Scenes from a turbulent Cincinnati suburb look scarily like the start of a race war.
Masked gunmen in black combat gear patrol Lincoln Heights, a proud, historic black community of 3,100 residents, recalling the gun-toting Black Panthers of the 1960s.
They took up arms after white Neo-Nazis showed up in the neighborhood last month, waving swastika flags and shouting racial slurs; and local cops allegedly treated them with kid gloves.
DailyMail.com spoke with organizers of the black militia, local historians, and residents of the mostly-white Ohio suburbs around Lincoln Heights. They all described a community on a knife edge.
Local cops say armed civilian patrols near schools and churches are ‘very dangerous.’ Worried residents say it’s only a matter of time before there’s blood on Cincinnati’s streets.
For some, it’s the latest sign that America is on a path to civil war — a terrifying eventuality that a staggering 47 percent of people now expect to see in their lifetime, polling shows.
It comes weeks after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, and started dismantling policies aimed at giving minorities a leg up at schools, colleges, and workplaces.
One organizer of the Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch program, as it is known, said the racists who rallied in her neighborhood were heeding ‘dog whistles’ from the West Wing.
William Umphres, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati, described ‘uncertainty and anxiety’ across southwestern Ohio, where black and white suburbs remain segregated.
‘This is not a race war or anything of that nature,’ Umphres told DailyMail.com.
‘But so many of our shared assumptions about the government, the courts, and the police have been destabilized. If we’re not sure the government will secure our rights, the need to reassert our own security becomes more urgent.’
Lincoln Heights has been a fulcrum of US race relations since it was founded in the 1920s.
It was the first self-governing black municipality north of the Mason-Dixon line — a one-time stop on the underground railroad where the descendants of freed slaves could escape redlining and climb the property ladder.
In its heyday in the 1960s, it had more than 6,000 residents and was a black cultural hub, producing songwriters the Isley Brothers, known for Shout and This Old Heart of Mine, and poet Nikki Giovanni.
But a lack of jobs and tax revenues saw the village struggle and decline.
Property values crashed; the population nearly halved these past six decades, even as nearby white towns flourished.
No surprise, then, that the arrival of masked neo-Nazis on February 7 sent shockwaves through the legacy black community.
Roughly a dozen extremists gathered on a highway overpass connecting Lincoln Heights with Evendale, the mostly-white village where entrepreneur and politician Vivek Ramaswamy was raised.
They unfurled a sign reading ‘America for the White Man.’
Lincoln Heights has no police department of its own. Law enforcement officers from Evendale and the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office responded to the scene.
They made no arrests and did not collect identifying information on the hardliners, some of whom were armed.
Black locals who bore witness said cops were sympathetic to the neo-Nazis, who departed hastily in a U-Haul.
Weeks later, a Ku Klux Klan member was seen handing out fliers in Lincoln Heights and elsewhere across Cincinnati.
William Bader, 47, of Kentucky, an ‘imperial wizard,’ was stopped by police on February 23 and ultimately fined $200 for two counts of littering with ‘propaganda’ leaflets, a misdemeanor.
Members of the nearby black community, and its eight-year-old Heights Movement, were alarmed by the neo-Nazis and the apparent unwillingness of police to make arrests, even as it remains unclear if any laws were broken.
Armed volunteers wearing tactical vests and masks now patrol key areas of town, including bus stops and around the elementary school.
Yard signs in support of the militia have popped up in driveways across town as residents rally behind the scheme.
Daronce Daniels, a lifelong Lincoln Heights resident who organizes the patrols, says they’re a measured response to outsiders who ‘terrorize our community’ as cops are ‘helping and aiding’ them.
‘We don’t see ourselves as Black Panthers or even Black Lives Matter,’ says Daniels, 37.
‘We’re free people from a tight-knit, historic, African-American community, who are taking their American rights, their God given rights, to protect themselves.’
Ohio law permits open carry of firearms without a permit, meaning residents who legally own guns can carry them in public.
Still, some non-black visitors to the town have reported being harassed by patrol members.
Syretha Brown, 48, another lifelong Lincoln Heights resident, says the white supremacists were enlivened by the ‘orange Nazi in the White House,’ a reference to Trump.
‘I wasn’t surprised that it happened, because that’s the dog whistle that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, [Vice President] JD Vance and the other MAGA Republicans are blowing,’ she added.
She criticizes a double standard against black people who take up arms to defend their homes, and get caricatured as violent.
The Trump administration is delivering on election promises to axe diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) schemes, which it says have sidelined whites in a bid to help minorities.
Supporters of the watch say it can be a blueprint for similar scared minority neighborhoods across the US.
Evendale police and Hamilton County sheriffs say they’re assessing their response to the rally, and that their body camera from the day is being studied in a criminal probe.
Hamilton County Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey has called for a ban on masks worn by those openly carrying firearms.
Such a law would have made it easier to intervene against the neo-Nazis, she says.
But McGuffey adds that Lincoln Heights residents are unwise to take up arms themselves.
‘They feel they need to arm their residents, and they’re allowed to,’ McGuffey said.
‘At some point, we are going to likely face a very dangerous situation.’
Critics of the militia say its volunteers have fallen into the trap set by the white supremacists — to goad them into more violent confrontations.
Last year, law enforcers bust open at least two plots by white supremacists to ignite a race war.
An online group, called ‘The Terrorgram Collective,’ tried to arrange attacks on Black, Jewish, LGBTQ people and immigrants in a bid to incite a race war, federal prosecutors said.
Meanwhile, a gun owner in Arizona was arrested over a plot to incite an ethnic conflict by targeting blacks, Jews, and Muslims at a concert in Atlanta, prosecutors said.
These plans were exposed in the run-up to a highly-charged 2024 election as Americans grew ever-more fearful of political violence.
A shocking 47 percent of Americans said they expected to see a civil war in their lifetime, Marist Poll found in May.
For many, fighting would erupt between liberals and conservatives. For others, it would break along racial lines.
Umphres, the Cincinnati academic, says Lincoln Heights sits on a fault line that’s dangerously exposed in 2025.
‘We used to have a consensus, now it feels like everything is unsettled,’ he says.
‘It’s hard to answer the question: ‘What’s next week going to look like?’ Because so much is changing and so much is uncertain.’