by Michael Israel

About the author: Michael Israel is director of the criminal justice program at Kean University.

Virtually every case that the courts see regarding the First Amendment involves symbolic speech such as lettering on garments and offensive offhand utterances. Not since Terminiello v. Chicago (1949) has a speech itself been tested. That case involved conditions of a speech as a Communist riot outside a hall threatened to disrupt a speech by a neofascist.

However, on November 30, 1993, at Kean College in New Jersey, Khalid Muhammad, a spokesman for the Nation of Islam, left behind a 3-hour audio tape that has strained the First Amendment in a manner that may portend the future.

“I came to pin the tail on the honky,” introduced his baleful excursion of hatred toward Jews, all Whites, Catholics, the...