Opinion: ‘Free speech doesn’t work just when you agree with it’
In 1977, a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Party of America applied for a permit to march through Skokie, Illinois, a predominantly Jewish, Chicago suburb. They wanted to wear brown shirts with swastika armbands and wave signs demanding “free speech for white people.”
The village refused the permit. The group sued, and it ignited a national debate over the First Amendment that may sound familiar today. Does the constitutional right to free speech protect offensive, even hateful speech? Can words cause real damage?
Skokie’s attorneys argued that seeing the swastika and hearing chants of “Sieg Heil” on their streets would amount to a physical attack on the hundreds of Holocaust survivors who lived in Skokie.
I remember speaking with Magda Brown over iced tea on her porch. She’d been a teenager in Hungary when the Nazi-aligned government began making anti-Jewish laws. She survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Her family was executed.
“The thought of Nazis in our streets today,” she told me, “brings back my worst fears.”
I told Magda Brown that the young Chicago Nazis I’d interviewed in their small storefront headquarters looked more ridiculous than menacing. Magda answered, “That’s what the Nazis looked like to us in 1933, too,” — the year Hitler came to power in Germany.
David Goldberger was the ACLU lawyer who argued in the U.S. Supreme Court for the right of the neo-Nazis to march and speak.
“But our real client was always the First Amendment,” he told us this week. The courts eventually ruled that the planned demonstration was protected speech, but the Nazis ended up holding their rally in Chicago instead.
David Goldberger, who is now professor emeritus at The Ohio State University’s law school, found the case personally painful. He himself is Jewish.
“I still feel bad about the pain it caused survivors,” he said. “People who had suffered so much. I felt like they could be my uncles and relatives.”
“But when free speech is denied because someone finds it offensive,” he says today, “then officials can prevent speech, even jokes, that anyone dislikes for any reason. Free speech doesn’t work just when you agree with it.”
Maybe there’s some unity in that thought in these divided times.
No more Elmo? APT could cut ties with PBS
The board that oversees Alabama Public Television is considering disaffiliating from PBS, ending a 55-year relationship.
Nonprofit erases millions in medical debt across Gulf South, says it’s ‘Band-Aid’ for real issue
Undue Medical Debt has paid off more than $299 million in medical debts in Alabama. Now, the nonprofit warns that the issue could soon get worse.
Roy Wood Jr. on his father, his son and his new book
Actor, comedian and writer Roy Wood Jr. is out with a new book -- "The Man of Many Fathers: Life Lessons Disguised as a Memoir." He writes about his experience growing up in Birmingham, losing his dad as a teenager and all the lessons he learned from various father figures throughout his career.
Auburn fires coach Hugh Freeze following 12th loss in his last 15 SEC games
The 56-year-old Freeze failed to fix Auburn’s offensive issues in three years on the Plains, scoring 24 or fewer points in 17 of his 22 league games. He also ended up on the wrong end of too many close matchups, including twice this season thanks partly to questionable calls.
In a ‘disheartening’ era, the nation’s former top mining regulator speaks out
Joe Pizarchik, who led the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement from 2009 to 2017, says Alabama’s move in the wake of a fatal 2024 home explosion increases risks to residents living atop “gassy” coal mines.
‘It’s like feeling the arms of your creator just wrapped around you’: a visit to a special healing Shabbat
Members of Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham gathered recently for their traditional Friday Shabbat service. But this particular service was different, as could be seen by all the people dressed in their finest pink.
