WASHINGTON – A short and sparsely attended white nationalist rally broke up late Sunday as police ushered the attendees into white vans and drove them away from a crowd of thousands of angry protesters in downtown Washington.

The rally's end followed a day in which large numbers of police officers sought – for the most part successfully – to keep the two sides from clashing in a repeat of last year's deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The message of the “Unite the Right 2” rally, which was attended by about two dozen people, was of “white civil rights,” delivered in an overwhelmingly liberal city where blacks outnumbered whites at the last Census count, was angrily denounced by those who flocked to Lafayette Square.

A brief speech by rally organizer Jason Kessler – also one of the lead organizers of last year's rally – was drowned out by the cries and chants of those massed around him. Many in the crowd of counterprotesters wore the signature black masks, helmets and body armor of the Antifa movement, which clashed violently with white supremacists in Charlottesville.

Scores of police officers kept them separated from the white nationalist demonstrators – and ultimately drew the renewed anger of the masked counterprotesters after supporters of the white supremacist rally were long gone from downtown D.C.

As evening came on and rain began to fall, the black-clad group launched flares and fireworks toward the White House compound. Roughly 200 of them then moved east in a group down I Street NW, turning over trash bins and chanting anti-police slogans.

Police later clashed with the counterprotesters at 13th and G Streets NW, after the activists tried to push past a line of officers on motorcycles engaged in crowd control. Some officers scuffled with the activists and used mace in response, although police said no one was immediately arrested.

Counterprotester Mike Isaacson said the group had planned to march to the headquarters of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement but were thwarted by police and rerouted to the Department of Justice.

“We were just taking the streets,” he said.

The white supremacist gathering fell on the anniversary of the Charlottesville violence, which killed an anti-racist protester, Heather Heyer, and took the lives of two Virginia State troopers whose helicopter crashed as they returned from monitoring the day's events.

On Sunday, Kessler told reporters the group was promoting free speech and denouncing abuses of “white people's civil rights.”

“I am not a white nationalist. I'm a civil-rights advocate,” he said. “I'm focusing on white people because we don't have civil-rights advocates.”

Kessler offered his “condolences” to Heyer's mother but said that police in Charlottesville should have blocked off the street where she was killed last year.