White nationalists and neo-Nazis marched in the small Tennessee cities of Shelbyville and Murfreesboro Saturday to protest refugee resettlement in the state, seven months after suing the federal government over the issue.

The “White Lives Matter” rally, and corresponding trending #whitelivesmatter hash tag, was expected to include some of the groups involved in a Virginia march in August that turned violent. It drew counter-demonstrators, too. Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, canceled events and some businesses boarded their windows.

The Wall Street Journal reported at midday Saturday the presence of dozens of police in riot gear with batons, police on horseback close by and armored vehicles positioned at the ready along the streets of Murfreesboro, population 132,000.

Behind barricades, a few hundred people protested against the white nationalist rally, according to the report.

“We don’t want the federal government to keep dumping all these refugees into middle Tennessee,” Brad Griffin, a League of the South member, who has written of his desire to create a white “ethnostate,” told Reuters. He cited a fatal church shooting last month near Nashville which has led to the arrest of a man from Sudan.

The rally, named in response to the Black Lives Matter movement created in protest of police treatment of minorities, is organized by the Nationalist Front but includes others, such as the League of the South, which calls for the South’s secession from the U.S., and the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi group. The League of the South this week issued a statement urging its participants to obey police and refrain from violence unless “only in defense of your own person, that of your compatriots, and your property.”

The Nationalist Front’s own manifesto claims an apolitical anti-capitalist, anti-finance and anti-bourgeois ideology that “promotes jobs with justice, the self-sufficiency of the nation and class cooperation between workers and the wealthy.”

“It’s an exciting opportunity to come together — a gathering of the clans, like the Scots would do,” Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the another group, the Traditionalist Worker Party, told Mic, this week.

It’s Going Down, a website that publishes anarchist and anti-fascist news, republished a call to action in advance of the white supremacist gathering.

In July, a Murfreesboro mosque was vandalized with graffiti and strips of bacon.

Many religious and community groups in Middle Tennessee have condemned the rallies. In a statement this week, Murfreesboro Mayor Shane McFarland spoke out against “the ideology of white nationalists and white supremacists” behind the rally.

Saturday’s rally comes roughly a week after hundreds protested a speech by white nationalist Richard Spencer at the University of Florida in Gainesville. In August, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., led to clashes that claimed the life of an anti-nationalist movement protester when she was deliberately run down by a car.