This article reports on efforts by residents of Lincoln Heights, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, to defend themselves against provocations by neo-Nazi thugs and Ku Klux Klansmen by organizing counter-mobilizations and an armed watch. Nearly 83% of the town’s approximately 3,000 residents are African American. Lincoln Heights was the first self-governing Black community to be founded north of the Mason-Dixon line, which divided the Union from the Confederate South during the U.S. civil war.

February 28, 2025

"On February 7, about a dozen masked men, some of them carrying AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, drove a U-Haul truck to a freeway overpass at Lincoln Heights’ edge. The men, dressed in black, shouted racist slurs and waived black flags with red swastikas on them. Enraged Lincoln Heights residents soon approached to counter protest. Local police who converged on the scene from the nearby town of #Evandale, across the highway, appeared cordial toward some of the white supremacists. As the crowd of Lincoln Heights residents swelled, the ultra rightists got back on their truck and drove off. Counter protesters burned the Nazi flags left behind. "