Four people in Michigan filed a civil rights lawsuit Monday, claiming a local township restricted their freedom of speech by vetoing racial justice messages on bricks near a controversial Civil War memorial. Allendale Township features a war memorial dedicated to various conflicts, with one statue showing a Confederate and Union soldier standing back-to-back with an enslaved Black child crouching between them. Town residents are allowed to inscribe bricks near the memorial with messages, but the activists say they were prevented from engraving them with “Black Lives Matter” or “Indigenous Lives Matter.” Lawyer Peter Harding, who represents the activists, said, “Allendale has permitted bricks with religious messages, messages advertising local businesses, and messages celebrating high school graduation classes. However, when our clients applied for bricks advocating racial justice, Allendale singled them out for discriminatory treatment in clear violation of the First Amendment.”