Dear Readers, Recently, I noticed reports about white supremacists marching in Jena, Alabama to support the white victim of the racially motivated “beat-down.� The local community did not want these outsiders using its pain as a soapbox for “white power,� yet it honored the 1st Amendment’s almost inviolable right to congregate and protest. In reading this sad story, my thoughts turned to an event from my boyhood: Skokie and the Nazis.

Skokie, Illinois is a middle class/upper-middle class town of approximately 65,000 people just Northwest of Chicago. Back in the mid-1970s, as today, Skokie had a strong Jewish presence. At the time, many of its citizens, maybe as much as 20% of its population, were either Holocaust survivors or direct relatives of those who suffered from the horrors of Hitler.

Frank Collin hailed from the Southside of Chicago, pockets of which have had some ugly racist histories. He was a small-minded, meglomanical man who fancied himself some sort of post-modern Hitler, claiming to be a leader of the Nationalist Socialist Party (Nazi). As I recall, his claims were delusional and, after his moment of infamy from 1976to 1978, he became just a hateful memory.

In the fall of 1976, Collin applied for a permit to march in full blackshirt regalia in a Skokie park. Skokie, and much of Chicago, recoiled in angry disbelief. Skokie leaders quickly passed an ordinance requiring, among other things, a bond be posted against potential damages from the march. Litigation over the constitutionality of this ordinance, briefly reached the United States Supreme Court in June of 1977. The Court ordered the march be permitted to go forward, pending the resolution of this litigation, given the singular importance of our 1st Amendment rights.

In constitutional law, there is a distinction between governmental interference with 1st Amendment rights as they unfold, if you will, and a “prior restraint� on the content of 1st Amendment rights. The latter are viewed with great skepticism requiring the highest degree of proof that governmental intervention is appropriate, as opposed to merely rational limits on time, place, and manner. Thus, there are regulations on how close to abortion clinics pro-life supporters may congregate, they cannot be absolutely banned.

In the end, Collin’s group marched in a Southside Chicago park, where the march was not quite as controversial, and Skokie citizens were spared something for which the word “horrific� does not do justice. Yet, Collin (who was Jewish, by the way) had won the right to take his message of hate directly to Skokie. The ACLU, which defended his right to march, lost tens of thousands of members for doing so and a movie starring Danny Kaye was made of the whole saga.

The citizens of Skokie were embittered by the whole experience. They could not comprehend how this country could allow, in complicity, such a petty and callous man to lance the wounds left by Hitler’s genocidal evils. I am sure the citizens of Jena share pale echoes of this resentment. Yet, their pain is a tribute to our Country’s greatest right, the first right, to publicly gather and protest. It is one of the principal distinctions between our republic and petty dictatorships or oppressive oligarchies.

Thus, the 1st Amendment is a shining promise that our rule of law triumphs over emotion and points the way to freedom, as opposed to the slippery slope of censorship. Ultimately, we may not like what the 1st Amendment sometimes permits, but the alternative would diminish our freedom.