Judge orders white supremacist group to pay $2.7 million to Black man attacked during 2022 ‘flash march’
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A Black teacher and musician who said he was attacked by a white nationalist hate group during an unpermitted “flash march” in downtown Boston in 2022 won more than $2.7 million in federal court Monday, a federal judge ruled.
Charles Murrell III, of Boston, was near the Boston Public Library over the Fourth of July weekend in 2022 when members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front pushed him up against a light post with their metal shields and into a busy street, according to Judge Indira Talwani’s decision filed Monday.
Patriot Front and its leader Thomas Rousseau will pay the damages for physical and psychological injuries, pain and suffering, lost wages and future earnings, punitive damages, and Murrell’s attorney fees, according to the court docket.
“Patriot Front’s physical attack of Murrell occurred with Rousseau’s encouragement, on a public sidewalk that Patriot Front and Rousseau sought to control without regard for Murrell’s right to be there,” Talwani wrote.
Patriot Front is an “image-obsessed” group that broke off from Vanguard America after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The center said the group “rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism.”
In Boston, the group marched the Freedom Trail on July 3, 2022, wearing white neck gaiters, sunglasses, and baseball caps to keep their identities unknown.
Content retrieved from: https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/01/13/judge-orders-white-supremacist-group-to-pay-2-7-million-to-black-man-attacked-during-2022-flash-march/.
