What's New at PBA - April 16, 2026
April 16th, 2026
PBA Students Participate in Re-Enactment of Vietnamese Fishermen v. Ku Klux Klan
Today I took the students of Dr. Benjamin Bruch’s “Civil War, Civil Rights, Civil Disobedience” class, mostly sophomores with a few juniors in the mix, to the Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalaniana‘ole Federal Building and United States Courthouse to watch and participate in a re-enactment of the Vietnamese Fishermen’s Association v. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which was tried before Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas on May 10, 1981.
The trial was an important one. Hearing a suit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Morris Dees, the federal court in Texas was persuaded to disband a private army of white supremacists that had formed to intimidate Vietnamese shrimp fishermen in Galveston Bay, refugees who had fled persecution in Vietnam at the conclusion of the Vietnam War, because of their competition with white fishermen as they worked to pursue their economic livelihoods in their new U.S. homes.
