Judge orders white supremacist group to pay $2.7 million to Black man attacked during 2022 ‘flash march’

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.

Boston police determined that the incident involving Murrell  “appeared to be more likely than not motivated in whole or in part by Anti-Black bias,” according to the court docs, but no one was prosecuted.

“I thought I was going to die,” Murrell  said at a hearing in October. He filed the federal case in October of 2023 seeking to bankrupt the white supremacist group, according to his lawyers at the time.

Murrell needed stitches, sprained a finger, and had lacerations to his hand, head, and eyebrow, according to court records. Due to psychological damage, the New England Conservatory-trained classical saxophonist performs less and avoids crowded places, the court docs say.

Patriot Front posted a video of the attack on its website, according to the judge’s decision.

“Murrell’s attackers showed no remorse for their actions,” Talwani wrote. “Instead, Patriot Front and Rousseau glorified the attack by posting a video online with a clip of the group pinning Murrell against the light post and pushing him into the busy road, to promote the view that non-white individuals like Murrell should be subordinated to white people.”

Lawyers for Murrell and Patriot Front did not return a request for comment Monday evening.