In Missouri, a Free Speech Fight Over a Highway Adoption by the National Socialists

[Whitebear]

In Missouri, a Free Speech Fight Over a Highway Adoption by the National Socialist Movement

When a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Movement volunteered last year to clean a Missouri highway — and get official recognition for it in the form of an Adopt-a-Highway sign — state officials felt powerless to refuse. So they took a rather clever tack.

Several years before, the Missouri Department of Transportation had lost a long legal battle to try and prevent the Ku Klux Klan from adopting a highway on freedom-of-speech grounds. So the state decided to counter the Nazi group’s speech with more speech, in the form of another roadside sign.

Officials are renaming the stretch of highway near Springfield that the organization cleans a
fter Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who fled Nazi Germany and became a prominent Jewish theologian and civil rights advocate in the United States.