A Tennessee man with ties to several white supremacist groups has been charged with setting a fire in 2019 that destroyed the offices of a social justice center connected with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., according to court records.
In a federal criminal complaint that was unsealed on April 24, the F.B.I. said that the man, Regan Prater, 27, set fire to the main offices of the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tenn., near Knoxville, and spray-painted an Iron Guard cross on the pavement outside.
The symbol originated with fascists in Romania in the 1920s and 1930s, according to the Anti-Defamation League. It has more recently been used by white supremacists, including one who murdered 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019.
Investigators in Tennessee said that Mr. Prater, of Tullahoma, took credit for the arson while chatting with an informant on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app that he used to communicate with other white supremacists.
“I didn’t admit that, but dots can be connected,” Mr. Prater wrote to the informant when asked if he had set the fire, according to the complaint.
He then gave details about how he had started the blaze, telling the informant, “It was a sparkler bomb and some Napalm.”
A law enforcement search of Mr. Prater’s phone showed that he had downloaded a document titled “Mad Man’s Book of Formulas” with instructions for making explosives, the authorities said. Investigators said that he had purchased gasoline, ammonium nitrate, which is commonly found in cold packs, and other ingredients that he used to start the fire.
Several hours before the fire, the F.B.I. said, he looked up directions to the Highlander Center on the Waze app. In the days after the blaze, investigators said, Mr. Prater saved news media images of flames engulfing the center on his phone and shared some in chats with other white supremacists.
Mr. Prater was charged with one federal count of arson, which could bring a penalty of up to 40 years in prison. A federal public defender listed for Mr. Prater, who was arrested on April 24 and remains in custody, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. Nor did federal prosecutors.
In April 2021, Mr. Prater pleaded guilty to a June 2019 arson at an adult novelty store in Manchester, Tenn., and was sentenced to five years in prison and three years of probation. Inmate records showed that he was no longer in custody in that case as of January.
The arson at the Highlander Center caused $1 million in damage to its main offices, which were destroyed in the early-morning blaze on March 29, 2019, the authorities said.
The Rev. Allyn Maxfield-Steele, the center’s co-executive director, said in an interview on Wednesday that the building was a charred shell when he arrived there that day.
“It was still smoking, a little bit on fire,” he said. “It was feelings of astonishment.”
Decades of historic documents, speeches and other artifacts were reduced to ashes, the center said. Some were from the civil rights movement, an era intertwined with the center, which kept its most important archives at other places.
The center began as the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in 1932, which evolved from an educational institution for the poor and champion of organized labor into a racial justice incubator. It counted the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, among its early supporters.
It was there, in 1955, that Ms. Parks attended a civil rights workshop just a few weeks before she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, becoming a catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott.
Ms. Parks returned to Highlander in 1957 when Dr. King gave closing remarks at a conference that marked the school’s 25th anniversary.
In 1958, another prominent civil rights figure, John Lewis, attended a retreat at Highlander. Mr. Lewis, who went on to serve in Congress before his death in 2020, wrote in his memoir that it had been a valuable experience.
His stay at Highlander, he said, “was the first time in my life that I saw Black people and white people not just sitting down together at long tables for shared meals, but also cleaning up together afterward, doing the dishes together, gathering together late into the night in deep discussion.”
Six years after the fire, the center is moving closer to finishing the rebuild of its main offices, a project that might be completed by the end of the year, Mr. Maxfield-Steele said.
Mr. Maxfield-Steele, who is white, said that the fire had strengthened the resolve of the organization.
“What does it mean,” he said, “that these kind of things continue to happen?”
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
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