Cops defend Nazis as hundreds protest

Chanting “No Nazis, no KKK, no police intimidation,” about 200 anti-fascist demonstrators made themselves heard here on Dec. 10 as the city rolled out the red carpet for the second “National Socialist Movement” (NSM) Nazi rally in Toledo this year.

Police arrested one-tenth of the demonstrators.

Toledo residents were joined by groups from other towns in Ohio, from Detroit and other points in Michigan, and from Chicago. The Nazis were far outnumbered when they finally peeked out from behind four massive rows of riot cops and began spewing their message of terrorism and genocide at the multinational and very unwelcoming audience below them at City Hall plaza.

The city authorities allowed the Nazis to use a sound system but forbade anti-Nazi protesters from carrying picket signs or megaphones.

What the Nazis lacked in numerical strength, however, was made up for by political support from the city of Toledo, county sheriffs, state highway patrol, and cops and SWAT teams from as far away as Michigan, who came to harass the anti-Nazi protesters.

The newspaper Toledo Blade estimated that 700 police officers were at the Nazi rally and counter-demonstration.

On Oct. 15, the NSM, an avowed terrorist organization whose stated purpose is the mass murder of most of the world’s population, had accused the African-American residents of Toledo of “Black crime” and attempted to march through their neighborhoods. At that point, the people of Toledo rose up in a heroic rebellion against racism that threw the fascists out. Over 100 anti-Nazi protesters were arrested; some are still facing charges. The cops used tear gas on the hundreds of mostly Black youth who had gathered in the streets to defend their city against both the Nazi provocation and the racist cops who were escorting the Nazis.

Parroting the Nazi line, the police and city authorities decried the “violence” of the protesters as they gassed the people and pursued them with helicopters, horses and phalanxes of riot cops.

Knowing that they could not guarantee the Nazis safety in the neighborhoods, the city of Toledo obtained a court order from Judge Thomas Osowik, which awarded the Nazis center stage in downtown Toledo for their rally on Dec. 10. While the Nazis protested this limitation in court, the weight of the court injunction was not aimed at them but at the protesters, who were confined to a small protest pen. They had to enter through a metal-detector and were subjected to a pat-down search while the cops took individual photographs of each protester. They were not allowed to carry bags or backpacks into the designated protest area.

Even before the rally began, the police had set up an assembly-line arrest-and-booking operation in the police station next to the rally site, and the arrests started. Five youths in a car from Chicago on their way to the protest were pulled over and searched by cops. The passengers and driver were thrown to the ground, cuffed and charged with “contempt of court” for violating the anti-free-speech injunction by “congregating” in another part of the city.

Judge Francis X. Gorman told the Toledo Blade, “We had this whole thing planned out really well,” referring to the mass arrests of the protesters. Some 29 people were arrested—more than a tenth of the protesters.

The cops repeatedly rode their horses into the dense crowd of protesters, stomping on at least one protester’s foot, and dragged people out of the crowd by their necks and into the waiting jail cells.

Elizabeth O’Brien of Lansing, Mich., says she was stunned repeatedly with a Taser electric-shock gun by the police and has 35 welts on her left thigh. Ileana Cortez of Detroit was charged with assaulting a police horse, although no injuries to police animals were reported. No Nazis were arrested, although three local racists who infiltrated the protest were.

City officials showed they would use any means necessary to give fascists an unobstructed platform from which to spout their genocidal, racist garbage.

This time, the protesters were not numerous or organized enough to decisively defeat the Nazis and their cop friends, but, despite overwhelming police oppression, they made it clear that Nazis were not welcome in Toledo.

The police carried out a premeditated plan to violently suppress opposition to the fascist recruitment rally, proving that the state is not a neutral arbiter of free speech but a patron and defender of ultra-right terrorists. Only the working class can defeat the Nazis and the racist system that supports them.

As political prisoners from the Toledo protest waited in the county jail—which charges its mostly indigent and Black inmates $100 per night for reeking cells, putrid food and drinking fountains built into toilets—the capitalist media was already spreading lies and justifications for the police attacks. On Dec. 13 the Toledo Blade editorialized that the massive police violence was “almost a non-event” and lied that “nobody was injured.”

What they can’t hide is the overwhelming poverty in a city where the workers have made millions of dollars for Daimler-Chrysler’s Jeep division and other corporate monopolies. They can’t hide the fact that Black motorists are twice as likely as whites to be stopped by police and issued tickets in Toledo, according to USA Today. They can’t hide the monstrous racist injustices of the “war on terror” or the genocidal neglect and abandonment of the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It’s time to bring this racist system down.

Alex Gould was one of those the police dragged from the protest and arrested.