“One man’s hate speech is another man’s political statement.”

Charles Levendosky, Liberal Opinion Weekly, August 17, 1998

Benjamin Smith, a twenty-one-year-old member of the racist group World Church of the Creator, went on a hate-filled, three-day shooting rampage over the Fourth of July weekend in 1999 in which he killed two and wounded nine—all minorities. He began the weekend by shooting at a group of Jews who were leaving their synagogue in Chicago, Illinois, wounding six of them. An hour later, he was driving down a residential street in Skokie, where Ricky Byrdsong, a black former basketball coach at Northwestern University in Evanston, was jogging with two of his children. Smith shot and killed Byrd- song, forty-three, with seven bullets to the back. The next day, Smith shot at a group of Asians near the University of Illinois. On the last day of...