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Federal Court strikes down Arkansas' attempt to Punish proponents of Boycotting Israel over treatment of Palestinians

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Republican Senator Rick Scott has urged a U.S. boycott of China.

Would that be a violation of the civil rights of Chinese-Americans or a form of racial discrimination? Of course not. China is a sovereign country, as is Israel, and Americans are free not to do business with a country to whose policies they object.

For the right to boycott as a first amendment right, the key case is NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, which came out of the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wikipedia explains,

    "[I]n 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and a young black man, Roosevelt Jackson was shot and killed by two Port Gibson police officers. On April 19, 1968, the field secretary of the NAACP for Mississippi, Charles Evers, led a march to the Claiborne County courthouse and demanded that the entire Port Jefferson police force be discharged When the demand was not met, the boycott on the merchants was [imposed]. On April 21, Evers made a speech in which he said, 'If we catch any of you going into these racist stores, we're going to break your damn neck...' In at least 10 instances, blacks who violated the boycott experienced instances of violence, including shots fired into their homes, bricks thrown through their windshields, and tires on their cars slashed. Five of the incidents occurred in 1966, and were not correlated to Mr. Evers' speech, and the other five were undated, and so they were discarded from the court case...
    "On October 31, 1969, 17 of the merchants sued in the Chancery Court of Hinds County, 146 individuals, the NAACP, and Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP) in state court to recover losses caused by the boycott and to enjoin future boycott activity... A trial began in 1973 and, in 1976, the chancellor found that the black defendants were jointly and severally liable to the plaintiffs based on three separate theories: (1) for a tort of malicious interference with the plaintiff's business; (2) for violation of a Mississippi statute banning secondary boycotts on the theory that the defendants' primary dispute was with the governing authorities of Port Gibson and Claiborne County, and not with the white merchants at whom the boycott was directed; and (3) the court found a violation of Mississippi's antitrust statute...
    "In a decision by Justice Stevens, the Supreme Court reversed the Supreme Court of Mississippi's decision, holding that the nonviolent elements of the petitioners' activities were protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and holding that the petitioners were not liable in damages for the consequences of their nonviolent, protected activity. This decision means that "boycotts and related activities to bring about political, social and economic change are political speech, occupying "the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values."

The Supreme Court found for the NAACP and against Claiborne Hardware in 1982: "While States have broad power to regulate economic activities, there is no comparable right to prohibit peaceful political activity such as that found in the boycott in this case."

Bonus video:

Vice News from a year ago: "Arkansas Newspaper Challenges The State's Anti-BDS Law (HBO)"

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Juan Cole is an American academic and commentator on the modern Middle East and South Asia.  He is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Since 2002, he has written a weblog, Informed Comment (more...)
 

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