White supremacist Richard Spencer shouted down at Florida college speech as tensions overflow outside

Hundreds of protesters shouted down white supremacist leader Richard Spencer on Thursday at a university in Florida, forcing him to leave the stage without delivering his planned speech.

Officials were so fearful of disturbances that Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency ahead of the speech by Spencer, an organiser of a white supremacist rally that erupted in deadly violence in Charlottesville earlier this year.

The order enabled the governor to bring in law enforcement personnel from across the state to keep order in the town of Gainesville.

Only around 30 supporters of the controversial white nationalist made it into the University of Florida auditorium, massively outnumbered by protesters who chanted “No more Spencer!”

Spencer has gained notoriety as a leader of the “alt-right” movement, a loose collection of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups that staged the incendiary protest in Charlottesville, Virginia in August.

A 32-year-old woman was killed when a Nazi sympathiser ploughed his car into counter-protesters, and two police officers died in a helicopter crash as they were responding to the violence.