KRUSH THEM:

In the 1980s, the Southern Poverty Law Center took the United Klans of America to court after two Klansmen lynched a 19-year-old Black man, Michael Donald, in Mobile, Alabama. A jury awarded his family $7 million. The white supremacist group, however, could not scrounge together the payment and had to turn over the deed to their Tuscaloosa headquarters -- their lone asset -- to Donald's mother.

In 1990, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League successfully sued the leader of another white supremacist group, the White Aryan Resistance, for his part in inciting the 1988 fatal beating of an Ethiopian man in Portland, Oregon. The family of Mulugeta Seraw was awarded $12.5 million in damages, and the head of the group, Tom Metzger, found himself in financial ruins over the litigation, losing his home and filing for bankruptcy protection.

Like the case against the White Aryan Resistance, the suit targeting the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers hinges on proving at trial that they violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, a rarely used federal law codified after the Civil War to protect civil rights. The litigation has a good chance of succeeding, experts on hate and extremism in the U.S. say, because it sources the information that's being collected as part of the congressional investigation into what role the two groups played in the planning and execution of the assault on the Capitol.

"That's pretty damning -- it's coming from the federal government," Randy Blazak, a sociologist at the University of Oregon who is involved in efforts in the Portland area to combat hate speech and extremist activity, said of the lawsuit.

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