Toledo Police Chief George Kral was there as a police officer when the Ku Klux Klan rallied in front of the Lucas County Courthouse in 1994.
He was there in 2005 when members of the National Socialist Movement tried to march through North Toledo — an event police called off when rioting and looting broke out.
By 2015, when the same neo-Nazi group rallied in front of One Government Center, he was police chief.
“I’ve had my fill,” he said Sunday when contacted about the Maumee man alleged to have driven his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at a white nationalist rally Saturday in Charlottesville, Va. “It’s just crazy that we’re having these discussions in 2017. It’s depressing.”
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The Charlottesville event — held by white nationalists protesting the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee — was thought to be the largest such gathering in a decade. One woman was killed and at least 19 people were injured when the car James Fields, Jr., 20, of Maumee allegedly drove plowed into the counter-protesters.
Bowling Green Mayor Richard Edwards said he was disgusted by the display of hatred, heartsick over the violence that erupted. He was working as Wood County administrator in 1994 when the KKK pulled a permit to rally in front of the Wood County courthouse.
“Those folks who were on the steps of the courthouse were totally disgusting,” Mr. Edwards said. “I’ll never get out of my head seeing children up there with these people with their Confederate flags and their swastikas and other signs of hate. They couldn’t get out of town fast enough, and we couldn’t get them out of town fast enough.”
The Bowling Green Klan rally was one of a string of such events held in the mid-1990s by a small contingency of the KKK in area cities, including Toledo, Bryan, Hicksville, Ohio, and Hillsdale, Mich.
By and large, problems were few.
Members of the public were encouraged to stay away, to find better ways to spend their afternoons. Alternative events — with different messages — were planned.
Mr. Edwards said he had friends at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and recalled contacting the school’s center for First Amendment rights to talk about how to legally allow the KKK express its free-speech rights “under authorized control and conditions.”
“We encouraged people not to incite and just everyone keep their cool, and so I really at that time had great respect for the restraint shown on the part of the citizens and the people who came to the community to observe,” Mr. Edwards said. “They observed in silence and showed disgust by their silence.”
Lucas County Sheriff John Tharp said that has always been the message.
“Don’t show up. If they don’t have an audience, then who are they talking to? Each other,” the sheriff said. “That’s what we always preach. That’s what keeps the community safest.”
Chief Kral said he understands that “people’s emotions get the best of them” when a group with such a radical hate ideology comes to town.
“I feel bad for the police [in Charlottesville],” he said. “With the First Amendment, these people have rights to free speech and we have to protect those rights even when we don’t agree with them.”
On Oct. 15, 2005, more than 100 people were arrested after rioting broke out in North Toledo in advance of what was to have been a march through a mostly black neighborhood by 15 members of a neo-Nazi group.
Police canceled the rally because of the violence, but in the end four businesses were looted, one was set on fire, and crowds threw bottles, bricks, and rocks at law-enforcement officials. Tear gas and wooden pellets were fired in return.
Two months later, about 60 neo-Nazi protesters returned to Toledo, holding an hourlong rally in front of One Government Center downtown. Some 30 people — most from out of town — were cited for misdemeanor charges of inciting violence and disorderly conduct.
Such hate-filled events are volatile and “totally uncalled for in this day and age,” Chief Kral said.
While the message is, “ ‘Don’t give these groups the audience they want to try to incite violence,’ this country was born off protests,” he said, “and people want to show these kinds of radical hate groups they aren’t going to win, and I can understand that.”
Contact Jennifer Feehan at jfeehan@theblade.com or 419-213-2134.
First Published August 14, 2017, 4:07 a.m.
