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.
2 survivors of suspected drug vessel will be sent to home countries, Trump says
The two survivors of an American military strike on a suspected drug-carrying vessel in the Caribbean will be sent to Ecuador and Colombia, their home countries, President Trump said.
These voters want to overturn Missouri’s new gerrymandered congressional map
A Missouri group is working to overturn the map that gives the state one more Republican seat in Congress. If they get enough signatures, the map cannot take effect unless Missourians approve them.
Harris says Democrats ‘are standing up for working people’ in government shutdown
Harris made the comments in an AP interview Friday, the same day her book tour brought her to Birmingham.
Opinion: Susan Stamberg gave NPR its voice
NPR has lost a singular, distinctive radio journalist: Susan Stamberg, who died Thursday. She was the first woman to host a national news broadcast and set the tone, pace, and scope of the network.
Why are so many rich Americans investing in British soccer teams?
American millionaires and celebrities are buying up British soccer teams in record numbers.
A caregiver’s survival guide: Advice from people who’ve been there
Family caregivers offer their wit, wisdom and survival tips for the hardest unpaid job in America.
