A white nationalist group that’s been sued in the past for violating civil rights is being taken to court yet again by two nonprofits in North Dakota that accuse the group of racial intimidation after its members defaced businesses and public property at a large indoor market that houses businesses largely owned by immigrants.
The North Dakota Human Rights Coalition and the Immigrant Development Center are behind the civil rights suit that alleges the group Patriot Front vandalized several storefronts and businesses with their logo and other graffiti to racially intimidate the market’s shopkeepers.
The suit says that the group, two of its leaders, and 10 others spray-painted Patriot Front logos and designs last year at an indoor market area called the International Market Plaza that contains restaurants, shops, grocery stores, and an afterschool program that is owned and operated by people of color and immigrants from African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American nations.
The group also allegedly defaced murals, including one that depicted Black women wearing hijabs, and posted “anti-immigrant propaganda” this past July, just days after a man of Syrian descent shot and killed a Fargo police officer and injured two other people.
Patriot Front is accused of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which was established during America’s Reconstruction era to protect the civil and political rights of many of the country’s formerly enslaved people who were threatened and targeted during that period.
The complaint alleges that the Ku Klux Klan Act “was designed to prevent precisely the kind of conspiratorial racist activity that Defendants perpetrated in this case.”
That vandalism left shopkeepers and customers in fear for their safety, according to the suit, and caused the market’s business owners to reduce their hours as a result.
The suit also includes a snippet of Patriot Front’s Manifesto from the group’s website that states the only people who are Americans are those “of the founding stock of our [European] people” and who “share the common spirit that permeates throughout our [European] greater civilization, and the European diaspora.”
Patriot Front’s actions “were intended to cause fear and deprive others — especially immigrants of color — of their rights, and, unfortunately, Patriot Front achieved that result,” the complaint states.
The Associated Press reports that no attorney is listed on the case docket for Patriot Front, and another attorney who has represented the group in the past said he knew nothing of these fresh lawsuits.
The nonprofits are seeking attorneys fees, a jury trial, and damages of an amount to be determined at trial.
The Southern Poverty Law Center labels the organization as a hate group formed after the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. They’re known for forming unannounced demonstrations and vandalizing public displays that memorialize police brutality victims or feature people of color and the LGBTQ community.
They were sued last month for assaulting a Black special education teacher and musician last year in Boston, Massachusetts, who accused them of coordinating a “brutal and racially motivated attack” while he played his saxophone in front of a public library.
