Proud Boys Leader Yells Racist Slurs Before Attacking Black Woman

A chap­ter leader in the far-right Proud Boys extrem­ist gang was charged with assault Sunday in Akron, Ohio, after he was record­ed shout­ing racial epi­thets at a black woman and then suck­er-punch­ing her in the face. A man police iden­ti­fied as Andrew Walls, 26, was caught on video out­side a bar in the ear­ly hours of Sunday, stum­bling and scuf­fling with oth­er patrons while spew­ing a tor­rent of racial slurs. His vic­tim, 23-year-old Cameron Morgan, was pass­ing by with a friend when she heard Walls and oth­ers around him scream­ing “Fucking niggers.”
She lat­er told her father that she con­front­ed Walls after real­iz­ing she was the only Black per­son around.
“We were like … ‘You can’t say that. That’s not OK,’” she told her dad, local teacher and for­mer sports­writer David Lee Morgan Jr., who record­ed the con­ver­sa­tion and pro­vid­ed a tran­script to HuffPost.
Video tak­en by Cameron Morgan’s friend shows what hap­pened next: Walls squares up, points his fin­ger at Morgan, and repeats the racist slur, adding: “Bitch, shut your mouth.” He then cocks his right fist and punch­es her direct­ly in the face, the impact of which releas­es a blood-cur­dling pop.
Morgan was treat­ed for a concussion.

David Lee Morgan, Jr.
@DavidLeeMorgan

Feb 27, 2022

I’m dev­as­tat­ed right now. My 23-year-old daugh­ter Cameron, who wouldn’t hurt any­one and has a heart of gold, was suck­er punched by this racist guy in Highland Square in Akron last night for no rea­son. She weighs maybe 100 pounds. Can some­one please help me iden­ti­fy him!

David Lee Morgan, Jr.
@DavidLeeMorgan
Please! I need to press charges! I’m heart­bro­ken and sick to my stomach.

Walls kept going after the record­ing end­ed, and dragged Morgan into the street by her hair, her father said. She was shak­en up, he said, and left the scene with­out ini­tial­ly call­ing police.

But once the video began to make the rounds on social media Sunday, activists quick­ly iden­ti­fied the assailant as Walls. They also unearthed a pre­vi­ous sto­ry about him in the local Akron Beacon Journal, which iden­ti­fied him as the vice pres­i­dent of the Akron-Canton chap­ter of the Proud Boys.

Though Walls wasn’t wear­ing his Proud Boys uni­form — a black and yel­low Fred Perry polo — dur­ing the assault, his mem­ber­ship in the gang sug­gests a pre­dis­po­si­tion for vio­lence and big­otry. The Proud Boys, des­ig­nat­ed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion by Canada, have close ties to white suprema­cist groups and oth­er extrem­ists, and vio­lence is lit­er­al­ly writ­ten into their rules. (The gang’s high­est rank, known as the Fourth Degree, is giv­en only to mem­bers who com­mit a sig­nif­i­cant act of vio­lence “for the cause.”)
Walls’ chap­ter didn’t imme­di­ate­ly respond to a request for comment.
Reached by phone Sunday, David Morgan’s voice trem­bled as he recalled wak­ing up to see a video on his phone of his daugh­ter being assaulted.
“Soon as we saw it, I was in tears,” he said. “I just cried, because, I just watched some­body punch my daugh­ter, who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Morgan said his daugh­ter went to an urgent care clin­ic and was treat­ed for a con­cus­sion after she saw stars and blacked out. Her face swelled up tem­porar­i­ly, to the point where she couldn’t move her jaw.

She couldn’t real­ly open up her mouth to eat,” he said. Walls was charged with pos­sess­ing a firearm while intox­i­cat­ed and assault, and a war­rant was issued for his arrest. The sever­i­ty of Morgan’s injuries may lead to his assault charge being upgrad­ed to a felony, the Akron Beacon Journal reports. Akron police are also con­sid­er­ing an added eth­nic intim­i­da­tion charge. David Morgan said the rev­e­la­tion of Walls’ Proud Boys affil­i­a­tion changed every­thing for him. He said he was aware of the gang and the nation­al tour of polit­i­cal vio­lence they’d been on since their found­ing in 2016, but he “nev­er thought it would hit home until today.”
“This changes a lot for me, in the sense that, I want to get involved now,” he said. “This hap­pen­ing was time for me to wake the hell up. And I hate that my daugh­ter had to suf­fer that for me to wake the hell up.”