After Neo-Nazis Targeted a Majority-Black Town. Locals Launched an Armed Watch

 

On February 7th, a U haul van full of neo-Nazis gathered in the predominantly Black Cincinnati suburb of Lincoln Heights, which boasts a modest population of 3,144 people. They wore masks and carried guns as they called residents racist slurs. The group of white supremacists also waved flags with red swastikas on a highway overpass. The town originated as a self-governing Black community for laborers blocked from Cincinnati and surrounding towns because of their race, and is the oldest north of the Mason-Dixon Line, it proclaims on its website. The neo-Nazis also marched that same day in Evendale, a nearby village. 

Two weeks after that disturbing incident, someone - presumably another white supremacist - spread racist pamphlets from the Ku Klux Klan all over Lincoln Heights. Disappointed by local law enforcement officials who did not spring into action to protect them, Black residents have now taken things into their own hands.

Lincoln Heights' police department was disbanded in 2014; the area is served by the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office. Following the February 7th demonstration, residents - alongside Hamilton County Commissioner Alicia Reece - questioned why police made no arrests or citations after the neo-Nazis intimidated residents and threatened racist violence. Evendale police also released body-camera footage showing officers being cordial with the masked group. 

As a result, the Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch Program was formed. Black men now are carrying rifles to guard the roads that lead directly into Lincoln Heights, questioning anyone trying to enter. Ohio is an open-carry state and folks are taking advantage of that, according to spokesperson Daronce Daniels, a spokesman for Program, which coordinates the guards who serves as guards for Lincoln Heights. The program directs members to report suspicious activity to the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office.“ An American individual protecting his homeland with a firearm - I thought that was the most American thing that we [could] do,” he said.

The Hamilton County prosecuting attorney’s office is reviewing the neo-Nazi rally to determine if it will make criminal charges but said it would take time to complete a thorough assessment given the volume of evidence.

Daniels said the Lincoln Heights guards will continue patrolling their village for the foreseeable future. They feel they are still under threat. 

The Village of Lincoln Heights and members of the Lincoln Heights Missionary Baptist Church have initiated a public boycott of Evendale after their frustration with the Evendale Police Department (EPD) and Evendale leaders regarding the neo-Nazi demonstration that occurred February 7th. The Rev. Dr. Julian Cook, pastor of the Lincoln Heights Missionary Baptist Church, said at a February. 24  press conference at the church that no arrests or citations have been made by the EPD in connection with the incident. However, he expressed appreciation for  Evendale officials’ decision to hire a third-party team to evaluate their handling of the demonstration.

Read the February 27, 2025 Washington Post article.

Read the February 25, 2025 NBC News article.

Read the February 27, 2025 Cincinnati Herald article.

Book Review: "Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights" by Dylan C. Penningroth

 

In Before the Movement, acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth shows that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these “rights of everyday use,” they made Black rights usual. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself.

Free Black people participated extensively in credit, debt and contracts in the decades before the Civil War. According to Penningroth, by 1860, there were over 16,000 free Black property owners in the South who held property worth nearly $8.8 billion in today’s dollars. Freedom meant that they could ask local judges to protect their rights, and they went to court in cases involving farms, cows and myriad other types of property. Black homeownership rose from 43,000 families in 1870 to over 500,000 families in 1910 (about 1 in 4 Black families nationwide). Black farmers owned more than 15 million acres and $208 billion in farm property (in today’s dollars). Lynchings also rose sharply in these years, and not coincidentally. 

"Penningroth's conclusions emerge from an epic research agenda.... Before the Movement presents an original and provocative account of how civil law was experienced by Black citizens and how their 'legal lives' changed over time . . . [an] ambitious, stimulating, and provocative book." - Eric Foner, New York Review of Books.

The author is a professor of law and history at the University of California, Berkeley. The book, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of the author's own family. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life.

Read the September 26, 2023 Washington Post article.

Justice Department Agreement with DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Orlando at SeaWorld Resolves Allegations of Discriminatory Policy Against Hosting Arabs

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has reached an agreement with AWH Orlando Property LLC, the owner of the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Orlando at SeaWorld in Florida (DoubleTree), to resolve allegations that the DoubleTree discriminated against people of Arab descent in violation of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title II). Title II prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin in places of public accommodation, including hotels.

The owner, AWH Orlando Property, denied the allegations and did not admit liability. Attorneys for the owner said that both parties reached the agreement to avoid a prolonged legal process.

