| Summary |
On Monday, January 13, 1958, members of the Ku Klux Klan under the leadership of James W. Cole burned two crosses in Robeson County, North Carolina. A Lumberton newspaperman Bruce Roberts accompanied Roberts' them and wrote a news story about the event. article indicated that the cross burnings were aimed at members of the Lumbee Indian community. Five days later Cole was scheduled to speak at a Klan rally outside the Robeson community of Maxton. Between twenty-five and thirty Klansmen gathered to hear the speech but the meeting never took place. An estimated five hundred Lumbees shooting guns and yelling war whoops attacked the Klan members before anyone had begun to speak. The county sheriff, Malcolm G. McLeod, arrested two Klan members for inciting the Indians to riot. They were tried in Superior Court in Robeson County and convicted on the grounds that their cross burning activities had so inflamed the Lumbee community that their mere presence was sufficient to provoke a riot. This paper is an account of that celebrated incident and an analysis of the constitutional issues involved. It attempts to examine the. events as they occurred in light of contemporary Court opinions on freedom of speech and assembly as well as current assessments of those rights. It also attempts to examine the politically progressive label so often attached to North Carolina as it applies to this case. The paper contends that the 1958 conviction was unconstitutional because the Klansmen committed no overt act of incitement on January 18, 1958. One might suppose that had the Indians waited fifteen minutes until the meeting actually began there would be no thesis. |
| Local note | Joyner-"Presented to the faculty of the Department of History ... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in History." |
| Local note | Joyner-"Presented to the faculty of the Department of History ... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in History." |
| Local note | Joyner-"Presented to the faculty of the Department of History ... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in History." |
| General note | Presented to the Faculty of the Department of History. |
| General note | Advisor: Fred D. Ragan |
| Dissertation note | M.A. East Carolina University |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-158). |
| Genre/form | Academic theses. |
| Genre/form | Academic theses. |
| Genre/form | Thèses et écrits académiques. |
