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To understand how the United States has balanced protecting free speech and curbing harmful speech, this chapter takes the long view. In the first half of the twentieth century, states had the latitude to pass and enforce laws that restricted wide varieties of speech on almost any grounds. Starting in the 1920s and 1930s, however, the Supreme Court began to rein in these provisions. After initial steps to protect controversial speech, decisions from the 1940s and 1950s created the potential to move in a more speech-restrictive, European direction. It was only rulings handed down during the 1960s and 1970s that strictly limited states’ and municipalities’ rights to curb racist speech and that entrenched America's extensive protections for freedom of expression. This outcome amounts to the most significant exception to the overarching trend in liberal democracies toward limiting the freedom to be racist. Even so, there are still limits on racist expression in the United States, and identifying them tempers the misconception that the United States permits racist speech under any and all circumstances.

This chapter recounts the call to conscience issued by Congregate Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and their allies, coupled with the ugly events in Charlottesville at the Ku Klux Klan rally on July 8. It mentions the sense of personal accountability for the storm of hate speeches that occurred in Charlottesville for several months. It also points out that the Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee statues were all erected during the Jim Crow years, in brazen defiance of the dignity of blacks. The chapter explains how the Lee and Jacksons monuments are suffused with the righteousness of the South's cause during the Civil War, which was slavery. It discusses the most intense hate speech in America known as cross burning, a symbolic ritual long associated with the Ku Klux Klan.

This chapter introduces the task force created by Governor Terry McAuliffe in Richmond, Virginia that are tasked to study the racial violence in the city of Charlottesville during the summer of 2017. It mentions the violence in Richmond that claimed the life of Heather Heyer when a white supremacist, James Alex Fields Jr., slammed his speeding car into a crowd of counter-protesters confronting a “Unite the Right” rally. This chapter explains the work of the task force, which requires them to deeply investigate the constitutional protections of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and the rules of engagement governing what society could or could not do when confronted with racial supremacist groups rallying in a city. It also describes the famous free speech case called Virginia vs. Black involving vicious racist hate speech. The case involved a cross-burning rally of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in rural western Virginia in 1998 and a second cross-burning incident in Virginia Beach in the yard of an African American, James Jubilee.

This chapter focuses on the shift from the order and morality theory to the marketplace theory that took place in a series of landmark cases that span decades. It recounts events wherein the First Amendment upheld the right to protect critiques of public officials in 1964, rights of racists to engage in rituals such as cross burning in 1971, and right to protect the burning of the American flag in 1989. It also reviews the First Amendment principles of the modern epoch that exerted a powerful gravitational pull on the events in Charlottesville in 2017. The chapter mentions Paul Cohen who was arrested for wearing a jacket designed with a vulgar message and convicted of tumultuous and offensive conduct. It notes how Cohen's involvement with graphic language made a shift to the marketplace theory that embraces the protection for the graphic use of symbols.