The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida alleges that the DoubleTree adopted and implemented a discriminatory policy against hosting guests of Arab descent by unilaterally canceling a conference that was to be held by the Arab America Foundation, a non-profit educational and cultural organization, in November 2023, a week before the conference was scheduled to begin and almost a month after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

The lawsuit alleges that the DoubleTree’s decision to cancel the Arab America Foundation’s conference was not because of any legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons. Although the hotel claimed that the cancelation was because of security concerns, the hotel faced no security threats or risks associated with the conference. As alleged in DOJ’s complaint, contrary to what the DoubleTree told to the Arab America Foundation, it had not received any calls or other communications raising a safety or security threat to the conference or to the hotel. Rather, the decision to cancel was based on the national origin of the Arab America Foundation’s members and the conference attendees. The complaint therefore alleges that the DoubleTree discriminated on the basis of national origin and denied people of Arab descent the full and equal enjoyment of access to the services, accommodations, and privileges at the hotel.

The settlement, a consent decree that must still be approved by the court, requires the DoubleTree to:

• Issue a statement to the Arab America Foundation that all guests and groups are welcome to the hotel, including Arab and Arab American guests and groups;
• Retain a qualified compliance officer to oversee compliance with the consent decree for two years;
• Notify employees and executives of the DoubleTree’s obligations under Title II and the consent decree, including its commitment to ensuring equal access to the hotel, regardless of race, color, religion, or national origin;
• Establish a written anti-discrimination policy, which includes a system of accepting, investigating, and responding to guest complaints of discrimination;
• Conduct outreach to Arab or Arab American groups to share promotional materials about the hotel and indicate that it is open to all members of the public;
• Provide training to employees and executives on Title II and the company's obligations under the consent decree; and
• Make regular reports to DOJ to demonstrate its compliance with the consent decree.

Under Title II, DOJ’s Civil Rights Division can obtain injunctive relief that changes policies and practices to remedy the discriminatory conduct. Title II does not authorize the division to obtain monetary damages for customers who are victims of discrimination.

Read the January 16, 2025 DOJ release.

Read the January 17, 2025 CBS News article.

Obituary: Thomas Gaither, Who Chose Jail After Civil Rights Sit-ins, 86

 

One year after the sit-in movement that began at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960 and spread to other cities, stimulating the nation’s conscience over racial segregation, was in danger of losing momentum. In Rock Hill, S.C., local businesses still refused to integrate, despite the sit-ins, and local news no longer covered them. Then, in 1961, a 22-year-old organizer, Thomas Gaither, introduced a new tactic. In the next sit-in, at the lunch counter of a McCrory’s dime store in Rock Hill, Black students led by Gaither were dragged off counter stools by police officers. But this time, instead of paying a $100 trespassing fine as earlier protesters did, they chose to serve 30-day sentences on the county chain gang. Their “jail no bail” tactic dramatized their moral commitment and changed the direction of the civil rights movement. Within days, protesters in other cities followed suit, their imprisoning drawing more attention and protests. The choice of jail, historian Taylor Branch wrote in Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 (1988), was “an emotional breakthrough for the civil rights movement” because it dramatized protesters’ willingness to pay a real price for their convictions.

A little-sung catalyst of the civil rights protests of the 1960s, Gaither was one of the activists who, driven by high moral purpose, peacefully put their bodies on the line to fight racial discrimination. Those actions helped bring about historic federal laws to end legal segregation and ensure voting rights.

At Claflin College, an all-Black institution in Orangeburg, S.C., he was president of the youth chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. In March 1960, he was co-leader of a march of 1,000 students protesting segregated businesses. The peaceful Orangeburg marchers were attacked with fire hoses and tear gas, leading to 388 arrests. Many were held in a stockade meant for cattle, where they sang “God Bless America.”

As a field secretary by the Congress of Racial Equality, which used nonviolent direct action to fight segregation, Gaither was sent to organize in Kentucky, California, and Arizona. Ahead of the “jail no bail” sit-in in Rock Hill, on January 31, 1961, he helped train the protesters, eight students from Friendship Junior College. He and the students were known as the Friendship Nine after choosing to serve jail sentences. “The amazing thing about the Friendship Nine,” he added, “was that we took essentially a group of college students who had no knowledge at all of tactical nonviolence and we pulled off one of the most important protest events of the movement.”

Several months later, Gaither and fellow CORE organizer Gordon Carey both read a biography of Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolent protest, and developed the idea for the first Freedom Ride: an integrated group of activists who would take a bus trip from Washington through the Deep South. The idea was to dramatize the refusal of Southern states to comply with US Supreme Court rulings that segregated interstate buses and terminals were unconstitutional. In May 1961, CORE national director James Farmer led the first Freedom Ride, with 13 white and Black passengers, including the future congressman and civil rights advocate John Lewis.

In Alabama, the CORE activists were arrested and beaten by white mobs led by the Ku Klux Klan. The commercial buses they rode in were firebombed. The police abetted the violence, and hospitals refused to treat bloodied victims. National publicity drew hundreds more activists, who made dozens of Freedom Rides crisscrossing the South through 1961. The violence shocked the nation, no less because of the complicity of the Southern authorities in allowing it to happen in defense of Jim Crow laws.

