A Republican nominee to Florida’s state legislature marched alongside white supremacists at the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
Marshall Rawson, 34, won the Republican primary for Florida House District 10 on Aug. 18 with about 55 percent of the vote. And he is heavily favored to win his race in the strongly Republican district.
His attendance at the rally was first reported by Talking Points Memo.
Rawson did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post. In a statement to Talking Points Memo, he said he had spent his adult life defending historical monuments and did not screen his campaign donors. He did not directly address his attendance at the Charlottesville rally in that statement.
Rawson has acknowledged involvement with a group that was present there — League of the South, a neo-Confederate organization that advocates Southern secession and that the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a white nationalist hate group.
He told a TV news station, WCJB, in August that his official participation had ended more than a decade ago. But the station reported that he attended a League event in 2019 and spoke at one of its conferences in 2021.
“I was involved in the activist phase that was really fighting on issues that mattered to everyday people,” Rawson told the Florida ABC News affiliate station. He attributed the scrutiny of his past to the Southern Poverty Law Center and his Republican primary opponent, who he said “colluded” with Democrats to damage his campaign.
In a Facebook post in May 2025, Rawson wrote that his involvement with the group stretched from 2013 to 2016 and involved rallying against issues including “unfettered immigration” and advocating for “historic monuments that were being attacked by woke rioters.”
He predicted people would try to wield this connection against him, he wrote, and compared the criticism to attacks directed at President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“This is the same worn-out rhetoric that the left (and in some cases other Republicans) have used against Trump and DeSantis in the past,” Rawson wrote.
League of the South gained national attention after the 2017 Charlottesville rally.
On the eve of the rally, white nationalists marched through the University of Virginia campus with torches. At the rally the next day, many participants carried pistols or long guns.
A federal jury later found rally organizers and participating organizations — including League of the South and its leader, Michael Hill — liable for civil conspiracy.
Talking Points Memo reported that an archived YouTube video shows Rawson and his wife arriving at the rally and being greeted by name by League of the South members. Footage appears to show Rawson marching while carrying the group’s flag. The outlet also obtained a photograph showing Rawson standing near James Alex Fields Jr., who later drove into a crowd of counterprotesters.
Fields killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injured dozens of others. He was convicted of murder and federal hate crimes and is serving life in prison.
In addition to Rawson’s involvement with League of the South, he reportedly accepted campaign contributions from individuals with ties to white supremacist organizations.
Rawson’s campaign was endorsed by former U.S. Reps. Ted Yoho (R-Florida) and Paul Broun (R-Georgia). Neither responded to requests for comment from The Post.
His opponent, Democrat Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson denounced Rawson in a post to social media Monday.
“While his background has been casually talked about for years, the documented degree of his involvement and the carryover to his campaign has not been fully known,” she said. “This physical evidence is extremely alarming.”
“We must put hatred, secession, and fear behind us as a country, which means we cannot elect Marshall Rawson,” she wrote.
Malwitz-Jipson did not respond to calls for comment.
The Florida GOP, DeSantis and Florida House Speaker Pro Tempore Wyman Duggan did not respond on Monday to requests for comment.
The post GOP nominee for Florida House marched with neo-Nazis appeared first on Washington Post.
