Johnny Cash's Kids Take On Nazis

NASHVILLE, TN — Johnny Cash's five children are keeping a close watch on the heart of their late father. Troubled that a video is circulating showing a neo-Nazi marcher wearing a shirt bearing the image of the American legend at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, eldest daughter Rosanne Cash, on behalf of her siblings, posted a message on Facebook, saying they are "sickened" by the association and setting the record straight about which side of the fight their father would be on.

"Johnny Cash was a man whose heart beat with the rhythm of love and social justice," Rosanne Cash wrote. "He championed the rights of Native Americans, protested the war in Vietnam, was a voice for the poor, the struggling and the disenfranchised, and an advocate for the rights of prisoners."

Cash himself was a target of vicious — if mistaken — racial bigotry in the mid-1960s. After an arrest for smuggling amphetamines and sedatives across the Mexican border in October 1965, Cash was photographed with his first wife, Vivian, walking down the steps of the El Paso courthouse. The widely circulated photo caught the attention of the National States Rights Party, an Alabama white supremacist group with ties to the Ku Klux Klan, because it appeared that Vivian was an African-American woman. She was, in fact, Italian-American. (For more updates on this story and free news alerts for your neighborhood, sign up for your local Middle Tennessee Patch morning newsletter.)

In its newsletter, The Thunderbolt, the NSRP said the money made off The Man In Black's songs "went to scum like Johnny Cash to keep them supplied with dope and negro women.”

Cash faced boycotts and protests at his concerts and, in her autobiography, Vivian said that the Cashes received death threats. During this time, Cash wrote a letter to then-10-year-old Rosanne saying he wasn't home because he was out "fighting the KKK."

"Our dad told each of us, over and over throughout our lives, ‘Children, you can choose love or hate. I choose love,’" Rosanne Cash wrote on Facebook. "To any who claim supremacy over other human beings, to any who believe in racial or religious hierarchy: we are not you. Our father, as a person, icon, or symbol, is not you. We ask that the Cash name be kept far away from destructive and hateful ideology."

Photo by PH1 Gary Rice via United States Department of the Navy