"I think the best way to express our opposition to the Klan is to be here," said Nermin Abdelwahab, 19, a student at Hunter College who came with two friends. Many carried handmade signs expressing opposition to the Klan and to racism.

"I didn't think so many people would come out here against racism," said Hans Arrieta, a 21-year-old meatpacker originally from Costa Rica. Arrieta said some of his coworkers told him the protest would be dangerous, but were glad he went.

The anti-Klan protest began two hours before the robed and hooded, but unmasked, racists emerged with a police escort onto the street from inside the courthouse, holding a Confederate flag. After an hour and 15 minutes of rallying silently, protected by at least 1,000 cops including rooftop snipers and mounted cops, the Klansmen left. The cops then cleared out the counterdemonstrators.

Fourteen people were arrested, including three who had rushed at the Klan members. Three cops were slightly injured.

Two protests against the Klan were called, the main one initiated by several Democratic Party politicians, and a smaller one by the Partisan Defense Committee, associated with the Spartacist League. Because of the turnout in the same area, the crowd tended to merge together.

In the name of "preventing violence," the New York Police Department had denied the Klan a permit to demonstrate, citing an 1845 state law prohibiting masked gatherings. KKK leaders said they were challenging that law to have it ruled unconstitutional.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani vocally supported the denial of the permit.

Citing the constitutional right to freedom of expression, a federal district court ruled the Klan could march and cover their faces, asserting that they could suffer physical or economic harm for expressing their views. An appellate court then overturned that decision and ruled that the city could enforce the 1845 state law. The New York Civil Liberties Union filed an emergency appeal on behalf of the Klan with the U.S. Supreme Court, but the petition to permit the masks was denied. The federal district court also denied a sound permit for the smaller counterdemonstration.

Whether or not the Klan had the right to march in New York and whether the government should bar the reactionary group was a ongoing debate among working people and in the big-business press.

"The KKK should never have been given a permit to have a rally, with masks or without," said Mordechai Levy, a leader of the Jewish Defense Organization, a right-wing Zionist group. Giuliani denounced the ruling as taking free speech too far, saying, "This is another example of the ideology extended from the '60s."

Democratic politician Alfred Sharpton and the Amsterdam News, the main weekly newspaper orienting to the Black community, had reacted to the city's denial of the permit to the Klan by filing legal papers supporting its right to demonstrate. "We believe .… that if we did not stand up for the Klan's right, we had no right to stand up for anybody else's rights," said Elinor Tatum, publisher and editor in chief of the paper.

An editorial in the liberal Daily News compared the Klan rally to the Million Youth March, a pro-Black rights rally that the Giuliani administration had unsuccessfully tried to prevent, and advised its readers to "ignore them" rather than protest.

A number of people who went to the anti-Klan protest commented that as despicable as they are, the Klan had "the right to freedom of expression."

"I hate to defend the KKK, but I strongly believe in the First Amendment. " said Katrin Kark, 21, a student at Barnard College. Kark had come to join a contingent of members of the National Organization for Women, which recently protested an anti-abortion group that picketed a women's clinic in Brooklyn.

Members of the Young Socialists and of the Socialist Workers Party built and took part in the anti-KKK protests. They argued against calls on the capitalist government to ban the Klan rally because such legal restrictions will then be used against the working class and the oppressed. They likewise opposed defending the terror group's "right" to demonstrate. Instead, the socialists pointed to demonstrations such as the October 23 action as the road to mobilize working people, youth, and others in the fight against racist thugs.  
 
 
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