Protesters converge on Montco official Joe Gale’s home for calling BLM a ‘hate’ group

More than 100 protesters gathered in the road in front of Joseph Gale's home in Plymouth Meeting. He was believed to be at the Jersey Shore. They vowed to return.

Rae Dean of Norristown leads protesters outside the Plymouth Meeting home of Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Gale June 7, 2020, calling for him to resign after he called Black Lives Matter a hate group.Read moreTOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer

by Jacob Adelman and Tom Gralish

Updated June 7, 2020, 6:40 p.m. ET

Published June 7, 2020, 5:59 p.m. ET

Demonstrators gathered late Sunday afternoon at the home of Montgomery County Commissioner Joseph C. Gale, a Republican, who angered activists last week by calling Black Lives Matter “a radical left-wing hate group” that perpetrates “urban domestic terror."

More than 100 protesters gathered in the road in front of his home on a leafy suburban street in Plymouth Meeting, which had been closed to vehicles in anticipation of the demonstration, holding signs reading “How Many Weren’t Filmed” and “Gale’s Gotta Go.”

Monica D’Antonio, a Montgomery County Community College English professor and Norristown Area School District board member who joined the protest, said that participants wanted Gale to resign for the comments he made after protests turned violent last weekend in Philadelphia.

“His comments are unacceptable, he is unacceptable, and he doesn’t represent the people of this county,” D’Antonio said.

Sunday’s protest followed a demonstration on Thursday that drew hundreds to the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown to call for his resignation over the remarks last week, in which he also dismissed police brutality as “a bogus narrative."

The statement was blasted by many on social media, including by 76ers forward Tobias Harris.

Gale’s fellow commissioners, Valerie Arkoosh and Kenneth E. Lawrence Jr., both Democrats, responded to the Thursday protest by voting to censure and condemn Gale for his “hateful, divisive and false” statements.

“You can censure me but you cannot silence me," Gale said in a statement after the vote.

There was no sign of Gale at his home on Sunday, in front of which portable barrier gates had been erected. Four officers stood around a Plymouth Township Police Department cruiser parked in his driveway.

D’Antonio said Gale was rumored to have spent the weekend at the Jersey Shore.

“So we’re actually going to start doing some protests during the week, because eventually he’s got to go to work,” she said.