Above photo: Theo Sutton, an organizer with Mississippi Rising Coalition, protests outside the Southern Company shareholders meeting in 2023. Facebook/The People’s Justice Council.
Mississippi organizer Lea Campbell talks about McKesson v. Doe impacts on the climate for nonviolent protest in the Deep South.
As local and state governments across the country continue to propose sweeping new policies that criminalize protests, a recent Supreme Court decision in the Deep South has sparked fears that it “effectively eliminated the right to organize a mass protest” in multiple states — setting a dangerous precedent for Southern organizers and activists.
Back in 2016, prominent Black Lives Matter organizer DeRay McKesson led a protest in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where an unidentified protester seriously injured a police officer. The officer sued him, arguing that McKesson displayed negligence as an organizer. What resulted was a years-long back and forth that led to the U.S. Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit, which covers Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi. The Fifth Circuit sided with Doe and reaffirmed that ruling last year: According to federal Judge Jennifer Elrod, “it is plausible that McKesson knew or should have known that the police would be forced to respond to the demonstration, that the protest would turn violent and that someone might be injured as a result.”
The question at the center of McKesson v. Doe can be traced back to 1966, when the NAACP organized a multiyear boycott of white businesses in Claiborne County, Mississippi. Although organizers explicitly framed the boycott as nonviolent, some “acts and threats of violence” drove a group of white businessmen to sue the NAACP for damages three years later. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1982 that the boycott was protected by the First Amendment — and that organizers could not be held liable for illegal activity they did not endorse.
As Vox senior correspondent Ian Millhiser recently wrote, the NAACP v. Claiborne decision affirmed that “no one who organizes a mass event attended by thousands of people can possibly control the actions of all those attendees.” But if the McKesson v. Doe decision stands, protest organizers risk becoming financially liable if crimes occur during their protests, which may discourage many people from protesting at all. Throughout the Fifth Circuit’s territory, organizers are wrestling with the implications for protest strategy and tactics.
In Mississippi, a state with a long legacy of progressive and radical protest, the McKesson v. Doe decision is only the latest attempt to stifle that energy. Last summer, for example, the Republican supermajority in Mississippi’s legislature passed a law requiring written approval from state police before holding a protest near government buildings in the state’s capital. (A month later, that law was blocked by a federal judge.)
To get a sense of where McKesson v. Doe fits into Mississippi’s political climate, I spoke with community organizer Lea Campbell, who serves as president of the Mississippi Rising Coalition. The same day as our interview, students at Ole Miss joined the nationwide movement for colleges to divest from the war in Gaza. We discussed the current political landscape for protest in Mississippi, the advantages of statewide coalitions and how organizers will account for McKesson v. Doe in future campaigns.
Tell me about Mississippi Rising and some of your current work.
We’re a multiracial, intergenerational coalition of Mississippi residents working to advance climate, racial and economic justice.
We are organizing with folks from across the state to increase awareness and action around what’s going on in Gaza, the colonial apartheid and genocide of Palestinians. We are facilitating an alliance of about 30 grassroots organizations called the Mississippi People’s Movement that works together around shared priorities to advance racial and economic justice. We’re also organizing the Food Freedom Collective to establish a community-led, localized food system that will increase access for food insecure folks in the Hattiesburg area.
Where do mass protest and direct action fit into your theory of social change?
Direct action is definitely a strategy we use in our overall theory of change for resisting current systems and structures that oppress and advocating for new, liberatory systems and structures. Of course, under that bucket of direct action, we often use protest — meaning mass protest (or rallies) and small nonviolent actions. It just depends on our specific goals, who our targets are and where we are in a campaign as to what direct action tactics we use.
In your experience, what has the climate been like organizing protests in Mississippi during this moment?
We’ve been organizing protests since 2016, and we have worked really hard to promote a culture of dissent in Mississippi. There’s a lot of fear and reluctance because of the history of tactics used by the state and by police to repress protests. So we have worked hard to increase comfort levels in speaking out, feeling safe and owning public spaces that are ours. We really saw the progress of that in 2020 during the George Floyd protests: There were some really large protests here that we hadn’t seen probably for decades. That was a huge moment for us.
