Issues & Trends
Vigilante Violence: A Continuation of Racial History
March 08, 2022
Incidents of mob violence and acts of vigilantism by white men have made headlines in recent years, but the notion of private citizens taking the law into their own hands has a long history in America.
In late February, the American Bar Association hosted the program “The Long and Tragic History of Racism, Vigilantism, and Mob Violence in America,” which considered acts of vigilantism through a comparative historical lens and explored past and future efforts to bring justice to victims.
Chisa Putnam, chair of the ABA’s Diversity & Inclusion Committee, framed the discussion in her opening comments, finding a common thread between the January 6 insurgency, the shooting of protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and the murder of Trayvon Martin. “In each of these situations, people who believed they were above the law chose to take the law into their own hands, resulting in innocent people getting hurt and sometimes even killed. That’s not the way our legal system functions,” Putnam said. “Our system works with a method of checks and balances. We have law enforcement, we have the court system, and we have . . . lawyers who ensure that everyone is provided with due process.”
Pashman Stein Walder Hayden P.C. partner Raymond M. Brown traced the violence back to slavery. Brown argued that the institution of slavery avoided and negated many of our core legal concepts, and some of the laws that remain were influenced by this history. Referencing the recent trial of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery, Brown remarked that the defendants attempted to employ Georgia’s citizen’s arrest statute to justify their conduct.
Brown noted that Georgia’s original citizen’s arrest statute came about during the Civil War as white men left to fight for the South, leaving fewer law enforcement officers to catch runaway slaves. “It was a statute that assumed a Black person could be arrested on the statutory presumption that they were in violation of the law restricting them to their master’s property and to behavior endorsed by their master,” Brown said.
The law was later modified to eliminate the racial presumptions, but “it still remains a part of our history to understand that the citizen’s arrest concept was really imported into the common law and enforced to assist in the process of controlling the behavior of slaves. There’s very little that can be understood about our jurisprudence or the history of violence without understanding that,” he said.
Panelist Roberta Kaplan, founding partner of Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, has been involved in recent litigation involving mob violence. She was a lead attorney in the 2017 case Sines v. Kessler, representing nine plaintiffs in an action accusing 24 white supremacist leaders and groups of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 for their actions relating to the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Kaplan and her team succeeded in winning a verdict that awarded more than $25 million in damages.
Kaplan said that the experience, while frustrating, affirmed her faith in the law. “In the end, the system works,” she said. “It took too long, the plaintiffs were [emotionally] tortured, the defendants were allowed to get away with all kinds of [bull] that they shouldn’t be able to do, but in the end this jury of 11 people, in what was essentially rural Virginia — more than half of them were Trump voters — gave the verdict for the plaintiffs in our case.”
Kaplan also said that the case gave her a better appreciation of the ways in which racism and violence affect us all. “I think I never understood the concept of intersectionality before I was in this trial,” she said. “Because the one thing that is absolutely true is that these guys . . . hate all of us. They hate all of my identities. They hate gay people. They’re not crazy about women. They hate Black people. They despise Jewish people, and they hate immigrants, Muslims, etc., and if we don’t all work together to fight it, then we are not going to be able to fight it as effectively as we should.”
Kaplan also remarked that when groups gathered to plan or enact violence against Blacks and others in the past, they did so disguised in robes and hoods. “Today, they don’t need any of that,” she said. “All they need is a hashtag and WiFi.”
The new lynch mobs are no longer local or regional; the white supremacist conspiracies of the digital age stretch across the nation and around the globe, she said. “We’ve been extremely underestimating the threat of the growth of white supremacism, neo-Nazism, and these beliefs in this country in an organized way; thanks to social media and the internet, that is more dangerous than ever before,” Kaplan added.
The program was part of the ABA’s Activate Diversity Series attempting to combat racism. Past and future events in the series are available online, and attendees are asked to commit to leadership and action to activate diversity in their own communities.
