Amayo confronts white supremacists in Howell, Feb. 6, 2025 | Jon KIng
Municipal leaders in a small, Michigan city known as a hotbed for white supremacy are working to clean up its reputation, but they find themselves in a predicament.
Officials in Howell have denounced white supremacy groups that have demonstrated there for a half century, and they recently hired a public relations firm to scrub the city’s image.
But at a February City Council meeting, even as they criticized protestors who waved swastika flags and yelled “white power” – labeling them as outside agitators – they have castigated local residents who have stood up to racism.
One of those residents is now pushing back against the city, too.
Jeff Amayo, who is Black, filed a complaint March 11 with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, naming both the city and its police department.
The complaint followed a Feb. 24 presentation during a City Council meeting outlining the city’s response to a showdown earlier that month between white supremecist demonstrators and counterprotestors that included Amayo outside the Howell Theater.
The presentation from Howell City Manager Erv Suida which also included Police Chief Michael Dunn, named Amayo as having “antagonized, challenged and taunted” one of the white supremacists during the Feb. 6 event. Suida equated the actions of Amayo and Stand Against Extremism Livingston County, or SAGE which was showing a documentary and hosting a community discussion about white supremacy that evening – with those of White Lives Matter, which staged a protest outside the event. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified White Lives Matter, also known as WLM, as a neo-Nazi group.
While Amayo is not a member of SAGE, he said he showed up that night to support the group’s mission.
The city’s presentation noted that Amayo had posted a video to social media prior to the event in which he is standing outside the theater and says “Apparently these Nazis are cowards…where you at? I’m waiting for you.”
The city’s presentation said Amayo’s video was directed at Eric Cooper of Fowlerville, “a known WLM member” and was challenging him to come downtown. Cooper did show up at the theater, and was confronted by Amayo, according to a video Amayo shared of the incident.
Amayo told Cooper he didn’t own Howell, and called him “a joke.”
While the city’s presentation indicated Amayo sparked the confrontation, he told the Michigan Advance that it was Cooper who came to the event with the obvious intent of disrupting it.
“He did the Nazi salute and just something clicked in my brain,” Amayo said. “I never touched him, but I just let him know that,‘Your behavior is not tolerated. What you represent is not tolerated. And here’s a Black man in your face. What are you going to do about it?’”
A civil rights department spokesperson confirmed for Michigan Advance they had received Amayo’s complaint and said their investigators were evaluating it.
The Advance made a request for comment from Suida, but his office did not respond.
The presentation to the City Council followed a city press release after the white supremacist protest in which the city asserted that while WLM was “a small group of morally misguided individuals.” But city officials also “strongly” denounced SAGE for bringing what it said were untrained armed security guards to the event.
SAGE has said they did have several people attend who were legally carrying firearms to serve as a community safety team following online threats by extremist groups intent on disrupting the gathering.
But Amayo said he was the only counterprotester who was patted down by Howell police officers that night after they accused him of being armed.
Amayo told the Advance he never had a weapon that night as he is prohibited from doing so following a 2015 assault conviction in Livingston County Circuit Court for which he served time behind bars.
“I have a record,” said Amayo. “I’m not stupid. I have too much to lose. I don’t even own a gun, but they assumed that I had a gun, right? But where’s the surveillance of Eric Cooper and these other four Nazis?”
Suida’s City Council presentation includes dash cam video from Howell patrol vehicles the night of Feb. 6. Video showed multiple units were providing surveillance on the confrontation, although none of the officers left their vehicles.
That point was emphasized by SAGE, who posted a video from that night showing the WLM protestors harassing a Latina resident, calling her ethnic slurs and her husband a “race traitor” before telling her to “go back to your country,” despite her telling them she is a U.S. citizen.
“This is ethnic intimidation, it can not be normalized,” said SAGE. “Law enforcement is protecting the rights of white supremacists over the rights of our most vulnerable and allowing them to continuously terrorize our community.”
In their press release, Howell officials said they also had plainclothes officers monitoring the situation that night. The release said the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office conducted a traffic stop in coordination with the Howell Police Department on a U-Haul vehicle as it was leaving the area, identifying one member of the group, although it didn’t release that person’s name or hometown. However, they did “encourage the media” to use the Freedom of Information Act to identify the protestors “and bring light to who these masked messengers of hate are and the organization they represent.”
When the local newspaper the Livingston Daily did just that, submitting a FOIA request for that information, it reported that while it received two police reports from the incident, both redacted all identifying information.