Gaither was not on the original Freedom Ride in May 1961; he was scouting the route and contacting local supporters to house the riders. He was staying at the home of the civil rights leader the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy in Montgomery, Alabama, on May 20 when riders arriving at the Greyhound station there were beaten with baseball bats and iron pipes. The next night, more than 1,500 people went to Abernathy’s church to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak as a rock-throwing white mob surrounded the building. Dr. King called on Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to send federal protection.

He later became a professor of biology in 1968 at Slippery Rock University (Pennsylvania), and taught there for 38 years before retiring in 2007.

In his later years, Gaither felt that the civil rights movement had profoundly changed America, but also that the structures of racism had remained in his native South. “No question, the South has changed tremendously,” he said in 2011. “But the fundamental infrastructure of racism and segregation that called the shots in the South in 1960 are still in place. They have slightly different labels, they accomplish their goals by slightly different means, but there has been no real fundamental shift in who really calls the signals.”

Read the January 24, 2025 New York Times obituary.

Listen to a 2011 Library of Congress Oral History Interview with Thomas Gaither.

US Department of Justice Corrects Legal Record on Horrific 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

 

A new report by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has concluded that the 1921 attack in Tulsa's Greenwood District was the result of racially motivated violence targeting Black residents, refuting an initial federal account from the time. A coordinated attack by thousands of White people led to the slaughter of hundreds of Black residents. DOJ conducted the reexamination of the case under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows it to examine fatalities caused by civil rights crimes that occurred on or before December 31, 1979.

DOJ said a recent four-month reexamination of evidence in the case, known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, found that what an investigator described a month after the attack as spontaneous violence was, in fact, a coordinated effort by White perpetrators to decimate a thriving community known as “Black Wall Street.” The attackers, organized and aided by law enforcement, shot, beat, and arrested Black residents while burning and looting 35 city blocks over several hours on May 31, 1921, DOJ concluded. White authorities promised to help rebuild the community but instead put up barriers to financial assistance and offered no avenues for legal redress, investigators said.

The findings refute much of the initial report on the crime, in which a DOJ investigator at the time wrote that the violence was a “small” and “half-hearted” lynching attempt after a White man falsely accused a 19-year-old Black man named Dick Rowland of assaulting a White woman in an elevator.

Since then, historians have established a narrative consistent with DOJ’s new report, which is based on examining documents, witness accounts, and scholarly and historical research. The massacre “stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility, and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said. “Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about this race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa.”

Read the January 10, 2025 Washington Post article.

Read the January 10, 2025 DOJ press release.

HUD Study Finds "White Flight" Continues to Worsen Residential Segregation

HUD's research publication PD&R Edge has just published the results of two surveys examining recent White Flight migration. “Validating the White Flight Hypothesis: Neighborhood Racial Composition and Out-Migration in Two Longitudinal Surveys” uses data from two longitudinal surveys, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), to compare probabilities of neighborhood out-migration for Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians by neighborhood racial and ethnic composition. “White flight,” or the tendency of White households to move out of neighborhoods as the proportion of racial and ethnic minorities living in the neighborhood increases, is a basic assumption of theories of racial and ethnic residential segregation. Few studies, however, have empirically tested this assumption, with those that have relying almost entirely on PSID. Although PSID is a rich source of longitudinal data on the sociodemographic and economic characteristics of U.S. households, it is based largely on a sample of households originally drawn in the 1960s and their descendants. While research using PSID data has consistently confirmed that White households frequently move out as the number of minorities in a neighborhood increases, these studies examine the post-1960s period of increasing racial and ethnic diversity.

Findings

The researchers found that, for White households, the likelihood of out-migration increases as neighborhood minority shares grow. The trend is most apparent in predominantly White neighborhoods  - that is, when the percentage of minorities (non-White residents) in a neighborhood increases from 0-20%. Because most White households live in neighborhoods with few minorities, this finding suggests that in predominantly White neighborhoods, small increases in the share of minority residents can spur out-migration for some White households. In neighborhoods in which the minority share exceeds 20%, the rate of out-migration was slower. When the researchers examined Whites' responses to neighborhood proportions of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians alone rather than the minority population as a whole, the results were similar: as neighborhood shares of each group increased from 0 to 20%, White households were more likely to out-migrate.

The studies' research also found that out-migration of Black households increases as the neighborhood share of Hispanic residents rises from 0 to 20%. Also, there was increasing out-migration of Hispanic households as Black neighborhood shares increased. Finally, it was found that the mobility behaviors of Asian households are largely indifferent to neighborhood racial composition.

