Alabama highway sign hijacked with white supremacist hate messages

Messages on the sign include ‘Patriot Front’ and ‘reclaim America’

Motorists driving in Alabama on Memorial Day were greeted by an Alabama Department of Transportation digital road sign advertising a white supremacist organisation.

Images posted to social media showed the sign board displaying messages including “Patriot Front US” and “Reclaim America.” Patriot Front is a white nationalist organisation that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, was responsible for the vast majority of white supremacist propaganda incidents in the US in 2021. Reclaim America is one of the organisation’s mottos.

Motorists driving on Interstate 65 on Monday near the town of Clanton noticed the messages on the sign and began posting to social media about their presence. AL.com reported that one driver reported the presence of the signs to a state trooper around 1pm.

“Captured these before the trooper waved me to go on,” one motorist wrote on Twitter above photographs of the sign. “How does this come about? Is it an inside job kind of thing? It also said ‘Road Work Nightly’ or something on the third ‘slide’ and it was an actual work zone that followed. Weird as hell.”

According to the Alabama Department of Transportation, the sign was hacked.

“A citizen alerted a nearby state trooper about the message, who then contacted ALDOT,” John McWilliams, a public information officer for the department’s West Central region, told AL.com. “ALDOT personnel immediately responded and turned the message board off. No other message boards on I-65 were affected.”

Mr McWilliams said the Department of Transportation is investigating how the messages appeared.

Alabama is not the only state in which messages of hate have appeared on digital road signs in recent weeks. A similar situation unfolded in Orlando, Florida, earlier this month, where a message board was programmed to read “Kill all gays” in the early hours of the morning. Police took charge of investigating that incident in its aftermath.