A reputation for racism
Howell, a 90% white city of just over 10,000 between Lansing and Detroit, has long had a reputation for extremist activity. It became known as a Ku Klux Klan hotspot in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, infamous Michigan KKK Grand Dragon Robert Miles held hate rallies and cross burnings at his Cohoctah Township property north of Howell until his death in 1992.
That reputation has lingered, continually fueled by incidents such as a well-publicized auction of a Klan robe in 2005, and hate messages posted online by Howell students in 2014 after a basketball game with a racially-mixed Grand Blanc basketball team.
Community leaders have worked hard to fight that image, including a symbolic scrubbing of the steps of the historic Livingston County courthouse in 1995 following a KKK rally.
And while a similar symbolic scrubbing was held in August by SAGE a week after white supremacists marched through downtown Howell chanting “Heil Hitler” and holding signs saying “White Lives Matter,” city officials have been focused on emphasizing that the WLM protestors are not Howell residents.
However, that hasn’t stopped the Howell area from becoming a focal point for white supremacist activity, as evidenced by an incident in November when a group with Nazi flags protested outside a production of the play “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which prompted SAGE to hold another counter-protest, this time on the steps of Howell City Hall.
Amayo says the incident outside the play, which was being performed at the American Legion Hall in Howell Township, is what really motivated him to make a stand like he did on Feb. 6.
“Part of the reason people were afraid to come out of the American Legion was because they were intimidated by these people, and I want to show there’s nothing to be intimidated about these people. They’re cowards. They’re nothing but cowards,” he said.
Julie Ohashi, the cofounder of SAGE, grew up in Howell and told City Council members at their March 10 meeting that their choice of focusing on Amayo over white supremacists is a choice that leaves many questioning their priorities.
“The victim watched these people racially harass his community four times before that night when he decided that them being just a few blocks from his house was enough,” said Ohashi. “The reason minority community members have been forced to the point of confronting these terrorists themselves is the direct result of the inaction by the city, local leaders and law enforcement. Ignoring and pretending away something is not a strategy.”
Mark Fancher is a staff attorney for the Racial Justice Project with ACLU Michigan. He said the problems playing out in Howell are not isolated. Fancher believes that the anti-immigrant, anti-diversity rhetoric coming from the administration of President Donald Trump, and amplified by his supporters, can help explain the city’s reaction.
“This creates a general climate in the country that makes it very easy, for even people in government, to see a very distorted picture of what’s happening in their communities. They don’t process the white supremacists as being a threat to the community. The way that they process that is that these are people who are coming in to Make America Great Again,” said Fancher. “So I think it’s a local manifestation of something that’s happening nationally, and I think that there’s going to be more of it.”
Trying to rehab a reputation
The city of Howell, meanwhile, has responded to the multiple recent incidents involving hate groups by hiring a public relations firm to try and provide “consistent and accurate communications and messaging.” The firm, Holland, Michigan-based Burch Branded, was retained at the March 10 council meeting for three months at $6,500 per month, with an hourly rate of $135 per hour for any work outside the scope of the contract.
As outlined in a letter from the firm, they will develop a 12-month communication plan, provide public relations services such as writing press releases and pitching stories to media, as well as “support social media messaging on behalf of Howell” including creating and distributing an e-newsletter.
Rich Perlberg is a retired journalist who covered Howell and the Livingston County area as a reporter, editor and general manager at the local newspaper, now called the Livingston Daily, from 1972 until he retired in 2013.
Struggling to deal with racism is nothing new, he said, but hiring a public relations firm to try and resolve it is.
“In this case, what exactly are the negative consequences to the area after an unflattering story? Hurt feelings for a day or two? That’s nothing compared to the marginalized person who feels unsafe here. Talk to them, if they are serious about improving their image. Spend $20,000 on them,” he said.
Amayo believes the city is essentially trying to cure a disease by treating a symptom and not the underlying cause.
“I think it’s a joke that they’re willing to spend all this money when all they have to do is talk to the weak, the vulnerable, the minorities, the marginalized, and ask them their opinion,” he said. “Why spend all this money when you have all these residents that you can ask? And that goes back to the bigger picture of why are you blaming me? Why wasn’t I allowed to defend myself? Nobody reached out to me that they were going to do this. Nobody said anything.”
Amayo says his complaint to the Michigan Department of Civil Rights will hopefully provide a better starting point for the city to try and resolve these issues.
“Something needs to be changed. The only way you can fix a mistake is to know what you’re fixing,” he said.