Now in this current climate, we’re seeing a slow progression in the willingness of folks to get out and protest what’s going on in Gaza. We’ve had some protests in Jackson, Hattiesburg and here on the Gulf Coast. And there’s a group called UMiss for Palestine that’s staging the first on-campus protest, making demands for the Ole Miss administration to disclose and divest. So it’s really exciting to see student uprisings here.
The state legislature has tried to pass a few pieces of legislation restricting protest in the past few legislative sessions. They tried to pass a law making it a felony to block a road or street during a protest and tried to make it a felony to flee law enforcement. I’m sure they’ll continue with these attempts.
You talked about how your coalition is intergenerational. Have you been able to draw from the experiences of past generations of organizers in your current work?
We look back to tactics used by SNCC and Ella Baker [and] tactics used by COFO and others during Freedom Summer here in Mississippi. We always try to ground ourselves in movements that came before us — and try to assess, given the current context of protests, how we need to change tactics. Police are certainly more militarized, they have more sophisticated surveillance technology — so we have to take things like that into account as we organize protests and direct action. But we always honor and ground ourselves in the organizers and actions of the past.
When did the McKesson v. Doe decision get on your radar?
I knew that DeRay Mckession was charged [and] that it had reached the Supreme Court, but I wasn’t aware that the Supreme Court decision was impending. So when I heard that they had declined to reverse the ruling from the Circuit Court, I wasn’t surprised, but I wasn’t expecting it.
What are the implications of the idea that protest organizers could be held liable for what anyone in the crowd is doing?
We’re not going to stop protesting and organizing direct action: We’re not going to stop encouraging communities and individuals to exercise our right to assemble and our right to address grievances with our government, period. I want to be very clear about that.
What we will have to do is be very intentional about how we organize. We may have to modify the types of actions that we organize. We have to make sure there are trained street medics, protest marshals trained in how to approach and de-escalate with counter-protesters, ACLU-trained legal observers who can monitor the police. Some organizers may choose to organize smaller actions where there’s a little bit greater element of control.
But also, we have to be really explicit in all phases of organizing that we’re organizing nonviolent action, that violence in any form by any participant is unacceptable and that’s not the goal of what we’re doing. Police, all the time, provoke responses from protesters through use of physical force and violence — and who’s to say these police aren’t going to go back to a court and lie and say, “It’s the protesters that were violent, we were just trying to keep things under control.”
Behind McKesson v. Doe, it feels like there’s this implication that organizers should be able to filter out any bad actors in the middle of a protest. You could start an action with a certain group of people and other people join in as they see it, police show up, maybe different organizations with different leadership.
We cannot control what every participant in a direct action does. What we can control is how we organize, what we say and how we frame the action, who we recruit to do things — like be the marshals, who’s going to record the protest, who’s going to be the legal observers. We’re just going to have to do the best we can moving forward — that’s all we can do.
What can protest movements in other states learn from what’s happening on the ground in Mississippi?
I think Mississippi can be an example of the power of building cross-race, cross-class, cross-generation, cross-gender movements. We have to do that here — we have no choice. If we’re going to win change, win progress, win liberation in Mississippi, we’ve got to organize together: Black folks, brown folks, white folks, women and femmes, trans people, gay people, straight people, the working class, poor people, old people, young people. It’s not easy, it’s a struggle. But when we do that here, we win.
We organized from 2015 to 2020 to finally get the Confederate emblem removed from the state flag. We had to build a broad coalition that did not hesitate to protest and get out in the street, to go to the state capitol, go to our city halls, to make demands and then to escalate when those demands weren’t met. And it took five years, but we finally did that. So I think we can be a testament to the reality that organizing is a marathon, not a sprint. If you’re organizing for deep change, you’ve got to get in it for the long haul and you’ve got to be willing to organize with folks that maybe you otherwise wouldn’t. You’ve got to build coalitions.