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8. “No Longer Afraid”: The United League, Activist Litigation, Armed Self-Defense, and Insurgent Resilience in Northern Mississippi
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211 8 “No Longer Afraid” The United League, Activist Litigation, Armed Self-Defense, and Insurgent Resilience in Northern Mississippi Skip Robinson had just been released from jail, having been arrested on Election Day for disorderly conduct. All the Movement folk thought Skip had been arrested to destabilize the United League’s electoral efforts. I was standing next to him when his primary security person came down the stairs of the Legal Services Office. The young bodyguard said he needed to go home and check on his family. He wanted Skip to come upstairs so he could give Skip his .357 Magnum. Standing on the north side of the main square of the city of Holly Springs, Skip said, “Give it to me right here. I want them [the White supremacists] to know I have a gun!” The young man hesitantly passed Skip the .357 right there on the street.1 The 1970s saw a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan and other White supremacist activity in the South and throughout the United States. The Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith identified the late 1970s as a “minor renaissance ” for the Klan, which “almost tripled its national membership” in the decade of the 1970s. Klan leader David Duke received eleven thousand votes, one-third of the electorate, in a state senate race in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1975. This demonstrated the continued base of White supremacy in some White communities during the decade. A contingent of seventy-five White supremacists, including Klansmen and Neo-Nazis, violently attacked an anti-Klan protest organized by the Community Workers Party in Greensboro, North Carolina, on November 3, 1979. The White supremacist raid left five anti-Klan activists dead and eleven wounded. Although the incident was videotaped, an all-White jury acquitted all six of the only members of the contingent who were prosecuted in a criminal proceeding.2 Local chapters of the NAACP in the state of Mississippi were seriously compromised by a legal offensive from White merchants in Port Gibson. 212 “No Longer Afraid” In 1969, the Mississippi legislature passed an antiboycott bill making it illegal to conspire to “prevent a citizen from exercising a ‘lawful trade.’” Port Gibson’s White merchants filed a lawsuit for loss of income after a 1969 boycott and won a series of victories in state and federal appellate courts. A Mississippi state judge ruled in favor of Claiborne County merchants in 1976, ordering the state NAACP to pay $1.5 million for a “secondary boycott.” The Claiborne County merchants argued that Black activists maliciously disrupted their enterprises through instituting economic coercion against them, while their grievances were with the municipal (not commercial) authorities. Consumer boycotts had served as the primary weapon used to fight for civil and human rights and empowerment for Black Mississippians after 1964, so the legal victories of the Port Gibson White commercial community placed the Mississippi NAACP activists on the defensive and crippled the national organization financially. The national office of the NAACP ordered its affiliates in Mississippi “not to engage in any kind of economic pressure” that could be considered in violation of the court order.3 The radical trend of the Black Power Movement had also been serious neutralized by the middle of the 1970s. The effects of internal dissension Tupelo armed KKK demonstration, 1978. An upsurge of Klan activity occurred in the late 1970s. (Courtesy of Jim Alexander.) [3.90.242.249] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:21 GMT) “No Longer Afraid” 213 and political repression greatly weakened the Black Liberation Movement. FBI counterinsurgency campaigns against SNCC, the Black Panther Party, RAM, and the PGRNA resulted in hundreds of political prisoners and exiles and significantly decreased the human and material resources available to sustain insurgent Movement activity. In spite of these compromises, Black activism continued in what Black Liberation Movement participants labeled a “lull” period. Historians Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang characterized this time as “a moment of retreat, reconceptualization and regrouping.”4 A dynamic Black social movement emerged in northern Mississippi, serving as a challenge to local White power structures and as an inspiration to Black-liberation, radical, and progressive forces around the United States. Originating in predominantly Black Marshall County, the United League utilized previous traditions of the Mississippi Black Freedom Struggle, including economic boycotts, armed self-defense, aggressive litigation , and bold rhetoric, to serve as the organizational vehicle for Black insurgency in northern Mississippi and other regions of the state in the middle...