"It's perfectly despicable and shameful,” says the ACLU, “but also perfectly lawful."

PROVIDENCE -- Sondra Pierson was having a glass of wine at Parkside Rotisserie & Bar after work last Thursday when she saw something outside the window that shocked her.

“Everyone in the restaurant turned around, and they were like, ‘What? Is that for real?’ she said this week.

A beat-up old Cadillac with Massachusetts plates had parked near the front of the restaurant, and a man and a woman wearing Nazi paraphernalia had gotten out.

The man wore a red “Make America Great Again” hat and a red armband with a black swastika on it. The woman wore a matching armband and a swastika T-shirt.

“I said out loud, ‘Are you kidding me?’” said Pierson, who lives in Pawtucket and works in an office right next to Parkside Rotisserie on South Main Street.

The swastika-wearing pair crossed the street to the Holocaust Memorial, leaned on the various statues, took pictures and laughed, Pierson said.

Pierson’s account was corroborated by another witness at the restaurant.



“I confronted them,” said Pierson, who left the restaurant and walked over to the memorial.

“‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’” she said she told them. “‘How dare you do this?’”

The woman responded sarcastically, Pierson said, and the two walked back to their car. Pierson called the police and saw a cruiser drive by a short while later, but didn’t think there was much the police could do.

Nevertheless, Pierson said she was horrified by the sight. The man, she said, had swastikas tattooed where his eyebrows should be.

“I literally felt sick to my stomach,” Pierson said. “I started shaking. Everybody at the bar was just really disturbed.”

While disturbing, walking around in Nazi paraphernalia is not illegal, Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, wrote in an email.

"It's perfectly despicable and shameful,” he wrote, “but also perfectly lawful."

Given the climate of the country, though, and recent high-profile acts of anti-Semitism, such as the deadly shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue last year, or vandalism at a Jewish cemetary in Fall River last month, the display of Nazi symbols in downtown Providence is particularly alarming, said Rabbi Howard Voss-Altman of Temple Beth-El in Providence. The Rhode Island House of Representatives unanimously condemned the vandalism at the cemetery.

“I certainly think that the Jewish community feels that surge in hostility,” he said. “It’s a sense that heinous actions and ideas are coming into the light, and are very much designed to cause fear and harassment.”

Robert Trestan, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that tracks hate crimes and bias incidents, said the pair with Nazi armbands walking around downtown Providence was not an isolated incident.

Last month, a photo circulated on the internet of a woman with a Nazi armband at the Providence Place Mall.

The Anti-Defamation League has recorded 10 anti-Semitic incidents in Providence between 2002 and 2019, according to the organization’s Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism, Terrorism Map. Eight of those incidents occurred in 2017 and 2018.

“The dissemination of hate, whether it’s through vandalism or fliers or wearing it on your body, is on the rise,” Trestan said. “More and more people are feeling confident to be public about their hatred.”

— mlist@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7121

On Twitter: @madeleine_list