Despite canceling their second protest Saturday and fighting within over public image, the “White Lives Matter” rally in Tennessee last weekend was the largest public white nationalist gathering in years, outside of Unite the Right in Charlottesville.

The crowd of roughly 200 far-right demonstrators — representing white and southern nationalist, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups — is the first large gathering the movement has assembled since the rally in August, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

More:Alt-right, white nationalists are fighting among themselves after WLM rally

More:White Lives Matter Murfreesboro rally: What we know now

Unite the Right, involving several of the same organizations that held White Lives Matter in Shelbyville, left one woman dead and dozens injured after a car plowed into a group of counterprotesters. Others were hurt earlier in the morning as demonstrators from opposing sides assaulted one another.

The rally Saturday, attended by members of the National Socialist Movement, League of the South, Traditionalist Worker Party, Vanguard America, Ku Klux Klan and other groups, was also the second largest white nationalist gathering in the last decade, based on ADL’s records.

“This was the largest white supremacist rally since Charlottesville,” said Marilyn Mayo, senior research fellow for the ADL’s Center on Extremism. “Two hundred is a pretty sizable number.”

That means 2017 has been an important year for the white nationalist movement.

Although no official crowd size estimates have been released on the Aug. 12 rally in Charlottesville, people who attended or covered the event mostly agree that more than 500 white nationalists and white supremacists were in attendance that day, making it one of the largest such gatherings in recent American history.

Prior to Charlottesville, large far-right rallies in recent history usually drew no more than 125 attendees, such as a Nationalist Front rally in Pikeville, Ky., in April.

In July 2015, a Columbia, S.C., rally involving multiple KKK groups protesting the state’s removal of a Confederate flag from outside the capitol drew about the same number of participants, ADL estimates.

Other relatively large white nationalist, white supremacist or neo-Nazi rallies since 2007, however, drew only 75 to 100 people, according to the organization’s records.

White nationalist gatherings still gaining steam, despite internal and external criticism

The Shelbyville White Lives Matter event was supposed to be followed by a second rally that afternoon in Murfreesboro, which was canceled by organizers as it was scheduled to start.

Shelbyville, however, drew the crowd it did even in the midst of white nationalist infighting over strategy in the aftermath of Charlottesville and criticism from leaders of the so-called “alt-right,” a term used to describe those with a far-right, white nationalist ideology.

“The alt-right is at this turning point again, where Charlottesville was a seminal event,” Mayo said. “Most people in the country saw it as a very violent event — which it was — where a young woman was killed, and they’e trying to change the narrative of that. The people who came to Shelbyville wanted to change the narrative.”

Some planned far-right rallies were canceled in the days after Unite the Right, such as another event being billed as a “White Lives Matter” rally in College Station, Texas.

That event was among the first to be canceled when Texas A&M University shut down the rally planned for Sept. 11 over safety concerns.

In September, the group Anticom announced it was canceling a “March Against Communism” rally planned for Charlotte in December after headlining speaker Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist and alt-right leader, pulled out over concerns about his safety.

Brad Griffin, a League of the South spokesman who helped organize White Lives Matter in Tennessee, has repeatedly said one of the purposes of the Shelbyville rally was to prove white and southern nationalists could hold rallies without the violence that occurred in Charlottesville, which he said was provoked by anti-fascist counterprotesters.

“The big question after Charlottesville was whether all this had been shut down,” Griffin said of the large rallies. “There was this narrative developing that the alt-right was finished, and we were not doing any events.”

Griffin said he didn’t expect the Shelbyville rally to draw quite as many participants as it did.

“This was just supposed to be like a rebound rally for us, and it was a lot bigger than I thought it would be,” Griffin said.

He said that in light of Charlottesville — where police didn’t separate counterprotesters from protesters, and where violence erupted throughout the day — some in the movement remained wary of law enforcement’s willingness to step in during white nationalist rallies.

“That fear of being kind of shell-shocked might be receding somewhat,” Griffin said. “I think the next thing we do will be even bigger.”

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