‘Our sense of safety was violated': a Black suburb in Ohio confronts repeated threats from white supremacists

The Guardian

3 days ago

Despite its proximity to a busy highway, Lincoln Heights' rolling hills, parks and well-kept lawns are pictures of calm suburban life north of Cincinnati.
Today it's home to about 3,000 mostly African American people a few miles from Kentucky and the Ohio River, which divided free northern states from the slave-owning south. In the 1920s, Lincoln Heights became one of the first self-governing Black communities north of the Mason-Dixon line.
But residents say much of that peace and security was destroyed on 7 February, when a group of neo-Nazis paraded on a highway overpass adjacent to the community. About a dozen armed and masked extremists unfurled flags with Nazi and other racist iconography bearing language such as 'America for the white man'.
When locals heard what was happening on the bridge, many didn't think twice to act. Soon, a large group gathered to warn the extremists off. Racial slurs were hurled at locals while a small police presence attempted to maintain calm.
'I cannot understand how you can say that that was a peaceful protest. They were there with their flags, saying those things, they had guns,' says Lincoln Heights resident Syretha Brown.
'Their whole intent was to intimidate and cause fear. That is a crime. They used hateful speech. That together is a hate crime.'
In the months since, locals have been left to wonder why the authorities acted the way they did that day.
Although the white supremacists had no permit for their gathering, it was deemed legal by Evendale police, under whose jurisdiction the bridge falls, due to US free speech laws. Nor were the extremists ticketed by police for transporting themselves in the back of a box truck without using seatbelts. Evendale law enforcement said no citations were issued and the extremists were allowed to make off to a nearby school – with a police escort – in order to help de-escalate the situation.
'It's just beyond belief how they intermingled with the neo-Nazis,' says Lincoln Heights' mayor, Ruby Kinsey-Mumphrey, of the law enforcement response.
'I just don't think that they are sensitive to how that impacted this Black community.'
The outcry forced Evendale police to apologize for their handling of the incident, and two investigations soon followed.
Released last month, one found – to no little controversy among Lincoln Heights residents – that 'Evendale officers did perform well in recognizing and understanding the constitutional rights of all parties involved', and recommended that officers receive further training in handling large groups and protests.
Many Lincoln Heights residents are not impressed.
'For the police to participate in the way that they did sort of solidified what I thought,' says Brown of the 7 February march and the Evendale police's response.
She says that the claims by police that the neo-Nazis were allowed to leave the scene by illegally transporting themselves in the back of a box truck in order to maintain the peace doesn't stand up to reason.
'If that's the case, once [the police] got them away from the situation, why was nobody pulled out of the truck or asked for ID? I feel like at this point, there's laws for [African Americans] and laws for [everyone else],' she says.
'Why? Because Trump has said that this is how it has to go for the police that the extremists can't be charged. Nothing that has happened from 7 February until today am I shocked about.'
Many Americans feel the Trump administration's pardoning of the 6 January rioters, and, more recently, its deployments of the national guard on the streets of Los Angeles and granting refugee status to white South Africans highlight a racist undertone that creates a broader, permissive environment for groups and individuals with rightwing tendencies.
This month it was announced that no charges would be filed against the neo-Nazi group that marched on the Cincinnati bridge; many Lincoln Heights residents are boycotting Evendale in response to its handling of the incident.
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Within weeks, the Lincoln Heights community set up a safety and watch program that sees locals, some of them armed, patrol the streets.
When she attended a news conference highlighting the Evendale police investigation's findings last month, Brown found herself escorted out of the room shortly after asking a question.
Despite what has happened, Brown says she feels safer in Lincoln Heights than elsewhere.
'Am I more concerned now? No. Am I prepared? Yes,' she says, adding that she plans to run for a seat on Lincoln Heights' city council.
Residents of Lincoln Heights have faced discrimination ever since its foundation a century ago. When leaders attempted to incorporate the city in the 1930s and early 1940s in order to provide residents with basic services, neighboring cities opposed the move. While Lincoln Heights' repeated attempts to incorporate were pushed back, neighboring communities, including Evendale, were allowed to become established. When they did, they took with them a host of industrial areas and factories, leaving Lincoln Heights without much in the way of access to commercial tax income by the time it finally incorporated in 1946.
Just east of Interstate 75, the headquarters of the GE Aerospace conglomerate provides Evendale authorities with millions of dollars in tax revenue every year and employs about 5,000 people. And while Evendale's median household income is about $155,000, next door in Lincoln Heights, it's just $17,333.
Having lost more than half its population since its 1960s heyday, today Lincoln Heights is now less than 1 sq mile in size. With a tiny tax base, its schools are underfunded, forcing many families to educate their children elsewhere. In 2023, its high school, long since derelict, was bulldozed.
And yet, extremists have kept coming back.
Weeks after the neo-Nazi incident, members of the safety and watch program spotted a man dumping Ku Klux Klan recruitment literature on the streets in the middle of the night, and alerted law enforcement. When police stopped and cited the white supremacist man – for littering – they found a peace banner that was previously placed on the highway overpass by locals in his trunk. The hateful literature was quickly picked up.
'We feel grateful that the men in our community stood up and protected us, that our children didn't wake up to those flyers. That our seniors didn't have to wake up fearful,' says Brown of the safety and watch program participants.
For others, fears that past racism is resurging are hugely unsettling.
'We see this in our history books, that [racist attacks] happened to Dr Martin Luther King, to Malcolm X. But to see it in today's society leaves you speechless,' says Kinsey-Mumphrey.
'They were trying to tell us – the oldest African American community here in the United States – [that] we were targeted. Our sense of safety was violated.'