Taking the Fight South by Howard Ball

Author:Howard Ball
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2020-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

DEFENDING THE MISSISSIPPI KU KLUX KLAN

In fall 1977, the Mississippi ACLU’s executive director acted unilaterally and, for such a small organization, disastrously. Without any discussion with the board before her decision, she accepted a case brought to our affiliate by the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan. The KKK wanted to hold a rally on the public elementary school grounds (the ball field) of Saucier, Mississippi, one of the last towns to integrate its public schools.

They submitted their demand to the Saucier school board, which very quickly denied it. The educators maintained that such a rally on school grounds, including the burning of a cross on the field, would heighten tensions in the small town as it began to implement its school desegregation policy. (This initial move by the school board to end public school segregation began twenty-four years after the 1954 Brown decision of the US Supreme Court.)

The Klan immediately called our Jackson office and asked the ACLU’s executive director to take their case. The argument: the KKK had a First Amendment right to freedom of speech on public land. She immediately committed the ACLU to defend the Klan against the school board ban. As soon as word got out, via the press and television, half of the three hundred members of the ACLU affiliate—all the Black members—submitted their resignations in protest.

They were stunned by the action of the director—a feeling shared by many of the remaining members—and reacted very negatively. By the time of our affiliate’s emergency meeting shortly afterwards, the Mississippi ACLU had less than 150 members! And the chapter’s affiliate lawyers were already defending the Klan in state court.

At this time, a majority of the members supported a move to take the case from the Mississippi Chancery Court to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. Such a move from one jurisdiction was a golden opportunity to fully discuss our position on defending the Klan and, hopefully, to formally drop our association with this hateful, murderous organization. The stage was set for this emergency showdown meeting. Everybody was invited, especially the Blacks who had left the affiliate to protest our defense of the Klan.

Present, too, at this December 1977 meeting was the national ACLU president, Norman Dorsen. He was present for one primary—though unspoken at the meeting—reason: to ensure that the Mississippi ACLU affiliate continued its defense of the Klan in federal court.

Why? The answer was easy. At the very same time our affiliate was meeting to discuss whether we would continue the Klan defense, the Illinois ACLU affiliate was defending—successfully—the right of Nazis from Chicago to march in the city of Skokie, Illinois. The city had a population of seventy thousand: forty thousand were Holocaust survivors.2

In late 1976, Frank Collin, the leader of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, wrote letters to the administrators of dozens of bedroom suburb towns surrounding Chicago. He requested a permit for his group to hold a rally in the town park. Except for Skokie, all mayors or city managers simply ignored the request.

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