The previous organizer of the “Freddie” Fixer Parade is going to court to try to stop a new city-supported group from staging the parade next month using the “Freddy” Fixer name.
The organizer, Maurice Smith, plans to file the suit in federal court on Monday.
It charges that organizers of this year’s event — the biggest annual gathering in the African-American community, set for May 15 — have committed a trademark infringement by billing it as the “Freddy Fixer” Parade.
That’s the latest development in an on-again, off-again dispute between Smith, who has run the parade since 2009, and both city officials and community activists who sought to change the parade’s direction this year.
The Harp administration had pressed him to broaden his not-for-profit organization’s board and do more fundraising to defray municipal costs for the parade. That led Smith to charge the city with trying to steal the parade from him by supporting a new not-for-profit that has formed to run this year’s parade. It calls itself the “Elm City Freddy Fixer Parade 2016” committee. It also changed the spelling of the mythical community clean-up character’s first name from “Freddie” to “Freddy.”
Paul Bass Photo
Smith at the March 30 city meeting on parade permits.
The administration a week and a half ago decided to grant the permits for this year’s parade to the new group rather than to Smith’s “Freddie Fixer” organization. Smith showed up at a meeting where that was discussed. Afterwards, he said he had planned to sue the city and the organizers for trademark infringement, but changed his mind after listening to his former comrades at the meeting discuss logistics that Smith said he had mastered in years past. “I can’t do that. I can’t go against people I know,” he said. “These guys need my help.”
But Smith said he subsequently changed his mind because he was angry that city officials were still accusing him of not having made a good-faith effort to pay police overtime and other bills in the past; and because he felt the new organizers were disrespecting him.
Smith had hired an attorney to represent him with the city. But he hasn’t been able to reach his attorney over the past week, he said, so he decided to file the lawsuit himself, in U.S. District Court.
The complaint seeks an injunction against using the Fredd(ie)(y) Fixer name and seeks to have any money raised in events using that name to go to his organization.
The suit does not seek to stop the parade.
“I left it wide open for the judge to decide” how to proceed, Smith said.
Read a copy of Smith’s complaint here.
“It is the city’s policy and practice to withhold comment on pending legal matters,” stated mayoral spokesman Laurence Grotheer when asked for a comment on the complaint.
In previous interviews with the Independent (reported in these three stories), organizers from the new parade group and city officials argued that they have tried to work with Smith and respect the hard work he’s done over the years, and that they also felt a need to put the parade on a sounder financial footing with more community involvement. Elm City Freddy Fixer President Dexter Jones couldn’t be reached for comment for this article.
Community leaders formed the Freddie Fixer event in the early 1960s as part parade, part community clean-up drive. It grew into a multi-state draw for black police, fire, drill squad and other organized groups, complete with weekend-long events. “Freddie Fixer” was created as a fictional street-sweeping symbol for the event.
Previous coverage of this controversy:
• Parade Peace Breaks Out
• 1 Parade, 2 “Freddies”
• Freddie’s In A Fix