Road Cleaned By Neo-Nazis May Be Named For Rabbi

"It may be an attempt to teach the neo-Nazis a lesson," she said. "But I think it's an affront to my father's dignity to attach his name to a neo-Nazi highway."

The Springfield unit of the National Socialist Movement committed last year to clean up trash along the section of Highway 160 near the city limits in west Springfield. Two signs noting the group's membership in the Adopt-A-Highway program went up last October.

A 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling arising from a similar effort by the Ku Klux Klan says membership in the Adopt-A-Highway program can't be denied because of a group's political beliefs.

In general, the state can deny an organization's application only if it has members who have been convicted of violent criminal activity within the past 10 years.

After the state dropped the Klan from cleaning up a section of Interstate 55 near St. Louis in 2001 for failing to pick up trash, that stretch of highway was renamed the "Rosa Parks Highway" in honor of the black woman arrested in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Ala.