Residents of Lincoln Heights, Ohio, a Black-majority town in the suburbs of Cincinnati, have formed armed watches after neo-Nazis recently marched close by and after fliers from the Ku Klux Klan began appearing in town.
According to the Washington Post, residents decided to take matters into their own hands after becoming suspicious of the police response to a neo-Nazi march earlier this month on an overpass leading into town.
As a result, the residents decided to take advantage of Ohio’s open-carry laws by arming themselves and setting up checkpoints for people entering and exiting their town.
“An American individual protecting his homeland with a firearm—I thought that was the most American thing that we [could] do,” Daronce Daniels, a spokesman for the newly formed Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch Program, told the Post.
DeRonda Calhoun, a 45-year-old teacher, told the Post that she was particularly disturbed that her students were being targeted by neo Nazis.
“The way I found out that the Nazis were in my neighborhood was through children,” she told me. “They were afraid.”
According to the Post, Lincoln Heights has a long history of independence, beginning in the 1920s as “a Black enclave for laborers blocked from Cincinnati and surrounding towns because of their race.”
