After a police officer was injured by an unknown rock-thrower at a July 2016 protest in Baton Rouge over the killing of Alton Sterling, the officer sued not the thrower but DeRay Mckesson, the movement figure who had helped lead the march. The theory — that an organizer is personally liable for the independent criminal act of anyone present — struck at the foundation of NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, the 1982 Supreme Court decision that had protected civil-rights boycott leaders from exactly this tactic.

The Fifth Circuit allowed the suit to proceed on a "negligent protest" theory, and in 2024 the Supreme Court declined to intervene, leaving organizers in Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi exposed to ruinous personal liability for leading demonstrations. Paired with the felony charges brought against protest leaders in the same years, the case marked the revival of a pre-civil-rights-era strategy: making the act of organizing itself too legally dangerous to attempt.