization seeking the independence of Southern states and one whose members held demonstrations in the same two cities exactly four years ago to “warn the public about the consequences of refugee resettlement, mass immigration, multiculturalism, political correctness and terrorism and how this curse would haunt the region,” Griffin wrote in a blog post about the rally.

But now, Griffin said, the topic has become even more relevant after police say 25-year-old Emanuel Kidega Samson, who moved to the United States from Sudan in 1996, opened fire at a church in Antioch last month, killing one woman and injuring seven others as Sunday service let out, according to authorities.

Griffin and other members of Nationalist Front, an alliance of white nationalist organizations hosting the White Lives Matter event, are angry that the White House didn’t make comments about Samson and removed Sudan from a travel ban list the same day as the deadly church shooting.

They are also disappointed President Donald Trump's administration hasn't yet started construction of his promised southern border wall.

Griffin said Nationalist Front chose Middle Tennessee, in part, because it believes law enforcement here will keep counterprotesters away from his group, which he said didn’t happen when they rallied in Charlottesville.

“We just do not trust the police in a lot of these Democratic-leaning leaning cities to enforce the law,” Griffin said.

On top of that, they don’t suspect nearly as many anti-Fascist counterprotesters to show up to an event in Middle Tennessee, compared to the turnout in Virginia.

“The demographics of the town are completely different,” Griffin said of Shelbyville. “It’s a lot further away from all the antifa enclaves in the Northeast.”

Among the groups rallying as part of Nationalist Front are the National Socialist Movement, the Traditionalist Worker Party, League of the South and Vanguard America. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers each organization to be a hate group, falling under neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate and white nationalist categories.

‘Everybody is talking about it’

Inside Pop a Top, one of the few bars in Shelbyville, Ruby Tucker takes a break from hanging Halloween decorations inside the business to smoke a cigarette.

The White Lives Matter rally, she said, has been discussed more than anything else in her bar over the last two weeks.

“Everybody is talking about it,” Tucker said. “And I’ve heard one person say they’re in favor of it.”

Tucker, 49, who has co-owned a bar here with her mother for 27 years — and in this particular spot on Madison Street for the last 17 — describes the dimly lit watering hole with pool tables and neon signs as a “country bar.”

Tucker talks over the stereo system as a song by country artist Billy Currington plays. “God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy,” the song says.

When the mother and daughter first opened their business nearly three decades ago, Tucker said, “you didn’t hardly see black people come to the bar.”

Today, Tucker describes Pop a Top as a place where "the n-word is not allowed," a place where Latino customers are some of her best tippers and where Somali immigrants — “good people like Memo and Antonio and all of them,” she said — are welcomed like everyone else.

She and her mother serve as the bouncers, and Tucker said she doesn’t hesitate to ban someone from the bar who makes racist remarks to other customers. Tucker said she banned a customer for that just a couple of months ago.

James Keele, who with his wife, Patty, is helping Tucker decorate the bar, is a self-described “country boy” who disagrees with much of the cause and message perpetuated by white nationalist groups like those who rallied in Charlottesville.

Keele, 50, who grew up in Wheel, an unincorporated community west of Shelbyville, wears a T-shirt with a Tractor Supply Company logo in the corner. He talks about his great, great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War.

“To me, it’s a disgrace for them to carry around symbols of the Confederacy, because this has nothing to do with the Civil War, period,” Keele said. “Never has, never will. The group, the rally, I’ve seen pictures where they’ve got the Confederate flag. It has absolutely nothing to do with what they’re trying to do.”

Keele says he is hardly bothered by immigrants who are in Bedford County.

“What I would like to ask the White Lives Matter group is, if they’re willing to, do they want a job at Tyson’s?” Keele said. “They’re going to say no. They don’t want a job at Tyson. They’re not going to work there. So what’s wrong with a Somalian or Mexican or whoever working there?”

Patty Keele was at one point a Tyson employee, a job in which she was “the only white person” on her line. She described the immigrants employed at the meatpacking plant as “good workers.”

Chris Simpson, owner of Pope’s Café in downtown Shelbyville’s Public Square, raised the same issue as the Keeles.

“Tyson brought a bunch of them in so they can run the plant, and everybody raised a big Cain about it,” Simpson said. "But I don’t see anybody else’s tail going out there to work, and Tyson is always hiring.”

While nearby city denounces white supremacy, Shelbyville remains neutral

Last week, Shelbyville's city council passed a resolution committing to support efforts by law enforcement to keep people and property safe while upholding both parties' constitutional rights to free speech in public spaces.

No event permit is required to hold the rally on a public sidewalk in the city, which Nationalist Front says it will do.

In the resolution, Mayor Ewing Wallace Cartwright and council members said they acknowledged that the “community is caught between conflicting ideological ideas.”

Before the city passed its resolution, Sharon Edwards, chair of the Bedford County Democratic Party, asked the city council to commit to protect minority groups during the rally and specifically denounce the views of those involved in the White Lives Matter event. Edwards submitted a petition signed by more than 600 people online to support for her request, but said she never heard back from the mayor.

Although Murfreesboro has not yet determined — a month after receiving the application — whether it will grant a permit to League of the South to rally outside the Rutherford County courthouse on Saturday, the city has taken a stand in opposition to the beliefs of the organizers behind the White Lives Matter rally.

"We condemn in no uncertain terms the ideologies of white supremacy and white nationalism," Mayor Shane McFarland said in a statement. "The city of Murfreesboro and the council are committed to the constitutional rights we have taken an oath to uphold, as well as the peace and public safety of this city. Be assured we will take every step necessary to protect both."

Edwards is campaigning against the rally, encouraging business owners in the community to post “Boo to hate” fliers in windows and changing marquee signs to similar messages.

Hinojosa is among those reaching out to store owners, and said that other counterprotesters are holding a vigil from 4 to 5 p.m. each day this week at the intersection where the rally will take place.

“As a white person, I feel like it’s my job to stand up to other white people who are saying these things,” Edwards said. “I was born and raised here. We love where we live. We love everyone in it. And they don’t get to come into the town and speak for us.”

Reach Natalie Allison at nallison@tennessean.com. Follow her on Twitter at @natalie_allison.