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.
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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…
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