Loudoun County residents rallied over the weekend to protest racist, homophobic and antisemitic messages painted on the sidewalk and side of a local shopping center in South Riding.

Loudoun4All, a progressive advocacy group, estimated that about 50 people — including Del. Suhas Subramanyam (D-87th District) and Dulles District Supervisor Matt Letourneau — joined the protest along Tall Cedars Parkway near the shopping center. The group held signs opposing racism and offering messages of community welcome to marginalized groups, and waved at passing cars.

“We will always fight back against these cowardly acts,” Subramanyam tweeted. Letourneau called the vandalism “truly disgusting.”

The graffiti was painted on the pavement and on a building in the South Riding Town Center shopping center. According to photos shared by Loudoun4All, it included a laundry list of hateful slurs against Black people, LGBTQ people, and Jewish people. Two known white supremacist hate symbols — the Nazi swastika and the number 1488 — are repeated several times. One message featured racist language about crime. Another appeared to reference “Great Replacement Theory,” a racist and antisemitic conspiracy theory increasingly discussed by Fox News and far-right politicians.

“I know a lot of people who really it made them feel a lot less safe in our neighborhood,” said Amanda Bean, a Loudoun4All board member who lives nearby. “It was so important to send that message out to the community that…we do welcome people and that you can feel safe here, that we have your back, that we will stand up when something happens.”

The graffiti was first reported to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office on Friday morning by a passerby, according to law enforcement. County authorities were not immediately able to remove it because it was on private property, according to Letourneau’s office.

But before the owners of the commercial plaza could remove the messages, community members took matters into their own hands. A local small business, Timbers Landscaping Care, brought out a power washer to remove the graffiti — “erasing hate,” as the business called it in a Facebook post thanking community members for their quick action.

Children chalked over the parts of the message that were not immediately removable with positive messages like “Spread Love” and hearts and rainbows.

County officials have promised a swift and extensive investigation.

“This public display of hate speech is sadly another reminder that there are some who will choose to try and divide our community, or worse threaten our safety. The intentional attack on specific, marginalized groups within our county will not be tolerated,” said Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj in a statement. “My office is committed to protecting our diverse communities and will continue to fight against racial, ethnic and religious hate wherever it rears its poisonous head.”

“There is no place in society for this behavior,” the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office tweeted.

The office is asking anyone with knowledge of the vandalism to report it with an anonymous tip at 703-777-1021.

The vandalism is part of a nationwide wave of antisemitism and hate speech, with high-profile public figures like the entertainer Ye publishing antisemitic attacks online and former President Donald Trump dining with a Holocaust denier. The Anti-Defamation League, an organization that tracks hate incidents towards Jewish people and other identities, told NPR that 2021 was the worst year for anti-Jewish violence and harassment since it started tracking such incidents in 1979, and the group expects 2022 to be similar.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and anti-government groups, found similar trends in its 2021 year-end report: that hateful ideologies are on the rise nationally, as evidenced by the January 6 insurrection.

“The reactionary and racist beliefs that propelled a mob into the Capitol that day have not dissipated,” the group said in the introduction to its research. “Instead, they’ve coalesced into a political movement that is now one of the most powerful forces shaping politics in the United States.”

Those trends are also being felt locally. Virginia had 313 reported instances of white supremacist propaganda and 36 instances of antisemitism in 2022 alone, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The group counted 113 instances of white supremacist propaganda and 56 antisemitic incidents in Maryland, including multiple instances of antisemitic graffiti in Montgomery County. D.C. had 16 instances of white supremacist propaganda, one white supremacist event, and 13 instances of antisemitism, according to the group.

In Loudoun County Public Schools, use of hate speech and racial slurs spiked earlier this year, with 40 incidents reported in March, up from just a handful each month in late 2021 and early 2022. Bean said she knows of other recent incidents in her community.

“We were both a little shocked just to see the words and to see them so close, but also, we know that there are issues in our community, in our schools with this kind of hate speech,” Bean said.

“These types of incidents are becoming too prevalent in our communities,” the D.C.-area chapter of the Anti-Defamation League said on Twitter. 

This story has been updated with comments from Amanda Bean.