Early Saturday morning, Massachusetts police in the town of Wakefield saw two cars parked on the shoulder of Interstate 95. Men, heavily armed and wearing military-style tactical clothing, were refueling their vehicles. When police asked to see registration for the weapons, The Washington Post reported, the men indicated that they were not carrying gun licenses, and that their group did not recognize state laws. What followed was a standoff lasting almost nine hours, with surrounding neighborhoods being ordered to shelter in place as many of the armed men moved into nearby woods.
They have been identified as members of Rise of the Moors, a “Moorish sovereign citizens” group whose adherents say they are part of their own sovereign nation and therefore are not subject to any U.S. law.
On its website, the group says “sovereignty and nationality can be considered synonymous,” and it considers Moorish Americans to be the “aboriginal people of the land.” In a video Saturday morning, an unidentified member of the group disputed the sovereign-citizen moniker, saying, “We are not anti-government. We are not anti-police, we are not sovereign citizens, we’re not Black identity extremists.”
During the standoff Saturday, members of the group said they were traveling to Maine to train on “private land.” While it remains unclear where the group was headed, sovereign-citizen groups commonly travel to remote, rural locations for paramilitary training.
The Moorish sovereign-citizen movement emerged in the mid-1990s, though it shares ties with the Moorish Science Temple, a religious sect that dates from 1913. In 2016, Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism wrote that Moorish sovereign groups adhere to “the notion that African Americans had special rights because of a 1780s treaty with Morocco, as well as the belief African Americans were descended from African ‘Moors’ — and often as well the belief African Americans were also a people indigenous to the Americas.”
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