With sweeping cuts to government agencies and programs designed to counter hate groups, civil rights and advocacy groups can hold the line.
In July 2022, the white supremacist group Patriot Front held a “flash march” through the streets of Boston. Dressed in uniforms reminiscent of fascist paramilitaries of the past, members of the neo-Nazi organization violently assaulted Charles Murrell III—a Black man—with metal shields and repeatedly kicked him until he lost consciousness.
While authorities did not arrest anyone for their role in the attack, Murrell filed a civil lawsuit against Patriot Front in August 2023. In January 2025, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled in favor of Murrell, ordering Thomas Rousseau and Patriot Front to pay Murrell $2.7 million in damages—a significant monetary penalty. Key to Judge Talwani’s decision was Patriot Front’s violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act, a 150-year-old statute initially passed in 1871 to help combat political violence in the post-Civil War American South. Similarly, after the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe embarked on a months-long campaign of intimidation and harassment against the Haitian migrant community in Springfield, Ohio, the city filed a civil lawsuit against the group, alleging the fascist street gang conspired to violate the civil rights of its residents.
These civil lawsuits against hate groups come against the backdrop of a Department of Justice that has signaled its desire to shift law enforcement priorities away from prosecuting domestic terrorists and far-right extremists. In March, the FBI announced staffing cuts to task forces focused on investigating domestic terrorism, preferring to redirect its energy toward the administration’s immigration policies. At the same time, employees at the Department of Homeland Security-funded government grant programs—aimed at preventing targeted violence—have been some of the latest federal workers to receive termination notices as part of sweeping cuts to government spending.
Consequently, criminal prosecution for hate crimes under the Trump administration seems unlikely, requiring innovative forms of litigation. Civil rights organizations and advocacy groups can learn from the success of previous lawsuits against far-right extremist groups that rely on the legal framework of the Ku Klux Klan Act and other civil rights violations.
The Ku Klux Klan Act
During the era of Reconstruction in the post-Civil War American South, vigilante racial violence ran rampant. Though the institution of chattel slavery had been abolished with the conclusion of the Civil War, newly freed African Americans in the South still faced significant challenges to exercising the rights guaranteed to them by the 14th Amendment as whites continued to resist Black citizenship. In May 1866, race riots in Memphis, Tennessee, claimed the lives of 46 freed African Americans after white police officers had repeatedly harassed Black Union soldiers stationed at Fort Pickering. Shortly after, in July 1866, racial violence broke out again in Louisiana when Sheriff Harry T. Hays—a former Confederate general—deputized a posse of white officers to disrupt a Black protest in New Orleans, resulting in the deaths of 34 freedmen.
The formation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865 by former Confederate generals further fanned the flames of racial tension in the South. In South Carolina, the situation was especially dire, with 77 documented whipping attacks from 1870 to 1871 alone.
As a result, Congress passed a series of laws known as the Enforcement Acts during this time to combat campaigns of racial violence aimed at depriving African Americans of their constitutional rights. Enacted in April 1871, the acts gave the federal government broader powers to enforce constitutional rights enshrined in the 14th Amendment. Utilizing these powers, President Ulysses S. Grant launched an aggressive crusade, enlisting federal troops to arrest Klan members and federal judges to try their cases.
Successes and Challenges
Though Grant’s decision to use his broadened authority dealt a serious blow to the Klan and effectively dismantled the terrorist organization until its revival in 1915, the end of Reconstruction under Rutherford B. Hayes foreclosed the use of the Enforcement Acts until the 1980s. In 1981, amid an armed effort to terrorize and intimidate Vietnamese fishermen along Texas’s Gulf Coast by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) resurrected the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 in a civil lawsuit. Led by Louis Beam, the Texas chapter of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan destroyed Vietnamese-owned shrimping boats and held multiple cross-burnings in Vietnamese fishermen’s yards. Beam’s activities attracted the attention of the SPLC, whose attorneys eventually persuaded Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald to order the group’s disbandment and shut down their paramilitary training camps throughout Texas.
Just a few years later, in 1987, the SPLC once again brought a civil case against the United Klans of America (UKA) for their role in the lynching of Michael Donald, a 19-year-old Black man in Mobile, Alabama. Donald’s lynching came after a mixed-race jury did not convict Josephus Anderson for the murder of a white police officer. Lead attorney Michael Figures and the SPLC won a historic $7 million judgment against the men directly responsible for Donald’s murder and the UKA. Unable to pay the monetary penalties levied against them by the court, the UKA was forced to declare bankruptcy and turn over its headquarters to the plaintiffs, who subsequently sold the property.
