Black Majority Ohio Town Mounts Armed Guard Against Neo-Nazis

Source: Bill Pugliano / Getty

The Black residents of a town in Ohio have formed an armed watch after neo-Nazis attempted to march nearby and Ku Klux Klan flyers appeared there.

Residents in the historically Black community of Lincoln Heights, Ohio, have formed an armed watch to protect themselves after a group of neo-Nazis attempted to march nearby before being chased off, in addition to flyers from the Ku Klux Klan being found in the area. Members of the town mobilized after the neo-Nazis rallied on the border of Lincoln Heights and another Cincinnati suburb, Evandale on Feb. 7. The confrontations on the I-75 bridge, which saw residents chase the group off, were caught on video.

“An American individual protecting his homeland with a firearm — I thought that was the most American thing that we [could] do,” said Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch (SAW) Program spokesman Daronce Daniels in an interview with the Washington Post. The group has set up checkpoints around Lincoln Heights and is armed per Ohio’s open-carry firearms law. In a press conference held Monday (Feb. 24), the group shared flyers they claimed were distributed throughout Lincoln Heights and neighboring towns touting the 160th anniversary of the Klan. They also shared video footage showing members of the watch catching a man tossing the flyers from his car the previous evening at a traffic stop. The footage was shared with the Local 12 news network.

The SAW group along with the nonprofit Heights Movement also laid out a list of demands for leaders of Evandale to find a new firm to conduct a third-party investigation into the thwarted neo-Nazi rally after Lincoln Heights Mayor Ruby Kinsey Mumphrey stated she was shut out of the process. The demands also call for the firing of Evandale police officers who aided members of the group (including one who drove a member to his car to retrieve his service animal) and those who didn’t activate their body cameras as well as the surrender of all the unedited bodycam footage from that day.

The residents of Lincoln Heights, which dates back to the 1920s, state that their primary concern is for the youth of the town. “The way I found out that the Nazis were in my neighborhood was through children,” said DeRonda Calhoun, a teacher in the area. “They were afraid.” The Heights Movement did state that they secured funds for mental health services available to those children who requested it.