NEW YORK — Two years after the Million Man March filled Washington’s central mall with supporters of Louis Farrakhan, two Jewish protesters are suing the National Park Police.
Ronn Torossian and Moshe Maoz claim their civil rights were violated when police told them to leave the mall, tore signs from their hands, and searched one of them and removed papers from his pocket, their attorney said in an interview.
The pair was at the Oct. 16, 1995 march representing AMCHA — Coalition for Jewish Concerns, a Riverdale, N.Y.-based group led by Orthodox Rabbi Avi Weiss.
Attorney Gordon Pearson said the lawsuit would be filed this week in United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
Torossian, 23, and Maoz, 24, are seeking unspecified monetary damages, he said.
At the mall, they held signs reading “David Duke and Farrakhan: Two Sides of the Same Coin,” and “The Nation of Islam Is a Nation of Hate.”
Torossian said they were surrounded by 50 to 100 African-Americans, who at various times spat on them and shouted, “Hitler should have finished you off” and “We’re going to get you. Go home, Jew, go home.”
A National Park Police officer told them that they were inciting a riot and that they had to leave or else they would be arrested, he said.
“It’s despicable that they didn’t protect us,” Torossian said of the police. “They have an obligation to protect those who peacefully protest.”
The pair’s treatment “was a violation of their First and Fourth Amendment rights,” which permit free speech on public property and protect citizens from unreasonable search and seizure, Pearson said.
His firm is handling the case without charge at the request of the American Civil Liberties Union, which offered to help Torossian and Maoz after the march.
Maj. James McLaughlin, commander in charge of the hundreds of police officers on duty that day, said that he does not recall any report of the two men’s demonstration at the time.
But in responding to their account of what happened, McLaughlin, now the spokesman for the National Park Police, said: “Beyond [concern over an individual’s civil] rights is public safety, and we have to make sure we don’t have a riot on our hands. Any time we have a group which is going to cause a disruption, for their own safety we tell them to leave the area. If a skinhead or member of the Ku Klux Klan should show up somewhere we would remove them.”
In a separate legal action brought by Jewish protesters around Nation of Islam events, AMCHA’s Weiss is suing Howard University and a security guard.
Weiss claims that a security guard grabbed a sign from him and struck him on the hand while ordering him and four other protesters to stop their April 1994 demonstration outside a university auditorium where Nation of Islam leader Khalid Muhammad was appearing.
The case is scheduled to go to trial Nov. 19, also in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Weiss is seeking more than $100,000 in damages.