While the Klan is not the powerful organization it once was, the century-and-a-half-old statute designed to crush its existence and protect the civil rights of vulnerable communities is still in practice today. However, not all cases utilizing the legal framework of the Ku Klux Klan Act result in the sweeping success of the recent Patriot Front example—even when the case seems exceedingly clear.
One of the most notable examples is the civil lawsuit Sines v. Kessler, brought against various organizers and participants of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. The rally, which gained national media attention for its brazen display of Nazi symbology and the murder of Heather Heyer, brought together dozens of hate groups from across the country to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from a local park in Charlottesville. The rally’s planners and organizers, including prominent figures of the alt-right such as Richard Spencer, were named as defendants in the suit.
In November 2021, jurors found all defendants liable for civil conspiracy under Virginia state law. Still, they remained deadlocked on charges that the defendants violated 42 U.S.C. § 1985 and 1986—the two most widely used sections of the Ku Klux Klan Act. Even though the court was unable to levy penalties against Spencer and his co-defendants for their alleged violations of the act, the jury still found them liable for punitive damages related to their civil conspiracy and Virginia state law against racial, religious, or ethnic harassment or violence. In total, the judgment awarded the plaintiffs $26 million for injuries and trauma—an amount that was later reduced to just $350,000 due to Virginia state laws limiting punitive damages.
Even so, efforts to collect even a fraction of the monetary compensation remain difficult. For some defendants, lack of assets or compounding legal costs represents a significant roadblock in awarding damages to the plaintiffs. Richard Spencer described trial expenses stemming from Sines as “crippling” and expressed worry over the possibility of future wage extraction and liens imposed on his properties. In an interview with Politico, Matthew Heimbach—one of Spencer’s many co-defendants and leader of the now-defunct Traditionalist Worker Party—said he lives paycheck to paycheck and has no assets or property.
Other Litigation Tools
Short of leveraging federal statutes such as the Ku Klux Klan Act, other legal strategies can prove effective at bringing hate groups to justice and holding them accountable for their actions. A notable example of this occurred in 2000 when the SPLC successfully sued the Aryan Nations after armed security guards at their compound shot at Victoria Keenan and her son and held them at gunpoint in July 1998. After the trial, the jury found Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler and his organization negligent in selecting the guards, awarding the Keenans a $6.3 million judgment. The size of the judgment against Butler forced him to declare bankruptcy, put the Aryan Nations’s 20-acre compound up for auction, and turn the group’s intellectual property rights over to the Keenans, effectively dismantling the organization. After the case concluded, Idaho philanthropist Greg Carr purchased the property, allowing local fire departments to demolish the compound’s buildings during training.
More recently, in February 2025, a Washington, D.C., court awarded the Proud Boys’s trademark to the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church as part of the $2.8 million judgment against the group led by Jan. 6 figurehead Enrique Tarrio. Tarrio and the Proud Boys became embroiled in the D.C. civil suit due to their actions on Dec. 12, 2020, when they tore down a Black Lives Matter sign on the church’s fence. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which filed the lawsuit, leveraged local D.C. laws prohibiting bias-related conspiracy, theft, and defacement of property, according to the criminal complaint. In addition to the trademark transfer, the ruling bars the Proud Boys from selling their merchandise without the AME Church’s consent and allows the church to seize any revenue the group generates through future sales.
As the previous cases demonstrate, legal strategies against hate groups continue to evolve, using both historic and modern litigation to hold them to account. These cases show how financial penalties and asset forfeiture can dismantle these organizations, effectively paralyzing their operations and activities, and providing a road map for future efforts to fight back against hate groups and fascist street gangs.
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The continued use of civil lawsuits aimed at dismantling hate groups underscores the enduring relevance of legal tools like the Ku Klux Klan Act to combat racial violence and extremist intimidation campaigns. While criminal prosecutions of far-right extremist groups may wane in the coming years due to political leadership, civil litigation remains a potent avenue for holding these groups and individuals accountable and, in some cases, forcing their dissolution through financial penalties.
Challenges in cases like Sines v. Kessler demonstrate that legal victories against progenitors of hate are not always clear-cut, and collecting punitive damages to justly compensate the victims of hate-fueled violence is notoriously difficult. Even so, the successful outcomes of lawsuits against Patriot Front, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and now—hopefully—Blood Tribe illustrate the importance of steadfast legal action against organized hate. Moving forward, civil rights organizations, attorneys, and advocacy groups can continue leveraging these legal tools to ensure white supremacist violence is not met with silence.
– Luke Baumgartner is a research fellow at the George Washington University Program on Extremism, specializing in domestic extremism and far-right movements. Published courtesy of Lawfare.
