Celebrating Hitler’s Birthday in the Hood
The American National Socialist Workers Party, (not to be confused with the Westland, Michigan based American Nazi Party) are trying to stir up racial hatred in Cincinnati.
The group wants to celebrate Hitler’s birthday by marching through the Queen City’s Over-The-Rhine community - ground zero for Cincinnati’s 2001 rebellion which was sparked after Cincy police killed over a dozen Black men in five years.
Recognizing the provocative and potentially violent nature of the Nazi request, the city wants to find a legal way to move the march.
The police department initially granted the permit to march through predominantly black Over-the-Rhine, but City Manager Milton Dohoney Jr. on Friday revoked it and said the group would get a new permit only if organizers agreed to a new route – just three blocks along Central Parkway on the edge of downtown.
Council members have been researching the possibility of using the “fighting words” exception to the First Amendment. The Constitution protects freedom of speech, but the U.S. Supreme Court has held as long ago as 1942 that some speech can be regulated. The court, in a 1942 case from New Hampshire, defined those unprotected words as those which “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”
That’s right. Cincinnati’s police department, well known for their love of Black people, granted the first permit. According to the Nazis, the ACLU may sue the city for revoking that license. The city also wants to send the Nazis a bill for the additional police needed to protect the white supremacist hatemongers.
If the march, scheduled for April 20, does happen and police are needed, she said, the group should be billed. There’s precedent here for that – in 2000, the city billed the Ku Klux Klan more than $10,000 for the time spent by police officers in monitoring a cross the group erected on Fountain Square. The KKK, former councilwoman Alica Reece said, didn’t pay the bill and “never came back.”
