Neo-Nazi sympathizer attracts insults, intervention by police

Molly Nolan, left, who says she's a member of the Aryan Nation, is the target of shouts from counterprotesters.

One young woman, alone in the crowd, managed to cause so much commotion that she came under police protection.

Molly Nolan, 23, identified herself as a member of the Aryan Nation.

She rode a TARTA bus for an hour, she said, to be downtown by 10 a.m. in support of the neo-Nazis.

But even before the neo-Nazi group rallied at Government Center, some in the crowd of waiting protesters who'd overheard media interviews with Ms. Nolan surrounded her.

Their anti-Nazi chants attracted a self-appointed peacekeeping team; as members stepped in to protect her, two snowballs were hurled at the young woman, and a man spat at her just before six police officers joined the scene.

Soon after, they removed Ms. Nolan from the crowd under escort. Earlier, she said she moved to Toledo from Jackson, Mich., a week before the North Toledo riot in October, which she also attended in support of the neo-Nazis.

"I live a block from where the riot occurred," the East Park Street resident said.

Ms. Nolan said she came by her white-supremacist views through her family.

"My father raised me that way," she said, adding that her mother left the family when Ms. Nolan was 8 years old. "She left my dad for a black man but married someone else who was Jewish."

Her father, she said, also was reared with white-supremacist views; her mother's abandonment only reinforced his views, she added.

Ms. Nolan claimed she'd faced charges in Michigan for "multiple counts of assault," each stemming from racial incidents.

She said she'd been in "over a dozen" race-related fights as an adult, "but since childhood, probably two dozen."

In her daily life, she said, "I try not to associate with [blacks] if at all possible." On the other hand, she claimed, she "could get along with anybody."

In raising her two children - a toddler and an 8-month-old - Ms. Nolan intends to convey her separatist views: "White people should stay in their own community."

She would, she added, "teach them not to start in on [and fight] other people because I don't want them locked up like I was. But if one of my children was to come home with a black person, I wouldn't let them in my house."