March 4, 2025

For over 16 months since the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, Workers World has shown solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people’s right to conduct an armed liberation struggle — from Gaza to the West Bank — against the U.S.-backed, Zionist, genocidal occupation.

That same solidarity should be shown towards the majority African American community of Lincoln Heights, Ohio — located on the outskirts of Cincinnati and very close to the Mason-Dixon line — where people chose self-defense when armed neo-Nazis began to terrorize the residents beginning on Feb. 7.

At least a dozen of these armed fascists had the arrogance to show up unexpectedly in pickup trucks for a march within the same vicinity of Black children leaving from Lincoln Heights Elementary School. One can just imagine how traumatizing and intimidating this event was for these youth and their parents.

Two weeks later, these same fascists appeared again tossing KKK flyers into the same community. And to no one’s surprise, the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office did nothing to drive these fascists out of the Black community. In fact, community residents saw firsthand how the police protected the fascists who were a clear danger to their community. One fascist was merely cited for “littering.”

It’s important to know that Lincoln Heights has been a self-governing community for years, where residents actively try to reverse the lack of public services, underinvestment and neglect on the part of the local white power structure. This is why Lincoln Heights has been subjected to an outside police presence.

Cops work hand in hand with fascists

Showing no clear signs of intimidation, members of the Black community formed the Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch Program, and armed themselves with weapons. Its members patrol 24 hours a day to defend their community from invasion by these white supremacists.

Dominic Brewton Jr., a community resident, said, “When we saw that the police wasn’t helping us, every able-bodied man in the neighborhood, with or without a gun, has stood guard and has been standing guard ever since.” (Washington Post, Feb. 27)

Self-defense is absolutely necessary. When Kyle Rittenhouse, a white supremacist who murdered two Black Lives Matter activists in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in August 2020, the police were seen giving Rittenhouse aid and comfort hours after the murders.

When white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the police got him a hamburger after his arrest. It is not a stretch to say that many police wear a badge by day and KKK hoods by night.

There is a historic precedent of the Black community arming itself against the repressive state apparatus, the police, along with the extra-legal arm of the state, neo-Nazis and the Klan. During the 1960s and 1970s, Black people set up armed self-defense squads in the South and North.

The Deacons for Defense and Justice was formed by Black workers in November 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana, to protect Civil Rights activists from KKK terror during the struggle for voting rights. Black activists Robert Williams and Mabel Williams organized armed self-defense against the KKK in Monroe, North Carolina, following struggles to desegregate a swimming pool in the late 1950s, where they were joined by Black Liberation leader Mae Mallory.

The Black Panther Party, originally founded in 1966, formed armed community defense squads in Oakland, California, and in other large urban areas against police occupation and brutality by citing the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms.

The Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch Program is carrying on this heroic tradition of people of color defending their right to protect themselves and communities from white supremacists who have been given the go-ahead to carry out their message of bigotry and hate with impunity from the police and sanctioned by the current White House administration.

And this tradition must continue to be defended by progressive and revolutionary forces from Palestine to the U.S.