A man drove a vehicle into a group of protesters outside Richmond, Va., on Sunday, the authorities said, and identified himself as a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Prosecutors said they were investigating the episode as a possible hate crime.
The Henrico County Police Division said it received a call about the episode, which happened in Lakeside, just north of Richmond, shortly before 6. p.m.
“Several witnesses reported that a vehicle revved their engine and drove through the protesters occupying the roadway,” the police said in a statement. The driver, Harry H. Rogers, 36, of Hanover County, Va., was arrested and charged with assault and battery, the police said.
Across the United States, people have been gathering to protest police brutality after George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man from Minneapolis, died after a white police officer pressed a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes.
There were no reports of serious injuries after the episode in Lakeside on Sunday, and the person who called the police was checked by emergency responders at the scene and refused further medical treatment, the police said.
A lawyer for Mr. Rogers could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday afternoon. It was unclear whether Mr. Rogers’s claims about his membership in the Ku Klux Klan were true. He is currently being held without bond.
“The accused, by his own admission and by a cursory glance at social media, is an admitted leader of the Ku Klux Klan and a propagandist for Confederate ideology,” said Shannon L. Taylor, the Commonwealth’s Attorney for Henrico County. “We are investigating whether hate crimes charges are appropriate.”
Studies indicate that membership in the Ku Klux Klan has been declining for decades, but that the overall number of hate groups in the United States has been growing in recent years. A report from the Southern Poverty Law Center found that the number of white supremacist groups has been rising since 2017, and data from the Anti-Defamation League shows that the use of white supremacist propaganda is growing across the country.
In a separate episode in Seattle on Sunday night, a man with a pistol drove a car through a crowd of protesters, the authorities said. Video footage from the scene showed a car moving on a crowded street toward an intersection where protesters were gathered near a Seattle Police Department station house in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
The reports from Seattle and Henrico County echoed a deadly episode in Charlottesville, Va., nearly three years ago, when a man plowed his car into a crowd of demonstrators protesting a white-supremacist rally, killing one woman and injuring at least 19 other people.
“Protesters acting peaceably, well within their constitutional rights of assembly, should not have to fear violence,” Ms. Taylor said. “We lived through this in Virginia in Charlottesville in 2017. I promise Henricoans that this egregious criminal act will not go unpunished. Hate has no place here under my watch.”
