Word: tupelo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...black leader who has done just that is Alfred ("Skip") Robinson. A 42-year-old former building contractor, Robinson last February organized a series of demonstrations protesting alleged police brutality in Tupelo, Miss. He also organized a black boycott of the city's main stores, demanding that they and the city government hire more blacks...
...nostalgia; they fit his perception of the problem. "There's no such thing as the New South," he says bitterly. "There's more racism in Mississippi in 1978 than there was in 1972." But some blacks see Robinson's approach as self-defeating. When the Tupelo city government recently adopted a sweeping affirmative-action plan, Robinson issued a new list of demands...
Along the way, Diane quizzes the group on Elvis trivia: "What was the third television show he appeared on?" Everyone seems to know: "The Ed Sullivan Show!" Diane asks another: "What was the song Elvis sang at a state fair in Tupelo in 1946 to win second prize?" Nancy Jones, 13, who has come all the way from Tulsa with her grandmother, knows right off. Old Shep, she says...
...people of Tupelo, torn between sheer incredulity and cold fear, do not find their situation funny. Tupelo (pop. 26,500) managed to tiptoe all the way through the '60s without any civil rights trouble. Ever since spring, though, local blacks have been boycotting stores, first to protest the failure of the city to fire two white policemen accused of beating a black prisoner, then, when the two resigned, to demand more jobs. And here is the Ku Klux Klan threatening a rally and cross-burning outside town on the very day that the United League of North Mississippi...
Just before noon, 600 blacks step out from the Springhill Missionary Baptist Church on Green Street and head silently for the courthouse, walking three abreast and carrying signs reading SMASH THE KLAN. A police helicopter whirls overhead. The 65-member Tupelo police force is stationed along the route, looking like a seedy version of a TV SWAT team. Most carry 12-gauge pump guns or rifles (some with bayonets), and several big old boys are bulging out of blue bulletproof vests. They look mad. "I walked point for 31 days in a row in Viet Nam," says a young black...