Residents of the Battery Park neighborhood of Richmond are suing 27 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front for defacing a mural of Arthur Ashe, the Black civil rights icon and tennis legend.
Arthur Ago, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the group’s actions were “evidence of white supremacy.”
Ago said the vandalism led to the partial closure of the park and deprived residents of its use. The vandalism was never criminally prosecuted.
The suit seeks a jury trial and punitive damages. It names Patriot Front, four defendants, and 23 unidentified other members of the group, who are listed only as “John Doe.”
On Wednesday afternoon, a lawyer for the defendants argued to dismiss the case before U.S. District Judge M. Hannah Lauck.
The lawyer, Glen Allen, represents the two named defendants in the case, Nathan Noyce and Thomas Dail, who plaintiffs say are the men responsible for the graffiti.
Lauck said she would issue an opinion swiftly. Her decision will determine whether the case goes to trial.
In 2022, video of two men whitewashing the Battery Park mural of Arthur Ashe was leaked from a private messaging server belonging to Patriot Front. The video shows two men in masks spray-painting Patriot Front logos over descriptions of Ashe’s accomplishments.
At one point, the video’s cameraman recommends spraying over Ashe’s likeness.
“You want to get his face or something?” asks one of the men. “F—-ing n——-’s face.”
Allen described the incident as “an unfortunate, knuckleheaded, covering up of Arthur Ashe.”
The video does not identify the two as Noyce and Dail. The vandalism occurred on Oct. 18, 2021. It’s not clear whether Allen intends to dispute that Noyce and Dail are the ones in the video.
Allen said his clients aren’t white supremacists, but white nationalists whose beliefs fall within the protections of the First Amendment.
“They are an advocate for a white ethnostate,” said Allen, who sought to reframe their actions as constitutionally protected. “The First Amendment runs through every part of this case.”
Allen also said that Patriot Front does not promote violence, rather a policy of segregation summed up by the idiom “good fences make good neighbors.”
That claim provoked disbelief from Lauck, who at several points batted her eyes in apparent disbelief and expressed an inability to follow Allen’s logic.
“How do you create a white ethnostate in America?” asked Lauck.
On behalf of the plaintiffs, Ago argued that the vandalism was motivated by “racial animus,” evidenced by their targeting a mural of a Black civil rights icon in a Black neighborhood.
Ago sparred with Allen over Patriot Front’s First Amendment protections, telling Lauck that if they were to bring a First Amendment defense in a criminal case over vandalism, they would be “laughed out of court.”
In a 36-page civil complaint, Ago alleged that Patriot Front encouraged a “campaign of vandalism and property destruction” with the purpose of promoting their “extreme and racist credo.” The complaint alleges they violated a Virginia law that protects residents from intimidation and racial harassment.
And it alleges violations of civil rights under an 1871 law originally conceived to combat the Ku Klux Klan.
The suit names Patriot Front’s national director, Thomas Rousseau, and the Virginia director for the organization, Paul Gancarz. Gancarz was in attendance on Wednesday.
In court, Ago described the groups coordinated effort to vandalize and intimidate residents of Battery Park. Before the graffiti itself, Patriot Front stickers appeared throughout the neighborhood.
“October 18th was the culmination of a campaign to intimidate the Battery Park neighborhood,” said Ago.
The plaintiffs, two unnamed neighborhood residents, say the graffiti made them feel threatened, causing them to feel outright anger, fear and intimidation. The city then partially closed the park in the wake of the vandalism.
The graffiti took place just before the criminal trial of white nationalists involved in the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville. That rally saw white nationalist protesters carrying torches across the Grounds at the University of Virginia. Violence broke out between white nationalists and counterprotesters.
One counterprotester, Heather Heyer, was killed by James Alex Fields Jr., a white supremacist who was later sentenced to life in prison.
Patriot Front formed in the aftermath of the Unite the Right Rally, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who describe it as an aesthetic remake of its predecessor, neo-nazi group Vanguard America.
The Anti-Defamation League describes Patriot Front as being responsible for “the vast majority of white supremacist propaganda distributed in the United States.”
In 2021, Patriot Front graffiti appeared across the country, including on a mural of MLK Jr. in Philadelphia and on Howard University, a historically Black school, in Washington, D.C.
The Arthur Ashe Tunnel in Battery Park is seen in in 2022. Residents of the Battery Park neighborhood of Richmond are suing 27 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front for defacing a mural of Arthur Ashe, the Black civil rights icon and tennis legend.