Boston Globe: Toppling hate sometimes takes civil justice
By: Integrity First For America News Coverage
By Kimberly Atkins Stohr, Boston Globe. Read the full article here.
In what feels like an endless stream of high-profile trials and verdicts in cases involving racialized violence, the case that may have the greatest impact on stamping out the source of lethal hate is probably the one that wasn’t about sending anyone to prison.
Tuesday’s multimillion-dollar verdict against the organizers of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville cannot heal the wounds inflicted on the nation by those bent on sparking a “race war” to create a “white ethnostate.” It won’t erase the physical and emotional scars of the plaintiffs who were harmed that day.
And it certainly won’t bring back Heather Heyer, a counterprotester killed when neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr. mowed his car through a crowd of people.
But in the more than century-old tradition of using civil courts to topple the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, it just may bankrupt hate.