JACKSON, Miss. (CN) – The Mississippi lawmaker who said “Nazi-ish” Louisiana officials should be lynched for taking down Confederate monuments in New Orleans has been sued by a black attorney, who asked the judge to order state Rep. Karl Oliver to read the biography “The Blood of Emmett Till” and write a book report on it.
Plaintiff Carlos Moore is a Hattiesburg attorney who sued Mississippi a year ago, trying to get the Confederate Stars and Bars removed from the Mississippi state flag.
In his Tuesday lawsuit in Federal Court, Moore said Oliver’s lynching statement, posted on the lawmaker’s Facebook page, was “intended to communicate a death threat to anyone in Mississippi who might take action to lawfully secure the removal of Confederate monuments or insignia in Mississippi.”
On Sunday, as the last of four monuments to the Confederacy was being removed from public land in New Orleans, Oliver called it “heinous and horrific.” The second sentence of his three-sentence post said: “If the, and I use this term extremely loosely, ‘leadership’ of Louisiana wishes to, in a Nazi-ish fashion, burn books and destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY, they should be LYNCHED!”
Moore’s 6-page lawsuit continues: “More specifically, it was intended as a threat to have Mr. Moore lynched for his diligent and persistent efforts, through the United States courts since early 2016, to remove Mississippi’s prominent and flagrant glorification of the goals of the Confederacy, including slavery and white supremacy, in its state flag.”
Moore asks the court to enjoin the defendants from making any more threats against him or trying to carry them out. He also asks the court to order the state attorney general to investigate whether the defendants have committed crimes, including threats of violence and intimidation of a witness in a court proceeding. And he wants them ordered to read two books on lynching, "At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America," by Phillip Dray, and "The Blood of Emmett Till," by Timothy Tyson.
Emmett Till was a black teenager in the town of Money, Mississippi, which is in Oliver’s legislative district. Till was kidnapped and lynched in 1955, on the false accusation that he had whistled at a white woman in a grocery store. The woman did not recant the false accusation for more than 50 years, in this year’s best-selling biography, “The Blood of Emmett Till.”
In his lawsuit about the Mississippi flag, Moore calls it “state-sanctioned hate speech.” U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves dismissed the complaint in September last year for lack of standing, saying Moore did not show that the flag caused an identifiable legal injury.
Moore appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court which affirmed Reeve’s ruling. In his Tuesday lawsuit, Moore said he will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.