White supremacist group banned from armed protest in Charlottesville

A white supremacist group that took part in the deadly Charlottesville, Va., Unite the Right rally last year will no longer be able to protest while armed in the city, a Virginia court has decided. 

The League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group, reached a deal with city organizers on Monday to keep its members, agents or state chairmen from taking part in any future armed demonstrations in Charlottesville, according to the watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The deal does not require any admission of wrongdoing by the group, nor require them to avoid peaceful protests. 

The consent decree was the result of a lawsuit first filed in Charlottesville Circuit Court by Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection against leaders of the League of the South and other paramilitary groups involved in the rally, which led to the death of one woman and injuries for several others. 

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The city government and several local businesses later joined the ongoing lawsuit, which names the individual leaders of other white supremacist groups, allowing the opportunity that more groups might strike similar deals with the city. 

Spencer Borum, the group’s Kentucky leader, has taken an active role in arming and training the League of the South for possible civil conflict in the U.S., the SPLC says.

Another League of the South leader, Michael Tubbs, pleaded guilty to the 1991 robbery of weapons from an Army base with the intention of arming the Ku Klux Klan, as reported by the Daily Beast. 

—Updated at 5:12 p.m. Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misstated the terms of the League of the South’s consent decree. The story has been updated to reflect the terms more accurately.