Conclusions

The research highlights the continued important determining role of race in the migration decision making process and the broader spatial foundations that shape inequality and mobility. 

Earlier work appearing in PD&R Edge documented the difficulties HUD’s housing assistance programs have encountered in reducing racial and ethnic segregation. While housing assistance programs have successfully improved neighborhoods and the lives of individuals receiving assistance, these programs have not significantly reduced racial and ethnic segregation. 

This research found that additional barriers to efforts to reduce residential segregation are:

(1) The active resistance of some White households, who may resort to moving to new neighborhoods to avoid living with minorities. 

(2)  The tendency for minorities to  avoid neighborhoods predominantly occupied by other minorities. 

Therefore, "White flight” and minority neighborhood avoidance combined with discrimination in the search for housing, differential access to credit, and restrictive zoning laws are significant obstacles for HUD to achieve the stated goals of the AFFH, namely reduced racial and ethnic residential segregation. 

Read the May 14, 2024 HUD User article.

 Insurance Discrimination in Maryland

Maryland Finds Erie Insurance Illegally Rejected Baltimore Auto Customers in Minority Neighborhoods

On May 24th, the Maryland Insurance Administration (MIA) has ruled that Pennsylvania-based Erie Insurance racially discriminated by engaging in insurance “redlining” of predominantly Black neighborhoods in Baltimore. Through the Baltimore Insurance Network, four Baltimore-area insurance brokers had accused Erie in separate complaints filed in 2021: Baltimore Insurance Network LLC of Bowie, Ross Insurance Agency of Windsor Mill, and Welsch Insurance Group of Baltimore. All contracted or had contracted with Erie as agents to sell auto insurance policies. A fourth brokerage, Baltimore-based Burley Insurance, filed a similar complaint. The state’s ruling also said Erie penalized brokerage firms that failed to engage in discriminatory practices by reducing commissions or terminating contracts.

Kobi Little, NAACP Baltimore president, said the policies and practices exposed in the case are “prima facie evidence of institutional racism and structural inequity. This is corporate policy violence and it is a root cause of the physical violence and economic decay that we see in urban centers with significant Black populations. The impact is devastating in terms of the economic loss suffered by the firms serving urban markets and those in urban markets who are denied coverage. This is modern-day redlining and this case is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The MIA found that Erie unlawfully canceled or rejected business from brokers based on race or for other discriminatory or arbitrary reasons. It also found Erie unlawfully canceled or changed agreements for qualified applicants based on “adverse loss ratio,” a measure of an insurer’s profitability. The spokesman for Erie - with nationally has over 6 million home, auto, life, and business policies - disagrees with the findings. Erie has requested a hearing with the agency and expects to “defend our company against these claims.”

The state’s investigation discovered that because Erie’s auto insurance business in Maryland was not profitable, it kept its broad guidelines and set a secondary layer of eligibility standards that agents should use to reject qualified applicants (“front line underwriting”). The state is continuing a broader investigation of Erie’s market practices to determine they are part of a larger pattern of discrimination. 

The original complaints said Erie refused to underwrite policies based on a potential client’s race, ethnic origin, neighborhood and/or socioeconomic status. Baltimore Insurance and Welsch said that Erie urged them to not sell policies to people in Baltimore with “city sounding names.” Baltimore Insurance Network said it was told by an Erie branch manager to “place those people elsewhere, I don’t care where, just not with Erie. They don’t fit Erie’s appetite. Find better people.” That branch manager also told Baltimore Insurance that it was “devaluing the brand” by writing insurance policies for people in predominantly African American neighborhoods, and that the brokerage had to “understand Erie’s appetite.” Likewise, Welsch Insurance Group’s Thomas A. Welsch was told to get his business “from somewhere else.” Welsch’s contract with Erie was terminated in August 2019, citing poor underwriting practices and unacceptable policyholder service.

Baltimore Insurance said in the complaint it was told to reduce its sales by 30% by rejecting applicants who qualified for coverage and were mostly Black and living in inner-city neighborhoods. Erie required the brokerage to include criminal record checks for applicants, most living in low-income neighborhoods, though such checks were not part of Erie’s underwriting standards or the broker’s training. The attorney for Baltimore Insurance said in his client’s case alone, “these are hundreds if not thousands likely affected members of the public who Erie rejected based on discriminatory practices that the insurance administration has found to be unlawful.”

The MIA ordered Erie to calculate and pay the agencies all amounts in commission that had been withheld between December 2019 and May 2023 when Erie had notified the insurance administration it would restore commissions. Erie works with 13,500 licensed agents who serve customers across the company’s territory, Cummings said.

*****

Sources

Read the June 6, 2023 Baltimore Sun article.

Read the June 1, 2023 Baltimore Banner article.