Advocating racial equality was criminalized as sedition against US white supremacy

Evidence

When J. Edgar Hoover learned of the MSTA, he immediately “associated these African American Muslims with racial insurgence.” The FBI viewed the group’s leaders as “fanatics” because of their advocacy of racial equality. To their mind, a group that challenged white supremacy and US imperialism was a danger to the status quo. This resulted in a widespread program of surveillance, the planting of infiltrators, and use of tactics of intimidation to disrupt the group’s activities including through the use of the law. … In the state of Mississippi, the MSTA was prosecuted for violating the state’s antisedition laws. The group represented “racial enemies threatening the ability of the White race to control the government of Mississippi and that of the nation,” Johnson writes. This amounted to sedition. Once convicted, MSTA members were sentenced to jail as a warning to other black people of what would happen if they dared to challenge white supremacy. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 246

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 246
• XREF: connects to: Aggressive antiracist pamphleteering provoked the state to jail its white advocates — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 442; Mississippi criminalized advocating racial equality in speech as late as 1921. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 284

Broader Connections

• Mississippi criminalized advocating racial equality in speech as late as 1921. #exemplifies (0.95) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 284
• Aggressive antiracist pamphleteering provoked the state to jail its white advocates #corroborates (0.90) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 442