KNOXVILLE — A six-hour confrontation between a right-wing forum and the people protesting it ended Saturday afternoon a few minutes after kickoff, when the screen inside Jackson Terminal finally switched to the Tennessee game and both sides stopped to watch.
The forum, run by a new group raising money to buy a downtown headquarters for what its president has called the right wing, had been advertised as a football watch party with free beer and free food. Its location was secret until somebody posted it on Reddit around breakfast. By one o’clock about 160 people were inside at tables with orange and white tablecloths, and a few dozen were outside on Jackson Avenue with signs.
Several people inside said they had not read the whole flyer.
“My husband said it was a watch party,” said Rhonda Pryor of Halls. “I said who’s playing. He said Arkansas. He did not say the other part.”
Terry Wade of Karns said he had been asked for his Instagram before anyone would tell him the address. “All I post is the dog,” Wade said. “I guess the dog passed.”
The other part was two panels on immigration and mass deportation, the second of which was still going at kickoff. The screen on the back wall was showing a slide about the building fund. Curtis Bell of Powell, who was sitting near the door, said people had started checking their phones.
“There was a fella from the venue by the wall with the remote, looking up at the podium like he was waiting for somebody to tell him what to do,” Bell said. “But the Border Patrol guy was still talking. You don’t just holler at him to wrap it up.”
Dwayne Satterfield of Karns, who brought his two boys, said they had done fine until about three.
“The second panel was on remigration,” he said. “The little one asked me if it was birds. I said sort of. I didn’t have it in me.”
Outside, Laura Sneed of Fourth and Gill had been chanting that hate had no home in Knoxville for the better part of two hours.
“Then it got to be four o’clock and I looked around and half of us had our orange on,” she said. “You could see the screen through the window and it was still that slide. We’re not animals.”
At about 4:16 the chant changed. Where it had been “Shame,” it was now “Turn on the game,” and it went on for about a minute until somebody inside did. The crowd on Jackson Avenue cheered. Bell said the room cheered too, and then seemed to remember who was cheering outside and quit.
“I’m not going to sit here and tell you the protesters were right about anything,” Bell said. “They were right about the TV.”
“The food was good,” Pryor said. “I’m not going to lie about the food just because of the rest of it.”
Satterfield said the two security guards, who had spent the afternoon by the door with their arms crossed, watched the whole second half from a folding table. Sneed said that when Tennessee threw an interception in the third quarter she heard the room groan through the brick, and the people outside groaned with it, and then nobody wanted to look at anybody.
Before the program started, a man working the door was cited for misdemeanor assault after a protester filming near the side entrance was punched. Both sides have since described the other as the real hate group, and the building’s tenant has said it had nothing to do with any of it.
Satterfield said his younger boy asked him on the walk to the truck whether the birds had won.
“I said yeah, buddy,” he said. “I didn’t know what else to tell him.”