Long ago, a group of angry men burned a cross on my grandfather’s lawn.
They wore masks. They wanted to intimidate my grandfather, who served as the principal of both the white high school and the segregated Black high school in the small Indiana town where he lived.
I don’t know why the men in masks did what they did.
I’ve heard stories. One account says the cross-burners were mad because my grandfather had disciplined a member of the basketball team. Another suggests something he had done to benefit the Black school enraged them.
I tried talking with my grandfather about it near the end of his life. It was at a time when he was trying to prepare me for the responsibilities that would settle upon my shoulders when he died.
Because of those circumstances, our discussions were franker than a man in his late 70s and a man-child in his late teens might otherwise share.
But Grandpa wouldn’t go anywhere near that night when the cross burned in his yard.
It wasn’t that he was scared. My grandfather was not a man who frightened easily, and the cross-burning was 30 years in the past when we talked about it.
My guess—and it is only a guess—is that he felt betrayed by the act. He knew that among that mob were men he considered neighbors, even friends, people whose children he’d taught and cared for.
That remained a source of pain for him to the end.
It scarred my mother, too.
That night left her with a lasting sense of violation—and an abiding anger toward those who try to frighten others into silence or obedience.
That, too, stayed with her until she died.
Again, life has its ironies.
Some 40 years after that mob burned the cross in Grandpa’s lawn, I—my grandfather’s firstborn grandchild and my mother’s eldest child—became the executive director of what was then the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, now the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana.
Among the people we represented during my tenure were the KKK and other white supremacist groups. Those groups then were going from Indiana town to Indiana town to hold public rallies in the hope that some public official would attempt to deny them the right to peaceably assemble.
They then would use the publicity resulting from the suit to recruit new members.
I met with those folks from time to time.
Did I like them?
No.
Did I agree with them?
No.
But that was beside the point.
I don’t claim to be a constitutional scholar, but I’d read the First Amendment closely enough to know that it didn’t have an asterisk. I knew that its guarantees of free speech didn’t just apply to people I liked or I agreed with.
I also was savvy enough to realize that allowing even the most noxious speech to be suppressed would allow unscrupulous people in power to establish a precedent—and a justification for shutting down expression they didn’t like.
So, I defended the rights of people whose views I detested.
I defended the spiritual heirs of the men who terrorized my grandfather, grandmother, mother and aunt.
I did so because I thought it was the right thing.
I still do.
We’re seeing now what happens when we tinker with speech codes and notions of hate speech. Unscrupulous people in power use those terms and that tinkering to shut down expression, even relatively innocuous expression, they just don’t like.
They’re using the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk as a justification for silencing criticism of his views.
Before he was brutally cut down, Kirk made use of his First Amendment rights more skillfully than any other figure of his generation. A college dropout, he built a media and political empire with a following in the millions.
The foundation of that empire was his willingness to criticize people in power, especially when they were Democrats and progressives.
That’s why he opposed speech codes and said there was no such thing as “hate speech.” His admirers call him a martyr in the cause of free speech.
Now, many of those same admirers want to shut up anyone who disagrees with him or them in homage to Kirk. They’re willing to use the power of government to do it.
Yeah, life has its ironies.
Some of them are tragic.
